Show WIRED MAGIC 0 0 9 0 the telephone on your desk is within I 1 reach of other transmitters wires carry pictures news even radio X V N 1 U 4 ve t i j 41 11 I 1 to k t behind every telephone switchboard is a confusion of wires and cables each serving a definite purpose in modern high speed communication prepared by Nat national lopal geo geographic gaehle society washington ashin gion D DC C W I 1 U service F YOU stand at one end of IF I 1 a football field and sho shout ut your will travel to the other end feet away in about one third of a second but your voice traveling by telephone would take less than one third of a second to travel all the way around the ear earth t 14 the electrical waves that a are r e created when you speak into a telephone transmitter have in effect increased the speed of sound nearly times you can telephone around the world moreover without even raising your voice whereas it takes a good loud shout to be heard even the length of a foot field today however even a man with a bad cold can shout across an ocean and the telephone enables him to do it with as much power as if all the millions of people in the united states were standing on the beach and shouting with him that is the estimated amount of power given to a single human voice by the amplifiers that launch transatlantic radio telephone conversations out on the air lanes overseas even though it takes the energy of a nations lung power to shout across the ocean ears of superhuman keenness are needed to hear even so tremendous a noise when it arrives for the large amount that starts across the ocean dwindles after traveling miles by radio to no more than the energy that would fall upon your outspread hands from the north star long distance wooing A man may whisper into a telephone in washington and be heard in san francisco from london you may say to a girl in cleveland will you marry me and hear her say yes as easily as if she sat beside you in the moonlight A suitor in london really did propose that way to a girl in cleveland and won her too though he had to talk half an hour radio telephone connections from the united states bridge enormous distances the circuit to australia for example consists of a radio channel across the atlantic linked with another from london that jumps eastward to sydney a distance of miles and when radio transmission is better in the other direction the circuit runs westward from london to sydney some miles out of reach of a telephone is almost unheard of in this country with instruments or one for every seven people of a total of telephones in the entire world half are in the united states new york city alone has more telephones than all france with a population of nearly chicago has more than south america on a round desk at the overseas switchboard in new york city are 80 telephone directories from all over the world in every well known language but in appearance very much like the familiar american telephone book fat ones for london paris berlin tokyo thinner ones for rome havana dublin madrid some such as those of the netherlands and switzerland containing gainin all the telephone numbers of a nation in a volume or two the telephone systems of some 70 countries now are connected by wire or radio to the telephone in your own home you can telephone to I 1 c ela ads icy mountains but not to Green lands yet or indias andias coral strand to chile or costa rica to palestine or panama or japan but conversations are only part of the traffic the telephone wires carry few people perhaps listening to nationally broadcast radio programs realize that a large proportion of their radio entertainment comes to them over telephone wires only for a comparatively few miles from the nearest broadcasting station do network programs travel through the air whereas they may have sped nearly miles over a telephone wire before taking to the air at all news of nation and world that you read in your favorite newspaper likewise comes over telephone wires carried not by human speech but by electrical impulses that flash over the wires and with ghostly unseen fingers type their message on a keyboard less typewriter at the receiving end more accurately than many a human stenographer such is the press teletype which delivers news most perishable of all commodities instantaneously to market news photographs too are sent over telephone wires the police teletype flashes news of crime over telephone wires to officers of an entire state and whole 4 X 11 one modern use of wires the highly sensitive machine that sends pictures across the nation in a few feic minutes by means of an electric eye which transmits light and dark into impulses groups of states linked in single systems the largest now includes new york new jersey connecticut massachusetts rhode island pennsylvania delaware and ohio four men broke into a jewelry shop at beacon N Y surprised by local policemen three escaped in an automobile heading toward new york city alarms were flashed over the westchester county police teletypewriter system telephonic arrest officers all over the county were on the lookout for them for the teletype alarm was relayed to police call boxes at yonkers a county policeman saw the bandits and waved them to stop but they opened fire on him pursuing them on 0 n his motorcycle he forced their car into a ditch and collared one bandit in a hand to hand struggle the other two eluded eluded him commandeered mande ered a taxicab and started anew for new york city but the taxicab itself soon was traced through a teletype alarm by ne new york police who killed bothi both bandits america is the land of bigness and its telephone industry fits into that picture enough telephone wire in north america to tie the earth to the sun miles away and start us circling around old soi sol like a pebble on the end of a string |