“PHANTOM” ’PHONE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18822, 12 July 1923, Page 6

“PHANTOM” ’PHONE

HARNESSING WASTED WIRE ENERGY. LONDON, June 1. Hundreds of people who yesterday made telephone calls between London and Glasgow sent their voices not along real wire but an invisible one! Although they did not know it, they were employing "phantom” telephony—a most ingenious method of harnessing the minute atoms of energy called electrons that the Post Office has just Introduced on the London-Glasgow overhead telephone system. “A ’phantom’ circuit is really a telephone line which doesn’t exist." a Post Office expert told a Daily Mall reporter. “It is produced by the activity of the electrons thrown off by the physical, or real wires. One alternating current is superposed upon another. “The telephone wires are laid In fours, making what is called a ‘quad.’ Each pair furnishes one telephone circuit, but by treating them as separate wires a third circuit is produced from them. This means that while two persons are using the two wire circuits another person can speak on the ‘phantom’ or non-existent ‘wire.’ The system has also been introduced on the underground cables, it is an incaliulably valuable advance in the wire telephony.” The last section of the LondonGlasgow underground telephone cable is rapidly nearing completion, and then it will be possible for no fewer than 462 conversations to b|i carried on from the south coast tc( Scotland at the same time.