494 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LV, No. 1427 



Angeles, California, some years ago furuislied 

 some of the most interesting data on the history 

 of life thus far secured in America. A similar 

 deposit representing an assemblage of animals of 

 a somewhat different type has recently been 

 opened for extensive investigation on the western 

 border of the Great Valley of California. Ee- 

 maius of a wide variety of higher animals and 

 birds were found at this new locality. The col- 

 lection represents the geological period immedi- 

 ately preceding the present and offers the best 

 opportunity thus far known to study the life of 

 this late geological stage under the conditions 

 obtaining in the Great Valley of California. 



The telephone engineer a puMic trustee: Frank 

 B. Jewett, vice-president. Western Electric Com- 

 pany. In his paper, which was a statement of 

 the unique position which the telephone engineer 

 of to-day occupies in relation to the general 

 public, Dr. Jewett outlined the organization of 

 the communication service of the United States 

 and pointed out the position and scope of work 

 of the engineer in this organization. Dr. Jewett 

 indicated that the telephone art, even at the end 

 of nearly half a century of the most intensive 

 development and monumental growth, was still 

 far from being an agency requiring little or no 

 change. He showed that the recent developments 

 in physical science had opened up vast possibili- 

 ties of new and improved communication services 

 which the telephone engineer was endeavoring to 

 make available for public service, and indicated 

 some of the problems which were being success- 

 fully attacked. He also pictured some of the tre- 

 mendous difficulties which confronted the tele- 

 phone engineer in incorporating these new services 

 into the existing structure, which was itself grow- 

 ing rapidly along already developed lines, with- 

 out producing disruptions of service. Finally he 

 pointed out that the telephone engineer of to-day 

 had come to recognize that his function was in 

 effect that of a public trustee and that his prob- 

 lem flas not alone that of developing new and 

 improved instrumentalities, but of developing 

 these instrumentalities and making tiiem available 

 to the public without subjecting the telephone 

 user to annoj'anee as a result of experimentation 

 on the .public at large. 



The loud speaking telephone: Frank B. Jew- 

 ett, vice-president, Western Electric Company. 

 For many years, and in fact almost from Dr. 

 Bell's discovery that human speech could be trans- 

 mitted to distant points electrically, there has been 

 incessant quest for a satisfactory loud speaking 

 telephone. Innumerable attempts to devise instru- 



ments of this kind have been made in the last 

 thirty or forty years and until recently all have 

 been substantial failures. Recently, however, 

 really successful instrumentalities have been pro- 

 duced and the field of possible influence on all 

 social and human relations which has opened up 

 was evidenced graphically in the Armstice Day 

 exercises attendant upon the burial of the Un- 

 known Soldier at Arlington, Virginia. In these 

 ceremonies vast audiences in San Francisco, New 

 York and Washington listened to the President 

 of the United States and other speakers and 

 joined in common exercises of respect to America 's 

 dead. Dr. Jewett 's paper, which was illustrated 

 by a local demonstration and by a demonstration 

 of talking over the regular telephone wires from 

 New York, described the physical and electrical 

 problems whose solution had to be achieved in 

 order to make the loud speaking telephone a 

 success. He pointed out that the problem con- 

 sisted essentially of four main elements, namely: 

 (1) The development of telephone transmitters 

 capable of picking up the sound vibrations of the 

 speaker's voice when the latter was speaking 

 normally at some distance from the instrument, 

 and of faithfully translating these vibrations into 

 electrical vibrations for transmission over the 

 wires; (2) the transmission of these electrical 

 vibrations undistorted to the distant point; (3) 

 the amplification at the distant point of the re- 

 ceived electrical impulses to an energy value many 

 times greater than that produced by the trans- 

 mitter at the speaker's end of the Mne; and (4) 

 the translation back into sound vibrations of these 

 greatly amplified speech waves through an appro- 

 priate loud speaking receiver. He pointed out 

 that if the received speech through the loud 

 speaking receivers was to be of acceptable quality 

 no serious distortion could take place in any of 

 the links of the chain from the speaker to his 

 distant audience, and that the inherent charac- 

 teristics of the loud-speaking system call for even 

 more faithful reproduction than is necessary in 

 ordinary telephones of recognized good quality. 

 He pointed out further that because of the neces- 

 sity of using ordinary telephone lines, which in 

 most cases were in close proximity to numerous 

 other telephone lines used in the regular way, it 

 was necessarj' that the currents transmitted from 

 one end of the line to the other should be sub- 

 stantially of the same magnitude as those pro- 

 duced in the use of the ordinary telephone. He 

 showed that this requirement, combined with the 

 necessarily inefficient energy characteristics of the 

 originating transmitter and the tremendous energy 



