TALK TO LONDON

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 814, 7 November 1929, Page 1

TALK TO LONDON

Mr. Eliot Davis Speaks Across 12,000 Miles FIRST NEW ZEALANDER Probably the only New Zealander who has held a 12,000-mile telephone conversation is Mr. Eliot Davis, of Auckland. On his recent visit to Australia he talked with his father, Mr. Moss Davis, and his brother, Mr. Ernest Davis, in their London house. DPACE and time have been success- ® fully eliminated in this age of modern miracles. The voices in the fraction of a second speed round the world, across the vast Indian Ocean, over India, over Turkey, the Mediterranean Sea, France or Spain, into a house in a London street. "Marvellous” does not aptly describe the wonder of a telephone conversation between England and Australia. And yet Mr. Davis said that it was just as though he had been carrying on a conversation in Auckland through his own telephone. HELLO! LONDON “Hello! Hello! Is that you, dad?” remarked Mr. Davis from Sydney at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. At 6.30 o'clock in the morning in Loudon Mr. Moss Davis answered his son. Time does not matter where telephone conversations are concerned. Describing the conversation, Mr. Davis said that the arrangements had been made for him in Sydney where tests were being carried out before the opening of the service between the two countries. He simply sat at a table with earphones on and a small box like a microphone on the table in front of him! The box was not much bigger than one containing 50 cigarettes. “The voices were just as clear as though I had been speaking in Auckland.” he told a Sun representative. “A man said to London as I came into the room, ‘Oh, here’s Mr. Davis now. Just hold the line.’ “Mv father and brother were in their London house and we talked for some time about purely personal things. It was very interesting to talk to my people, so far away. They talked into the ordinary telephone receiver in their own house, 12,00(1 miles away.” £3 A MINUTE Mr. Davis is perhaps the only New Zealander who has talked with London and one of the few in Australia who has done so. He said this morning that an oflicial told him that the telephone between England and America was in constant use at tlie rate of £3 a minute. Discussing the telephone service between Australia and England, which is to be opened at the end of December, a writer in the London Dailj M The service will be carried out by SStS.'&ZX JSStSSaZ Sh XT' first the service will be avail- = hi« only for a certain number of able only ip probably be somewhere in T the neighbourhood of 7to 930 l.m. Greenwich time (» to 7.30 P ThiX U is t, Th i e n tim“ e when the active hoT 5 in Sydney overlap tho^in London As the fce extended . It "T*? » available for la»doo °"wireless Australia tiave 1 destination at ways and r f ach th e same fraction of a almost, exactly U.e epends „„ the father. Usages will probably go. as a rule, over India.