THE WAIPA POST. Printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. THURSDAY, 4th JUNE, 1931. AMAZING DEVELOPMENT.

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3305, 4 June 1931, Page 4

THE WAIPA POST. Printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. THURSDAY, 4th JUNE, 1931. AMAZING DEVELOPMENT.

THE remarks made a few days ago at Urenui by the Postmaster-General on the subject of radio broadcasting make interesting reading, especially his prediction that it would not be long before there were 100,000 subscribers throughout New Zealand. This represents probably 400,000 to 500,000 listeners-in. License-holders may not, however, be in accord with Mr Donald when he says that he has little fault to find with the Broadcasting Company. Maybe he was telling the truth, but license-holders would like to see the long-promised and long-hidden balance-sheets of the company’s operations. But there, is no denying that the vogue of listening-in has gained wonderfully 'in popularity, until the time is probably not far distant when radios will be scheduled as household necessities.

It has been one of the main characteristics of scientific progress that the apparently trivial phenomena of Nature are often those capable of the most astonishing exploitation. It was not regarded as a matter of any importance when, late in the last century, an artisan conducting a crude electroplating business in Paris comlplained to the authorities that nearly every time a thunderstorm occurred his bateries were prematurely discharged and the work in his plating tank ruined through the application of an excessive current. If the complaint received any attention whatever it was certainly not associated with the discovery some years before that a new sort of wave, resembling light and heat waves, to which the human senses were unresponsive, could be produced in the laboratory by suitable electrical apparatus. Much less was it suspected that behind the electroplater’s misfortune lay the evidence of the existence of an agency which, in fewer than forty years, was destined to become one of the most valuable which have been harnessed to the service of man. Not until some years after did Professor Branley recall the artisan’s experience while he was experimenting with the still little-under-stood electric waves. Professor Branley recognised that the crudely-made joints in the electroplating circuit were affected by the electric waves from the lightning flashes, causing the current to the plating tank to increase. The Parisian workman was therefore the first person ever to complain of “static,” and his equipment may be regarded as the forerunner of the unlicensed wireless receiving station. The real importance of the incident, however, lay in the fact that Professor Branley so clearly demonstrated the principle involved that an Italian youth named Marconi was able to seize upon it as a practicable way for “ detecting ” electric waves and to construct a detector by means of which the value of such waves as a medium of communication could be proved. Visitors to a broadcasting studio or a wireless exhibition, or even to any of the many well-stocked stores where radio apparatus is an important feature, will find it difficult to believe that the remarkable apparatus, with diversity of style and adaptable equipment, summarises the progress to date in one section of an art which began so modestly. Actually the displays represent the results of only ten years’ work, because, while successful wireless telegraph transmissions were undertaken more than thirty years ago, it was not for more than twenty years that the possibility of using the new form of signalling to provide a public service for the instruction and recreated of those using it was recognised, and broadcasting was born. In those ten years the broadcast receiver has passed through the stages, first of a scientific curiosity, and then a useful luxury, until it has been accepted as a necessity in a substantial proportion of the homes of the world. Rapidly as wireless services have been accepted by the people, the scope for their use has increased even more quickly. Fewer than ten years ago the suggestion that it might ultimately be possible to conduct trans-oceanic conversations by means of wireless telephone

was received with considerable scepticism. At a few hours’ notice any householder in the cities and chief towns of New Zealand can now obtain connection from his own telephone to any one of the 30,000,000 other telephone subscribers in nearly every one of the principal countries in the world, with the same certainty and clarity as he can speak on his office switchboard. Facilities for world communication are being rapidly extended. Not only is the great international telephone network rapidly enmeshing new countries, but it is being extended also to ships and even railway trains and aircraft. The time seems not far distant when, literally, every man, wherever hq* may be, will have at his elbow the medium for speaking to every other man in the world, or, by the interlinking of the world telephone and broadcasting services, when every public man may address at will as many people in the world as care to listen to him.

Broadcasting is, after all, only one, and possibly not the most important, of the services which the art of wireless signalling provides. In its adapr tation to sea and air transport services wireless will remain pre-emin-ent among the great humanitarian instruments which man’s ingenuity has fashioned. It may ultimately provide a cheap and effective medium for the distribution of electric power. The “ talkies ” are merely one familiar example of the innumerable byproducts of the wireless research laboratory. A new surgeon’s knife which cuts without shedding blood and which provides impregnable sterilisation of the wound as it does so, a crucible which will readily fuse the most refractory of substances, an altimeter which will unfailingly register the height of aircraft in darkness or in fog, and an electrical eye which will see in the dark, and which may ultimately provide the means for replacing lost human sight, are a few others. Applications for instruments designed primarily for wireless communication are even more numerous than the improvements in those instruments, and the experience of the past has taught that it is impossible to set limits to what the future may provide.