THE Waikato Independent. THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 1911. REVOLUTION IN TELEPHONY.

Waikato Independent, Volume XII, Issue 1019, 1 June 1911, Page 4

THE Waikato Independent. THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 1911. REVOLUTION IN TELEPHONY.

A DISCOVERY recently made' by Major Squire, of the United States Army, is likely to create a revolution in the present system of telephony. Under the conditions existing today we talk from o«e telephone to another through the medium of an unbroken wire that connects the sending instrument with the receiver. If we use a "party line" the other parties must wait until we are done. If it be a long-distance line, it may be necessary to wait if the line is "busy." One message at a time over one wire is the limit. By Major Squires' invention this limitation is done away with. For a number of months the United States War Department has had a wire workj ing between its labjratory on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and the Bureau of Standards seven miles away, taking several messages simultaneously over the uame wire, in both directions. Moreover, this does not in the least interfere with the use of the wire for sending telegrams while the conversation is passing over it. The in-

language, an explanation of the system. An ordinary wireless message (whether telegraph or telephone) flashes into the air ana produces "waves of ether," just as a stone thrown into a'pond causes a series of ripples or waves. These "waves of ether," trwel in ever-widening circles and are eventually caught by the wires that are suspended above a receiving station and thence conducted downward to the receiving instrument, where heard as the clicking of the telegraph or the sound of the telephone. The new system patented by Major Squire is, in a certain sense, a mis nomer—for it is a wireless system with a wire. The wire serves the purpose of conducting the "waves of ether" (that i 3, the conversation) in a straight line instead of in ever-widen-ing circles, 'the waves do not travel through the wire itself but through "a skin of ether" that envelops the wire; it gives them direction instead of containing them like a water-pipe contains water—and so it is that a number may pass along the wire at the same time, in the same or opposite directions. All that is necessary, apparently, is that an ordinary wireless-telephone instrument be connected with the transmission wire, with a "ground return." It is not yet known just how many messages may be carried at one time. This discovery mears that a large number of long-distance conversations can be carried on over long circuits without stringing additional wires. Every telegraph line in the country can be made into a long-distance telephone system by the simple process of hitching wireless telephone instruments to its wires.