Ear on Chicago; Midwest

I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know. Professor Morse in developing his telegraph early ran into two problems. One was the source of power and he found that a battery of one cup, which was then orthodox,

was changed at the suggestion of Professor Gail, a colleague of his, is to a battery of many cups. This provided enough voltage to project the electrical impulse to a distance. There were other problems, though, which were more space, which were not technical. And one of the most heartbreaking must have been his inability to get $30 ,000 from the United States Congress, which he needed, to build an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore. I'll bet von Braun and some of the other boys feel very much at home when they hear about that. Professor Morris took about five years, as I recall, in his efforts to get Congress to finance this projected line. And then he faced another problem interestingly enough. He had spent about half of his $30 ,000 in putting an insulated wire in a metallic pipe and the theory of being that it should be underground for safety and maintenance purposes. Well, when he had spent about $15

,000 of his $30 ,000, he found that the insulation was breaking and that he had wasted that time and money. So after a short bit of research in which Ezra Cornell participated, it was discovered that the line should be strong on poles and when that was done, the problem was solved. Well, one of the primary problems that Bell faced was to develop a diaphragm which would convert speech, mechanics of speech into electrical impulses, which could be sent over the wire. And of course, that brought the problem of reconverting it back into, from electrical energy into mechanical sounds. Bell was a vocational instructor of deaf students. He, that was his work, primary interest and

responsibility. And this telephone development was a kind of a sidelight natural consequence of his interest in electricity plus his interest in the teaching of deaf people to talk, that gave him a knowledge of what was involved that other inventors at that time did not have and couldn't get. So he was not only a step ahead of them, but in knowledge, but also in the practical application of it. Because I recall that he actually had a specimen, a human ear, which he secured and analyzed himself. I mean, it was a part of, he was not interested in this sort of thing. Primarily, he had that in mind at all times in his

approach to the telephone development problem and mechanical ear. He knew that he'd had electrical impulses, had the reconverted, I mean, converted to the mechanical to electrical and vice versa. And that was in his every thought concerning the telephone. The change of events is that the first of all, we had the spark transmission, then the backing tube produced a continuous wave type of transmission, which could be interrupted by a key and a code was set up somewhere to the Morse code. Then

the next step was to take an electrical signal corresponding to voice type of information, utilize this to vary the intensity, rather than simply interrupting the signal. And by this means the voice information was combined with the radio signal. And then, of course, at the same time, it was necessary to devise a means for recovering this voice information from the radio signal at the receiving end. Well, it just was quite fortunate the normal type of detector that would be used for code reception was also suitable for recovering voice. Radio began disseminating news, I think, through KVK8.

The broadcast was a very select audience because there weren't very many sets at that time. And the results of the 1920 election. By 1924, it was in business and there were enough people with sets to listen to it. But in those days, it didn't attempt much news and there was tremendous opposition on the part of all the newspaper organizations and agreements after agreement to limit the broadcasting to five minutes on the hour or just a couple of periods during the day. And the newspaper publishers were, of course, pretty disappointed with themselves that they hadn't bought into radio at the very beginning and they had an exaggerated idea of the effect of radio was going to have on them. Radio, as a news gathering in disseminating agency, came of age at the time of the Munich conference. And since then, it's a ability to be first with the spot news of important events, the death of a president, the outbreak of a war, a political campaign and a response event, and, of course, unchallenged. And so the effect of radio on the newspaper has been mainly to end the practice of putting out extra addition. Do I remember

my very early childhood seeing the extra addition announcing the sinking of the Titanic? And I remember one of the last extras that I recall being awakened in the middle of the night to hear the news boys announcing the death of a war and G -harding. That was just before radio got stuck. But it hasn't ended what you would call a newspaper scoop because it doesn't attempt to go beneath the service behind the scenes. And to dig, it gets its information from the same source that the newspaper does, its basic information, namely through the press association. But it is able to take the leads of those stories and disseminate them within minutes for as it takes the newspaper quite a bit longer to do it. From the small beginning, telegraphy has spread all over the whole world and has grown enormously in usage and importance. To bring it close to home in Chicago alone, Western Union now has 65 offices serving the general public. In addition, about 3 ,000 of the larger business concerns

have direct wire connections to Western Union to speed their urgent written communications on the way. There are, in the neighborhood of 100 heavy trunk circuits which interconnect the Chicago officers or Western Union to the nationwide high -speed telegraph network at Western Union maintains. Western Union now has in Chicago itself an excess of 2 ,100 employees. A recent change or development in the order to like a fit that may be interesting is the adaptation of telegraph to the growing needs of IDP integrated data processing. Western Union is not experimenting with the usage of telegraph lines to bring raw material to the electronic computer. Have the electronic computer carry out the processes necessary to figure payrolls and produce other accounting information and then feed the completed information

by wire back to the point of origin. That's a very interesting development and I'm sure that Western Union will be able to make the use of this experience in serving the nation's industry. Western Union scientists and engineers work continually to extend and improve the techniques of record communications. A single example of their work is the telefax or facsimile telegraph which transmits a telegram and picture form. The problem was to design a machine that was small enough to place on a businessman's desk and simple enough so that it didn't need an engineer to operate it. To solve this, Western Union engineers developed teladeltos paper which provides an instantaneous permanent record without further processing. And they designed

the desk fax machine which will send and receive telegrams and yet is hardly larger than a telephone. Nearly 33 ,000 Western Union customers now use the desk fax to send or receive their telegrams at the touch of a button. We currently have, if you care to speak on a coast to coast basis, a series of 107 relay towers that are spaced approximately every 30 miles, a typical conversation leaving a conversation or a telephoto vision program leaving New York would be picked up by these towers and re -amplified and sent on its way 106 times in its travel across the country, not to unlike the old Pony Express system. The television and telephone microwave network is constantly spreading out into all corners of the United States. There are currently some 400

such relay towers that connect probably in the order of 250 to 300 television stations and possibly around 175 cities in the United States at this time. The overall plan will encompass the connection of all the large cities. The new tone ringing telephone was developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories to make it possible to produce a tone to signal a subscriber that he's wanted on a telephone. It is entirely different from anything that is heard today in the way of a calling signal. As it said, the bandages are that it doesn't require as much power.

It can be transmitted through the voice frequency medium and it has an additional advantage in that it permits full selective signaling. On a good many of our exchanges in the rural areas, our subscribers number up to eight on a line. And it's quite an advantage to be able to select the specific one of the eight which you wish to call to the telephone. When the time comes and the developments are all complete and the service becomes general use, then each of these eight subscribers on a rural line will receive his own signal. They'll not be interrupted at night when someone else is called to the telephone. I'm going to

call the telephone. I'm going to call the telephone. Thank you very much. The Amanda is a device that will automatically answer your telephone when you are away with your voice which you have recorded for the announcement message. The announcement message can be in the order of about 15 seconds. And at the end of that message, the calling party may leave a message for you to pick up later. And that message may be as long as 30 seconds. Well, there are several that are raising their heads right now. One of them, of course, is that of signal strength. Signal strength is bounded by two areas. One, the maximum power you can pump into

a given transmitting system. I might carry the point of signal strength to the other extreme. Certainly, you can propagate enough energy to drown out interference over a given area. But we're also interested in signal strength of very minute quantities, too. The energy propagated from these space vehicles is certainly comparatively very small. For instance, one watt from the second spotnik and our explorer is yet smaller than that. So this is forcing the frontier in both antennas and in both detection down into another level of being able to resolve information from these noise levels that we talked about earlier. If we were to propagate our send a

message from Earth to Mars and we assumed the propagation was essentially that of light and constant, when Mars is in its most remote point from Earth, it would take 20 minutes to get word from here to there. Now, you can imagine the impatience on the part of a housewife if her husband happened to be on Mars if she had to wait 40 minutes for his excuse when she had asked in the question. I certainly think that as we extend our horizons and our boundaries of information and operation, additional thought, much additional thought, is going to be needed in new and different forms of communication. Thank you.