FLASHING NEWS TO NEW ZEALAND.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17853, 22 May 1926, Page 8

FLASHING NEWS TO NEW ZEALAND.

SCIENCE AIDS FIGHT, AND CABLE MEN CLAIM VICTORY. CAN BEAT WIRELESS EASILY, THEY SAY. (Special to the “Star.”) LONDON, April 2. Surprising mechanical and electrical developments, aiming at the instantaneous transmission of news and other messages between Great Britain and her Dominions overseas, are secretl3 r being made in the laboratories of Britain’s foremost telegraph engineers. The “winging of words” to New Zealand has taken a new importance since the completion of the British Post Office wireless station at Rugby. This station can communicate directly with the Dominion, as will Marconi’s AngloAustralian “beam” wireless station, ckie to commence work in August, jhe All-Red cable across the Pacific is to be speeded-up very shortly -by duplication, while the Eastern Associated Telegraph Companies have just laid a new type of “loaded” cable between Cocos Island and Fremantle, having ten times the capacity of the old type. At first blush one would think that a wireless message to New Zealand would win by lengths a race against a competitor whose tortuous route lay over landlines, under the ocean, up and down along a chain of islands, helped along en route by impulses from half a dozen sub-stations. Actually, the submarine cable engineers say, the transmission between London and any New Zealand station will be “practically instantaneous.” The message will be tapped out in morse code in the London office of the cable company, and no human agency will intervene until the message, pumped into the cables at tremendous, unreadable speed, is decoded by machinery at the other end.

I spoke to-day to Mr K. L. Wood, of the Eastern Telegraph Company, part-inventor of a little instrument known as the “regenerator,” which, worked in conjunction with the new type of “loaded” cable will, it is expected—though no cable engineer can be induced to discuss the question—equal the speed of wireless in transmission; be free from atmospheric disturbance, and, moreover, more remote still from that nasty habit associated with wireless—eavesdropping. SIMULTANEOUS TRANSMISSION.

Hitherto cable messages to New Zealand were retransmitted from station to station along the whole route. They went in quite strong and healthy at one end—but came out very feeble —and sometimes sickly— at the other. Their edges, so to speak, were frayed. They were sometimes distorted. Only by repetition could they be corrected.

The wonder of the “regenerator” is this: It not only does the work of the sub-station operator in just no time at all, but it minutely examines every single letter, as it passes through at the speed of light, smooths off its rough edges, sees that i’s are nicely dotted, and the t’s well crossed, polishes them up, pats them on the back and “boosts” them along the next •stage ol' their journey with a full, new charge of electricity behind them. They are really better little letters when they get to the other end. The advantage of the regenerator when worked in conjunction with a “loaded” cable will now be apparent. The messages—assuming there is no limit to the number of sub-stations which can be linked up by regenerators—are not only received simultaneously, say, in Wellington, with their despatch from London, but with a “loaded” cable they can be sent at ten times the speed. To the ordinary person the loaded cable seems a ridiculously simple invention.

Around the copper centre, or “core,” as it is called, of an ordinal insulated cable, is wrapped what appears to be a single coil of very fine wire—much thinner than the finest hairpin. This wire, it is explained, consists of eighty per cent, nickel and the rest soft iron. 400 WORDS A MINUTE. The effect of winding a bit of hairpin around the cable is apparently this: The nickel-iron wire becomes magnetised when a current is passed through the central copper core, and this increases the cable’s inductance or electrical mass. Besides increasing the capacity of the cable tenfold, this little addition of wire has the effect of “sharpening” the signals—that is to say, the signal comes through all at once instead of gradually rising in intensity and then dying away to make room for the next cypher or letter. Of course, the process could be more clearly explained in ten pages of algebraical formulae, involving the use of a slide-rule and a table of “logs,” but the upshot of it is that, whereas the ordinary cable has a capacity of forty words a minute, that now laid between Cocos and Fremantle has a capacity of four hundred words a minute. There is still one myster\* remaining unexplained: Why is the new cable said to be “loaded.” I have it on authority that the “loaded” cable is so named because of its peculiarities being similar to a certain mechanical analog}*. The ordinary cable can be likened to a light rope stretched tightly in water, and the process of signalling likened to lateral movements at one end that cause waves to pass along the rope. These waves will rapidly diminish in size, of course, owing to the friction of the water. But if the rope be weighted or “loaded” with weights at short intervals, the waves will travel along the rope with much less loss of size, because there is much more energ}'- associated with the wa\ T es. It is said that the best speed so far obtainable over the Empire’s wireless waves consistent with accuracy is forty words a minute. The loaded' cable deep down in the Indian Ocean, free from harmonics, must wink occasionally to Old Neptune.