The Bell System Technical Journal 



Vol. XXI June, 1942 No. 1 



The Future of Transoceanic Telephony* 



By OLIVER E. BUCKLEY 



President, Bell Telephone Laboratories 



"\X /"HEN Sir William Thomson saw the newly invented telephone of 

 ^ ' Alexander Graham Bell at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition 

 in 1876, he stated that "it was the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by 

 the telegraph." Recognizing that the limitations of the first crude instru- 

 ments would soon be removed, he remarked that "the invention is yet in 

 its infancy and is susceptible of great improvements," and also said "with 

 somewhat more advanced plans and more powerful apparatus, we may 

 confidently expect that Mr. Bell will give us the means of making voice and 

 spoken words audible through the electric wire to an ear hundreds of miles 

 distant." Lord Kelvin lived to see these prophecies rapidly proved true. 

 Had he lived only a few years longer, he would have seen the quality of 

 transmitted speech brought close to perfection, and he would have seen 

 the hundreds of miles extended to thousands. 



That Lord Kelvin should have looked upon the telephone as an improve- 

 ment on the telegraph was natural, for that is the way in which Bell ap- 

 proached it. Bell was experimenting with his harmonic telegraph when he 

 invented the telephone. He was extending the possibilities of the telegraph 

 by making use of a wider band of frequencies than were employed in the 

 systems of Wheatstone and Morse. With its sufficient range of frequencies, 

 Bell's system proved capable of transmitting speech as well as simple signals. 

 Thus, telephony was born from telegraphy by an expansion of the band of 

 frequencies employed in the electrical transmission of intelligence. 



More recently, further expansion of the frequency band has been asso- 

 ciated both with improvement of quality of transmitted speech and with 

 multiplication of the number of conversations which can be simultaneously 

 transmitted. So far have these developments progressed that today we 

 can transmit speech overland as perfectly as we may desire for any distance 

 we may choose, and we may do so with hundreds of conversations at once 

 over a single coaxial line. 



In fact, we have gone further and have so broadened the frequency band 



* Thirty-third Kelvin Lecture. Read on April 23, 1942 for Dr. Buckley by Vice 

 President Sir A. Stanley Angwin before the Institution of Electrical Engineers. 



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