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Show HARNESSES SOLAR POWER Sun Powered Phone System Tested The sun ultimate source of ajl the power which man has at his disposal began furnish-ing furnish-ing power directly to a telephone line this month for the first time. Announcement was made here by Dean C Williams, manager of Mountain States Telephone. Engineers switched solar power pow-er into a new type of rural telephone tele-phone system Tuesday, Oct. 4, using the Bell Solar Battery, an invention of Bell Telephone Laboratories Lab-oratories announced last year. George L. Mathews, a cotton and peanut farmer, made the first sun-powered telephone call and remarked that it sounded "just fine." The Bell Solar Battery is the first successful device to convert con-vert the sun's energy directly and efficiently into substantial amounts of electricity. It is at least 15 times more efficient than the best previous solar energy converters. Excess current from the solar unit not needed for immediate telephone use feeds Into a storage stor-age battery which provides power pow-er at night and over periods of bad weather. No Moving Parts The solar battery has no moving mov-ing parts of corrosive chemicals and therefore should last indefinitely. indef-initely. Even in poor light, it will continue to charge the storage stor-age battery but at lower power. The telephone system, under trial at Americus, Ga., uses transistors tran-sistors instead of traditional vacuum vac-uum tubes. The transistors, invented in-vented at BelJ Laboratories and announced seven years ago, require re-quire only small amounts of power. The new system uses the "carrier" "car-rier" principle which allows several sev-eral conversations to be sent simultaneously si-multaneously over a single pair of wires. Since each conversation conversa-tion is sent at a different frequency, fre-quency, they do not interfere with each other. Multifrequency transmission has been used for years with vacuum tubes on longer distance calls. The system sys-tem on triaj at Americus, however, how-ever, operates economically over shorter distances such as those on rural telephone lines. |