Mobile telephony

“ The apparatus used as developed by the engineers of the Bell system was in a measure an outgrowth of their work with the long-distance telephone. Wireless telephony, despite the wonders it has already accomplished, is still in its infancy. With more perfect apparatus and the knowledge that comes with experience we may expect that speech will girdle the earth.
It is natural that one should wonder whether the wireless telephone is destined to displace our present apparatus. ”

“ Millions of messages going in all directions, crossing and recrossing one another, as is done every day by wire, are probably an impossibility by wireless telephony. Weird and little-understood conditions of the ether, static electricity, radio disturbances, make wireless work uncertain, and such a thing as twenty-four-hour service, seven days in the week, can probably never be guaranteed. In radio communication all must use a common medium, and as its use increases, so also do the difficulties. The privacy of the wire is also lacking with the wireless telephone. ”

“ The telephone has become a necessity of modern life, so that if through some means all the systems were destroyed business would be, for a time at least, paralysed. It is the perfection of the devices for connecting one subscriber with another, and for despatching the vast number of messages and calls at "central," that make modern telephony possible.
To handle the great number of spoken messages that are sent over the telephone wires of a great city it is necessary to divide the territory into districts, which vary in size according to the number of subscribers in them. ”

“ Wireless telephones will not only transmit the speech more clearly and distinctly, but have the further advantages that the initial cost is very much lower than that of wire lines, the maintenance is almost nil in comparison, the depreciation is smaller, the number of employees required is less, and a break-down is limited to the inside of the station, where it could be quickly remedied by the substitution of a duplicate spare piece of apparatus. ”

“ In thirty years, the Western Electric has sold sixty-seven million dollars' worth of telephonic apparatus to foreign countries. But this is no more than a fair beginning. To put one telephone in China to every hundred people will mean an outlay of three hundred million dollars. To give Europe as fit an equipment as the United States now has, will mean thirty million telephones, with proper wire and switchboards to match. And while telephony for the masses is not yet a live question in many countries, sooner or later, in the relentless push of civilization, it must come. ”

“ FIG. 153.—The aerial system of a transatlantic station.
The wireless telephone enables a passenger on board ship to communicate direct with his home by relaying the message over the line wires. By the same means the captain of a ship can call his home office and communicate with the owner of the vessel.
Telegraphs and telephones are the nerves of the world, carrying swift messages from its brain centers to its hands, annihilating distance in thought. All differences between men as individuals and people as nations can be traced to the lack of close contact. ”

“ Wireless telephony, like wireless telegraphy, but to an even greater extent, is peculiarly suited for the conveyance of marine intelligence. Wireless telephony occupies a unique position in this regard-no operator is required. The additional expense of an operator is an objection to the wireless telegraph in many cases, and forbids its installation. Anybody can operate the wireless telephone. It is also much quicker-words can be spoken more rapidly than they can be put into Morse signals and translated. ”

“ Just the same, only in radio telephony we are confronted by a problem not met with in wireless telegraphy. We have not only to transmit sound, such as isolated dots and dashes, but to send through the air every rise and fall and inflection of the human voice just as it is recorded in the minute lines of a phonographic record. ”

“ One of the greatest disadvantages of most systems of wireless telegraphy lies in the fact that no arrangement is provided for simultaneously transmitting and receiving wireless signals. It is usually necessary for one operator listening to another to have to wait until the finish signal is given before he can reply or interrupt in case he cannot understand part of the message, because the receiving apparatus of the transmitting station is necessarily disconnected from the aerial and the ground during the period a message is being sent. ”

“ Roughly speaking, there are now ten million telephones in all countries, employing two hundred and fifty thousand people, requiring twenty-one million miles of wire, representing a cost of fifteen hundred million dollars, and carrying fourteen thousand million conversations a year. All this, and yet the men who heard the first feeble cry of the infant telephone are still alive, and not by any means old.
No foreign country has reached the high American level of telephony. The United States has eight telephones per hundred of population, while no other country has one-half as many. ”

“ He may establish a universal code, so that all persons of importance in the United States shall have call-numbers by which they may instantly be located, as books are in a library.
Some other young man may create a commercial department on wide lines, a work which telephone men have as yet been too specialized to do. Whoever does this will be a man of comprehensive brain. He will be as closely in touch with the average man as with the art of telephony. ”

“ There is a very decided field of opportunity for wireless telephony for long-distance work. The present systems of long-distance wires are very expensive to construct and maintain, and are subject to the whims of storms and the elements. ”

“ There is no racial reason for failure. The slow service and the bungling are the natural results of treating the telephone as though it were a road or a fire department; and any nation that rises to a proper conception of the telephone, that dares to put it into competent hands and to strengthen it with enough capital, can secure as alert and brisk a service as heart can wish. Some nations are already on the way. China, Japan, and France have sent delegations to New York City—"the Mecca of telephone men," to learn the art of telephony in its highest development. ”

“ It was not until the development of the 3-electrode thermionic tube had reached the stage of commercial production for wireless telegraphy purposes in 1913 that the problem of the telephone repeater could be solved. Since that time progress has been so rapid as to cause almost a complete revolution in long-distance telephony. ”

“ The average European family sends three telegrams a year, and three letters and one telephone message a week; while the average American family sends five telegrams a year, and seven letters and eleven telephone messages a week. This one na-tion, which owns six per cent of the earth and is five per cent of the human race, has SEVENTY per cent of the telephones. And fifty per cent, or one-half, of the telephony of the world, is now comprised in the Bell System of this country. ”

“ During some of the winter storms and blizzards, when miles of wires were down in all directions, wireless has been the sole means of communication in certain instances.
The process of sending a wireless message is very simple. The aerial switch is usually kept in such a position that the receiving instruments are connected to the ground and aerial so that the operator is always able to hear any one calling him. We will suppose for illustration that the land station at 42 Broadway, New York City, wishes to transmit a message to the steamer "Horatio Hall." ”

“ All that the earlier automatic system did was to prove more or less successfully that automatic apparatus had a right to exist, and that to demand of the subscriber that he manipulate from his station a distant machine to make the connection without human aid was not fallacious. When it had been recognized that the entire multiple switchboard idea could not be carried into automatic telephony with success, the first dawn of hope in that art may be said to have come. ”

“ In the first place, wireless telephony is now, and probably always will be, very expensive. Where the wire will do it is the more economical. There are many limitations to the use of the other for talking purposes, and it cannot be drawn upon too strongly by the man of science. ”

“ The history of wireless telegraphy and telephony is a striking example of how it is possible for scientists laboring in the field of pure research and stimulated by accumulated knowledge and imagination to arrive at discoveries of the most vital importance. ”

“ For many reasons wireless telephony can never take the place of wire systems, but it may be expected to supplement them in a useful manner. Wireless telephone systems are subject to serious interference from numerous conditions, atmospheric and others. ”

“ However, the automatic system must always suffer in comparison with the manual in respect of simplicity of the subscriber's equipment. The simplest conceivable thing to meet all of the requirements of telephone service at a subscriber's station is the modern common-battery manual telephone. The automatic telephone differs from this only in the addition of the mechanism for enabling the subscriber to control the central-office apparatus in the making of calls. ”

“ Data-Phone makes use of all the telephone switching devices and repeating apparatus so that any type of communicating system using frequencies within the voice range may be used. For such systems the telephone company will install equipment to separate the different types of electrical transmission to prevent interference. Because Data-Phone enables not only the sound of the human voice to be sent over a telephone circuit, but information from a teletypewriter or business machine as well, this new use for the telephone system has expanded its service to many types of business communications. ”

“ To make wireless telephony a success it was necessary to find some way of making perfectly uniform carrier-waves, and then of loading on them waves of speech. Of course, the latter are not sound-waves, because they are not waves of air, but they are electro-magnetic waves corresponding exactly to the sound-waves of air and at the receiving-end they affect the telephone receiver in the191 same way that it is affected by the electric waves which are sent over telephone wires. ”

“ Without going into details, I shall merely say that the great defects of this plan of multiple telegraphy were found to consist, firstly, in the fact that the receiving operators were required to possess a good musical ear in order to discriminate the signals; and secondly, that the signals could only pass in one direction along the line (so that two wires would be necessary in order to complete communication in both directions) . ”

“ It is too amazing to be true, and possibly a new generation will have to arrive before it will be taken for granted and acted upon freely. Ultimately, there can be no doubt that long-distance telephony will be regarded as a national asset of the highest value, for the reason that it can prevent so much of the enormous economic waste of travel.
Nothing that science can say will ever decrease the marvel of a long-distance conversation, and there may come in the future an Interpreter who will put it before our eyes in the form of a moving-picture. ”

“ Even Russia has rescued the telephone from her bureaucrats and is now offering it freely to men of enterprise.
In most foreign countries telephone service is being steadily geared up to a faster pace. The craze for "cheap and nasty" telephony is passing; and the idea that the telephone is above all else a SPEED instrument, is gaining ground. A faster long-distance service, at double rates, is being well patronized. Slow-moving races are learning the value of time, which is the first lesson in telephony. ”

“ In making this radical change, railroad officials were most cautious, and yet we know of no case where the introduction of the telephone has been followed by its abandonment, the tendency having been in all cases toward further installations and more equipment of the modern type. The reasons for this are clear, for where the telephone is used it does not require a highly specialized man as station operator and consequently a much broader field is open to the railroads from which to draw operators. ”

“ In the case of the wireless telegraph the number of messages which may be sent simultaneously is much restricted. In the case of the wireless telephone, owing to the thousands of separate wave-lengths required for the transmission of speech, the number of telephone conversations which may be carried on at the same time is still further restricted and is so small that all who can employ wires will find it necessary to do so, leaving the ether available for those who have no other means of communication. ”

“ Bell System mobile telephone service is now a reality in most major cities and on many highways. “Traveling telephones” are numerous on ships that ply coastal and inland waterways, and a growing number of passenger trains now offer regular telephone service. In addition, private line mobile telephone systems, leased and serviced by the various Bell telephone companies, are being used increasingly by police departments, utilities and industrial concerns. ”

“ Here, in the depths, is woven that mysterious power that carries the wireless message through the rocks of the mountains and the channels of the sea, and wraps the earth in a diaphanous garb that makes the wireless telephone a possibility. ”