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Show Machines That Are 4 Almost Human b 5 By E. C. T AYLOrP The Thought Transmitter DO VOD believe in mental telepathy telep-athy ; In the power of one Individual Indi-vidual to transfer his thoughts to the brain of another, without speaking the words? Science has approached such a phenomenon. A device has been perfected per-fected that enables speech, not thought, to be projected into a chosen chos-en brain by the mere pointing of a finger. Only the person selected to hear it can hear the speech. In a crowded room, no one else can hear what the speaker has to Impart to his chosen hearer. Scientists call the device a thought transmitter, however, since it is the speaker's thoughts that are transmitted, transmit-ted, although they are put into the form of words before they are conveyed con-veyed to the other peruon. In any vast crowd, enveloped by an immense silence, it is possible for an operator of the electrostatic projection projec-tion machine to put words into the mind of a chosen subject merely by grasping the handle of the machine and pointing his finger at the ear of the subject. The device has been demonstrated to scientists and others throughout the country by Sergius P. Grace, assistant assist-ant vice president of the Bell Telephone Tele-phone laboratories. His uncanny device de-vice confounded gatherings of electrical electri-cal engineers and industrial leaders In New York and Chicago. At the New York demonstration Doctor Grace hooked up the machine, grasped a terminal and pointed a fore-linger fore-linger at the subject's ears. The latter lat-ter heard a speech stressing the fact that this was merely a demonstration. No one else in the room heard the speech. In Chicago, Doctor Grace, before i.,000 members of the Illinois Manufacturers Manufac-turers association, spoke into a telephone tele-phone transmitter and by means of an amplifier what he said could be heard all over the room. While he was speaking a part of the current used was stored in a "delay" circuit, and part of the speech was not broadcast. broad-cast. Aiter being stored four and a half seconds, this electrical current was transformed to high voltage and passed into Doctor Grace's body. At this stage of his demonstration, Doctor Doc-tor Grace pointed a finger at the ear of a member of the audience, who then heard directly In his brain the same sentence which Doctor Grace had spoken Into the. telephone a few minutes min-utes before. This amazing feat, Doctor Grace explained, ex-plained, was due to the ear drum and surrounding tissues being made to act as one plate of a condenser receiver, the resulting vibrations of the ear being be-ing interpreted by the brain as speech. This electrostatic projection apparatus appar-atus in its present rudimentary form, however, is still only a scientist's plaything, Doctor Grace explained, but it opens a wide field for useful machines ma-chines built on the same principal. Another device, demonstrated by Doctor Grace at the same two gatherings, gath-erings, has since been placed In use in telephone exchanges. Carrying a telephone into the room, Doctor Grace requested a member of the audience to dial any number. The spectator dialed a number and two seconds later a loud speaker in the room, in a clear, human voice, spoke the number and exchange dialed. This device is' now used in co-ordinating automatic au-tomatic and voice telephone systems. A device to keep radio conversations secret also was demonstrated by Doctor Doc-tor Grace. Scientists are working to perfect that machine, for use when radio telephoning becomes more popular, popu-lar, and as an Instrument of communication commu-nication in times of war. The device "scrambles" any speech sent over the radio apparatus. This "scrambled" speech is ordinary speech with the frequencies, or tones, reversed, re-versed, so that the high frequencies become low and the low frequencies frequen-cies become high. In other words, the low tones become high and the high tones of one's speech become low when "scrambled" by the device. Another newly Invented device attached at-tached to the radio receiving apparatus appar-atus at the other end "unscrambles" the reversed speech and It Is heard In the form In which It originally was spoken. ((c) 1931. Western Newspaper Union. ) |