WIRELESS TELEPHONY PESSENDEN. 189 



6. The transmission is better, and as there is no distortion of the 

 si^eech the working distance is, it is believed, considerably greater. 



7. The flexibility is greater. With wire lines a telephone company 

 may not be able to give a Boston subscriber a line to New York, 

 while having lines from Boston to Chicago and from Chicago to New 

 York free. Operating wirelesly the wireless circuit normally used 

 for operating between New York and Chicago and between Boston 

 and Chicago could be used to operate from Boston to New York. 



8. No right of way need be purchased, and franchises, it is believed, 

 are not necessary. 



It will be noted that I have not mentioned any disadvantages of 

 wireless telephony for long-distance work. I presume this is because 

 I am not a telephone engineer. I hope the defects will be discussed 

 by the experts who are familiar with telejDhone operation and there- 

 fore better able to point them out. Before leaving this part of the 

 subject I would say that I think the question of interference has been 

 worked out to such an extent that no serious difficulty need be feared 

 in that direction. 



Transmarine Transmission. 



Wireless telephony is peculiarly suited for this class of work. 

 Pupin's ingenious and beautiful method has been successful at Lake 

 Constance, Switzerland, I believe, but even assuming that deep-sea 

 cables of this type could be laid and operated successfully, thej^ would 

 nevertheless be very much more expensive than wireless telephone 

 stations. It is believed that wireless telephony will come into ex- 

 tended use for this purpose. Even without further development 

 telephonic communication could be established between Norway or 

 Denmark or Germany or Spain and Great Britain; between Sar- 

 dinia and Corsica and France and Italy; between France and Al- 

 geria; between Australia and Tasmania and New Zealand; between 

 the United States and Cuba and Porto Rico, etc., were it not that it 

 is at present forbidden by law. 



As regards telephonic communication between England and Amer- 

 ica, my measurements show that this should be possible with an 

 expenditure of approximately 10 kilowatts and suitably large towers, 

 say GOO feet high, or with some of the new forms of antenna. 

 Whether such a transmission would be commercially valuable or not 

 is another matter. Personally I do not see that it would, but when I 

 remember that at the time when the telephone was first being intro- 

 duced a number of eminent business men decided that the house-to- 

 house printing telegraph would be more of a success commercially 

 than the telephone, for the reason that no one would want to do 

 business unless he were able to have a record of the transaction, I 

 must admit that there is a possibility of my being mistaken in this. 



