LOUD SPEAKING TERROR

Taranaki Daily News, 6 September 1930, Page 9

LOUD SPEAKING TERROR

VOICE FLOODS A CITY. APPEARANCE IN BERLIN. It is suggested in . all seriousness that a new menace to the peace of the voi Id has made its appearance in the form of the new giiint loud-speaker .perfected by one of Germany’s great engineering firms and introduced in Berlin to a select public for the first time in July. This technical novelty combines extraordinary clarity of speech with intense penetrating powers, says the Berlin correspondent of the Observer, London; it does not shout, it talks, and the still small voice is capable of flooding a whole city with sound, at once overpowering everything else within reach. It is a° voice which, according to the hopes of the firm, opens up a new perspective in advertising, since a stationary balloon carrying such an instrument of torture could control the air for many square miles. The loudest of loud-speakers up to the present—those used in election campaigns for example—has been capable of “producing sound to the equivalent of a hundred-watt electric current. But in this new invention, so strongly do the membranes vibrate in a powerful magnetic field that the equivalent electric current is two hundred watts. A whole fleet, a whole army, not to mention a whole town, can be controlled bv one whisper into a. microphone, with no other receiving apparatus necessary than a pair of ordinary human ears. But the whole point of this improvement upon existing apparatus is the promise of process along the same lines until whatever sound it is desired to transmit bV a headquarters, benevolent or malevolent, may penetrate everywhere they will, insistent as light and uncontrollable as air.