WONDERS OF WIRELESS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3112, 7 January 1911, Page 10

WONDERS OF WIRELESS.

OVER 1500 STATIONS LISTED. DISCOVERY OF NEW USES. (From “New York Tribune.”) “Let your imagination perform all the scientific- gymnastics it may and you need have little fear that it will get beyond the latent possibilities- in the transmission- of electrical currents without wires,” said ail expert in that field the other day. “Even we men who arc working on these problems every day expect to be surprised now and then by the successful manipulation of the wireless current in some new and startling way.” If flic expert expects to be surprised “now and then” tire man in the street should get ready to drop Ins jaw and elevate his eyebrows every few- days for the same reason. It’s little more than a depade since Marconi signalled by wireless at Flatholm and .eight years since wireless communication was accomplished between cape Breton and Cornwall. Already we have crewless battleships, cruisers, and submarines, the lighting of incandescent lamps by the wireless transmission of an electric current and a crewless dirigible. A few daj’s ago it was reported that a young college graduate, a son. of John Hays Hammond, had made important discoveries in the field of telautomatics, or the wireless control of automata, the assertion being made that he had caused absolute selectivity, thus doing away with the interference that is common to the ordinary wireless systems. By a special mechanism the young inventor believes he can differentiate a single wave or impulse into more than a thousand separate mechanical movements, and thus control any ordinary mechanical movements by wireless waves.

UNIVERSAL SUPPLY OF ELECTRICITY.

President Ferranti, of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, lecturing in London a short time ago, explained a scheme for a universal supply of electricity for all purposes at a sixteenth of the present cost, and declared that when electricity was understood more fully it would probably be manipulated so as to control the weather, producing or preventing rainfall when and where it was wished. He advocated the establishment of a few big centres for the retail distribution of electrical energy, all the coal being converted into electricity at those places, thus saving 90,000,000 tons of fuel annually anti producing among the by-products enough ammonium sulphate to fertilise all the cultivated land in England. The great increase in the commercial use of the wireless’ telegraph is little realised, also. The publication of the United States Government’s wireless telegraph directory, gives the number of officially listed stations as w-d. This total includes shore stations and ships, but does not take into consideration the warships of foreign nations. The list omits also the stations equipped and operated by amateurs, whose numbers rival those of professional operators, and against whose pernicious and unlicensed activities strict legislation has been advocated in Congress. The American Government has installed powerful apparatus in shore stations capable of transmitting messages thousands of miles. -Last month a new long distance record for wireless transmission was made, when William Marconi, of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, successfully received messages direct- from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and from C'liiden, Ireland, at the high power station tfyon nearing completion in the Argentine Republic, tiie distance covered being about <3601; miles. ST A RTLJXG APPLICATIONS. In the wireless tclegiaph field, which lias reached a more perfect stage of development than any of the other forms of wireless electrical transmission, many startling applications have been made. Two United States war vessels on opposite sides of Central-Ameriea were recently -in communication by wireless from ocean to ocean, although although the intervening mountains wore from 2700 to 5000 feet high, \vireless telegraphy as a means of communication between moving trains and despatching offices has proven satisfactory, although Thomas A.-Edison years ago put into operation an apparatus—different from that of Marconi —by which telegraph messages could lie transmitted from a moving .train through the air to the telegraph wires paralleling the tracks.

Daily papers are. now published on most of the big trans-Atlantic liners throughout their voyages, the news being transmitted to them- by wireless from the stations at South Wellfleet, Cupe Cod!, Gifden, Ireland, and PoldJm, on the English coast. Brokers at sea, unable to get rid of the gambling fever, despite •'the blood clarifying salt air, send in big buying or selling ordcon by wireless, and make enough sometimes to pay for several ocean voyages.

Rescuing imperilled boat at sea by the aid of the wireless has become almost a daily occurrence. The relief of the steamer Republic, which was wrecked off Nantucket, _ and from which one thousand persons were saved, set the high water mark in the humanitarian uses of the invention, and the steamer Ohio, -with two hundred passengers ; the steamer.; 1 .Slavonia with 410 passengers and the steamship Antilles, with 1.00, are among trio vessel that have since been saved from destruction at sea by the uses of the wireless. OTHER USES OF, WIRELESS.

The wireless telephone is an outgrowth of the wireless telegraph that has been successfully applied in. many places between shore stations and ves-

.sels, although its development dsahofc yet so far ahead as that of the telegraph.. The transmission of electrical energy without, wires aiid its application thereafter to various forms of machinery is being • rapidly developed by investigators in this country and in Europe. Boats and airships are propelled and steered, cannon are fired, torpedoes dispatched long distances under water, portraits are transmittted or a moving scene contemporaneously reproduced and machinery set in- motion through the air by the wave-producing inventions. All these things have been actually accomplished and their practical application to commercial and warlike uses rests only with uic ability of the inventors to perfect their apparatus. When power in quantity can be transmitted, the - aeroplane and the dirigible may be used to transport freight and passengers- with a speed and certainty that will annihilate all competition. When the heat of the earth’s interior, the rays from the sun, or the ocean waves and tides have been harnessed and made to produce imeir energy for the use of - men, the engineer of the aerial express can sit at the switchboard in, his office on the ground and drive the air-cralt round the world till doomsday without fear of interruption through lack of energy. Before him he will spread out a chart, and so plot the course of the vessel lie is guiding that he can bring it to a safe landing-place thousands of miles away. Or, if an accident happens to the mechanism of the airship, so that it is forced to descend temporarily and rest on the earth, the operator will at once become aware that something of the sort has occurred. He will immedinately get into communication with the crew of the stalled birdship by means of the wireless telephone. He will loam accurately what has happened to the propelling machinery or to the mechanism for receiving the electrical impulse, and dispatch an aerial repair car bearing the necessary materials and tools to the spot within a few minutes. As lie directs the work of repairing the vessel a complete picture of the scene, the situation of the airship on the ground, the fright of the passengers whose heads are thrust out of the cabin windows, the careful work of the guards in reassuring them and of the mechanicians at work on the engines or propellers, is revealed to him plainly as the image is thrown on a.huge white screen that rises before him. 6 ASSISTANCE IN FREIGHTCARRYING.

'l'he carrying of freight by all vessels that derive their electric motive power hv wireless from sub-stations on the earth may be among the greatest industries of the future. The Wright flyer who served a dry-goods firm the other d iv by carrying £2OO worth of silk in an aeroplane from Dayton to Colombus, Ohio, put that type of craft to such a use for the fiist time in aerial history. With inventions already suceossfuly operated by wireless that permit men not only to be carried through the air but to write, talk, hear, see, and act at points indefinitely remote from their physical peisons, the notion of Buddhist philosophers that man can project his astral self to a distance and occupy two places at the same time seems not so much a fancy as a prophecy.