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Show TELEPHONE COMPANY USES "OLD SOL" FOR PHONE LINE POWER The sun ultimate source of all the power which man has at his disposal began furnishing furnish-ing power directly to a tele-phono tele-phono line this week for the first time. That announcement was made here by Gerald Vickers, local manager for the Mountain States Telephone Co. Engineers switched solar power into a Hew type of rural telephone system Tuesday using the Bell Solar Battery, an invention in-vention of Bell Telephone Laboratories Lab-oratories announced last year. Use of solax power is a part of experiments being conducted near Americus, Georgia, 135 miles south of Atlanta, to de- wnr a;nt mt .ini vm "!h7 jj",i uflnrFr mt im vu velop more and better rural telephone service. 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 stor-age stor-age battery which provides power at night and over periods of bad weather. The solar battery has no moving mov-ing parts or corrosive chemicals and therefore should last indefinitely. indef-initely. Even in poor light, it will continue to charge the storage battery but at lower power. The telephone system, under trial at Americus, uses transistors transis-tors instead of traditional vacuum va-cuum tubes. The transistor, invented in-vented at Bell Laboratories and announced several years ago, requires only small amounts of power. The new system uses the "carrier" "car-rier" principle which allows several conversations to be sent simultaneously over one pair of wires. Since each conversation conversa-tion is sent at a different frequency, fre-quency, they do not interfere with each other. Multifre-quency Multifre-quency transmission has been used for years with vacuum tubes on longer distance calls. The system on trial at Americus, Amer-icus, however, operates economically eco-nomically over shorter distances dis-tances such as those on rural telephone lines. . |