ADVANCES IN SIGNALLING 225 



ocean, kept up a continuous stream of official news and propa- 

 ganda by radio, into the air from their powerful station at 

 Nauen near Berlin. This continual outpouring of German 

 bulletins continued by radio during the war, and could be read 

 by radio stations over a considerable part of the northern 

 hemisphere, including stations in America. Neutral peoples 

 could receive these bulletins unchecked. In Britain, America, 

 and the countries of their Allies, all known radio stations came 

 under government control during the war, so that except in a 

 ew surreptitious instances, these electric waves of propaganda 

 passed harmlessly over the heads of the peoples. 



Signal Corps Telegraph and Telephone Lines Abroad. On 

 the other side of the Atlantic, the Signal Corps, in 1917, began 

 building and leasing a complete system of telegraph and tele- 

 phone lines in France and England. The accompanying map, 

 Fig. i, shows the U. S. Army system of wires in those countries 

 shortly after the Armistice and after communications had been 

 carried forward into the occupied region of Germany. The 

 heavy lines on the chart indicate conductors built and operated 

 by the Signal Corps, the light lines those which were operated 

 by the Corps, but leased from the respective Allied Govern- 

 ments. The system is seen to run from Brest, St. Nazaire, and 

 Bordeaux with their environs, through Tours and Bourges to 

 Paris, and to the American front near Toul and war-scarred 

 Verdun. Connecting Paris with London were two separate 

 leased lines, one crossing the channel near Boulogne, and the 

 other by a special cable near Havre. The Signal Corps built 

 in France about 3500 kilometers of pole line, carrying some 

 50,000 kilometers of copper wire. Counting 35,000 kilometers 

 of leased wires, 120,000 kilometers more for networks of tele- 

 phone wire from the various headquarters to the front, and 

 150,000 km. of locally erected army telephone wires, the Signal 

 Corps wire system comprised a total of approximately 358,500 

 km. of wire in France and England, or nearly enough, if spliced 

 end to end, to reach to the moon. 



The traffic which this army telegraph system had to carry 



