The pioneer press. (Miller, Hand County, S.D.) 1893-190?, 1896-11-12
&c
%2SO-
TO ABOLISH DISTANCE.
The Russian Transatlantic Teie.
phone Scheme.


The alleged Russian discovery of a
telephone system by the aid of which
distance is practically abolished. and
an ordinary telegraph wire %sutiices to
tie loss of tone or volume" has been
criticised freely by electricians on both
sides OF the Atlantic. Some of the
comments are amusing. while others
show that kildischewsky, the inventor
Of the SO-Called new scheme, has so far
achieved only about half as much as
has already been done in this country.
"A Cable Expert fears that the Rus
sian scientist, who is said to be about
to travel to London to experiment with
his Improvement on the Atlantic cables
between LondCn and New York, has
not fully realized the practical difficult
ties that beSet this scientific problem.
Indeed, the assumption seems warrant
ed that he has seen Il cable
worked, for he talks Of speaking from
London city to New York" This would
seem TO prove his ignorance of the ele-
mentary fact that a London-New York
line Is composed Of three distinct see
tons worked by three separate sets OF
Instruments. "A Gable Expert" places
h~iidischewsky in Il group of cable in
ventOrs whose hopes have not been
followed by fruition. OF one of these
he writes: My third inventor | met at
an Atlantic cable station in Nova SEQ
tia. lie was 4 smart man. with a big
scheme to Supersede the miserable SyS-
tenn Of cable signaling invented by Sir
William Thompson A pretty big con-
tract IIn hnI ~, ,nrt,,.l a., ...s
dent Of the company that the latter III
tlmatciy consented to lend him one Of
his cables for his experiments. The
letter written by the president TO his
station manager was ]laconic: Dear
Mr.. i send you Il crank. Fix him as
you think best" II is needless to say
that the marvellous mirror and syphon
recorder invented by Lord Kelvin vds
not superseded on that occasion. An
American expert mentions the fact that
in this country a telephone circuit Loo
miles long is in commercial use every
day, and that he has talked over 1900
miles, which is equal TO nearly three
times the distancc-S90 miles-mentiou-
ed in the Russian dispatch. He sees no
reason to believe that the Moscow per-
f0imance Is of any Importance; posi-
bly, Il new tranSmitter has been used.
He places the Americans far ahead of
Europe in long-distance work: the line
from Boston to st. Louis. 400 miles
long-iS more than twice as long as any
European telephone circuit: the line to
Memphis is 1,5SS miles. J.. j. Ca.ty,
another well known telephone authori-
~. sees nothing remarkable in the telc-
phoning oJer telegraph wires on the
500 miles circuit between Moscow and
RoStOff. This has been done several
times already. As to submarine tele-
phOny, we shall, he believes. have il
across the Atlantic some day. The
or Mon on this subject apparently best
worthy of respect, Is that the desired
result will be accomplished, not by inn
provementS in the tranSmittcr and re-
ceiver, but by improvements in the ca
bic. An opinion of not a little signiti-
canoe. brought out by the discussion of
this subject, is that of Lieut.. Patten.
who states his conviction that tclcphOn-
ic repetition from one line to another
is destined to be one of the next steps
in electrical advance. \ few months
ago he distinctly heard speech in Il Sec
Ond line that was automatically trans
mitted from the first by a repeating
telephone relay the speech being de-
liyered in the second line with all the
~diStinctness and certainty Of ordinary
telephone transmission. If a message
can be thus repeated once. ii can be
done again and again, and herein nav
possibly be found the entrance. To Il
new era of telephone progress.