THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIII, Issue 7987, 16 March 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 1906.

A wireless telegraph station whose action is expected to cover the entire European continent is being erected by the German Government on the most north-western point of the country, at Norddeich, in Frisia. Its great steel tower. 213 feet high, will send out eleotrio waveo that can be detected by receivers located anywhere within a radius of at least 1,000 miles; and in all probability it will be able to receive and transmit over still greater distances. This is compared by the scientific paper "Electricity" to the Tower of Babel. It says in an editorial article:— "The ancient Chaldeans, to whom philologists are apt to give the palm for tha legend of the Tower of Babel, oould never, in their wildest flights of imagination, have comprehended what we now all regard at a prosaic fact, the existence of a steel tower sending and receiving all languages through invisible space. . . . . As regards the simile

tbafc such an undertaking will he like the Tower of tiabel, the faot tbafc it will receive and transmit messages from Germany, Switzer land, France, Great Britain, Denmark, Ituly, Sweden,- Norway, Spain, the Balkan Peninsula, and, Kussia, is sufficient evidence on that' score. It is believed that operations will be extended as far asSaragossa, Naples, and Cetinja to the south; as far as St. Petersburg in the east; ia the north it will be a voice from the silence to the people of Dronbeim and Narvik; and to the east German vessels homeward bound can'send their tidings to Norddeich whilj still on the Atlantic, far beyond Land's End, The proposal made in the beginning to erect these epoch-making towers on the island of Borkum was dismissed, and a choice made of the seaport Norddeich of the Frisian Islands instead. This town is the railway terminus of the Prussian system, and beoter adapted through its general accessibility, to the work in prospect."

The entire plant, we are told, will be completed by November. The foundations have already been laid, and the iron superstructure is being put up as rapidly as possible. At the base of the towers will live the officials and the employees, who will operate the telegraph—probably enough to form a oonaidei'afcle community. The writer concludes:— "The projection of this scheme and its crystallisation means the duplication of the same idea by the various Governments with whom it will keen in touch. Thug the strange picture is presented of Germany undertaking a titanic task—yet a task which in SDite of its enormou33ess is considered a necesary consequence of the changed conditions in the transmission of intelligence manifested in clie last ten years. iNational wireless stations are the correct idea, as far as method of international communication are deemed desirable. The only inquiry that seems natural under the circumstances is that relative to the use of high mountains. Along the Atlantic coast we Und the great Appalachian fin'uo with its hoary peaks. Fur purposes, secret or otherwise, these high mountains are the one great means of meeting the difficulties of sympathetic or selective signalling. All nations should be thus equipped, if for no other reason, at least for the sane of being able to feel independent of the submarine cable, which any sudden cataclysm at the bottom of the sea may disrupt and destroy."