THE FUTURE OF TRANSOCEANIC TELEPHONY 19 



yet to be born from the inventor's fancy. Indeed, I may have been over- 

 conservative for there are already partly developed inventions which might 

 greatly modify the picture. One such is the vocoder, an instrument which, 

 in a sense, compresses speech into a narrow band. More accurately it 

 dissects speech, transmits it in code and recreates it at the other end of the 

 line. With vocoders a hundred or more simultaneous conversations might 

 be carried by a pair of repeatered cables. While the vocoder would trans- 

 mit the primary elements of conversation it would not provide all of those 

 qualities of speech which words alone do not convey. The vocoder gains 

 in band width at the cost of naturalness of speech, but even so, it may find 

 important application. 



Other inventions may extend the band width available for transoceanic 

 communication far beyond the range here discussed. Projects such as 

 repeatered ultra-short wave radio systems and undersea wave-guides, 

 which today appear fantastic, may some day come within the range of 

 practicability. 



The electrical channels over which peoples of one continent hold their 

 more urgent communication with those of another have always been of 

 surpassing technical interest. Ever since the first electrical impulses to 

 carry words across the ocean were traced in the wavering beam of Kelvin's 

 mirror galvanometer, the improvement of these channels has been a fruitful 

 field for scientist and inventor. But these paths for the transmission of 

 intelligence have a wider significance than mere technical achievement. 

 They are strands of an ever-growing bond that unites widely separated 

 continents. The newest of these strands, the overseas telephone, has yet 

 to reach its maturity. Not until conversations can be carried on as easily 

 and reliably between continents as between cities within a continent, can 

 we claim that the art of transoceanic telephony has come of age. When 

 this time arrives, we shall probably realize as we look back that the half- 

 dozen telephone circuits of the 1930's formed indeed a slender thread to 

 bind together in speech the people of North America and those of Europe. 

 Some tens of kilocycles of band width may then appear as inadequate as the 

 slowly dispatched words over the first transatlantic cable appear to us 

 today. 



