Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, SEPT, 12, 1929. THE MARVELS OF MODERN TELEPHONY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIX, Issue 243, 12 September 1929, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, SEPT, 12, 1929. THE MARVELS OF MODERN TELEPHONY.

In these days of broadcastingmessages from one end of the world to the other, long distance telephony has ceased to be the occasion for comment and has come to be looked upon almost in the nature of commonplace. New Zealand is fortunate in having a really live Post and Telegraph Department which is not only keeping itself -well abreast of the times, but is, in some respects, in advance of similar departments in older countries. A notable happening in the history of the department was that arranged last week by the chief engineer of the Telegraph Department which controls the telephone system, in conjunction witli the Postmaster-General, when the Mayors of the four leading centres of the Dominion —Auckland, Wellington, Ckristckurck and Dunedin —were enabled to confer together over the telephone without leaving their own cities. The event, unique in itself, marks the most distinctive advance yet made in New Zealand in ordinary telephonic communication, as distinguished from wireless telephony and opens up great possibilities for the future. It affords yet another proof, were such needed, of the up-to-date methods adopted by the department, of the working of which New Zealanders may justifiably feel proud. The Broadcasting Companies now functioning in the Dominion could not possibly carry on without the help and active co-opera-tion of the department, and it is to the credit of the latter that it has been possible for “listeners in,” over their wireless sets, to take part in such notable events as the thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey, held in connection with the King’s restoration to health, and to receive detailed accounts of such happening as the test matches played by the All Blacks in Australia. The progressive developments in wireless telegraphy and telephony, of recent date, owe much to Senatore Marconi, who has made the commercial use of both possible. But the science of producing signals and sounds by means of magnetic waves without conductors had its origin in the theoretical investigations conducted by Lord Kelvin as far back as 1853, and by Clerk Maxwell in 1864, and subsequently confirmed in laboratory experiments by Hertz in 1888. A wonderful achievement was that recorded in Sydney (New South Wales) last month, when a cadet who had been seri-

ously injured by falling down the hold of the steamer Valacia on which he was employed, and was an inmate of the Prince Albert Hospital, was enabled to talk to his mother in a room in London, 12,000 miles away. The boy was in a very despondent condition and a Sydney paper that had taken a great interest in him, as the result of his accident, made the necessary arrangements with the authorities to put the boy into communication with his mother, so that, from his bed in the Sydney Hospital, he was able to talk to his mother and to hear her voice in return. “Five minutes radio-telephone conversation with her had the effect (the paper states) almost of a blood transfusion on the boy’s general health,” so overjoyed was he at hearing his mother speaking to him. “If,” says the writer describing the scene, “an artist could have caught the fleeting expression on Jack Sigrist’s face when he heard his mother’s voice it would have been a world’s maste'rpiepe. One moment was the direct antithesis of the other. From sorrow to joy, from pain to pleasure, from weariness to alertness, from a frown to a smile, and all in a fleeting moment when he Reard his mother’s voice.”