The other difference between this and other artificial languages like Esperanto is that you can actually learn to speak those. The only time you see someone walking around spouting a string of numbers is in movies where an android goes haywire.

TALKING BY NUMBERS

3283 1621 1 2047 1705 467 1800.

The above sentence in Logography, a new international language devised by Dr. Hans Binem of Denmark (photo above), means “This is a new language called Logography.”

The beauty of Logography is its simplicity. The first sentence of numbers in this article means the same thing in English as it does in French, German, Spanish and Scandinavian languages— and can easily be extended to include Chinese or any other language.

Dr. Binem’s slogan, “Nothing to learn, nothing to remember” just about sums it up. Note the illustration at the top of this page. It is a section of a page from the inventor’s American-English list of words using the Logography system.

You will notice that each word has an assigned number. The numbers, incidentally, are odd ones. Dr. Binem is reserving the even digits for the growth of his system which now has about 2,000 basic words with corresponding numbers. If you want to send a message you look up the word in your Logography manual and put down its code number. That’s all there is to it.

The person who receives your message deciphers it by taking out his Logography book, looking up the number for each word and translating the message into his language.

International Morse code is used by Dr. Binem for spelling proper names; the code is printed in the back of each manual.

Dr. Binem forsees many uses for his unique numbers system, including international business letters, telegrams and pen-pal letters.

Dr. Binem says, “The slight trouble to translate words to and from numbers opens the possibility of valuable and interesting personal contact to knowledge and friendship anywhere in the world.”

Dr. Binem was born in Poland but came to Denmark with his family when he was five. He had his numbers system in mind for quite a few years but didn’t begin working on it seriously until 1954.

Esperanto, Interlingua and other languages have an essential defect. Dr. Binem says, “They must be learned while the ideal must be a language which can be used immediately.”

He believes his unique numbers language may contribute to world peace by making communications between the great powers clearer and more simplified.

3809 523 1509 1627 3889. 901 4003?

Which means “We certainly hope it will. Do you?”

If you want more information about Logography and wish to become a member of the world-wide fellowship, write to Dr. Binem, c/o the Logography Center, Nakskov, Denmark.

—Ib Eichner-Larsen

“My Apple’s telephone just called up the home office!”

The exciting world of telecomputing. With a Hayes system, you just plug it in! Communicating is so easy with a complete telecomputing system from Hayes. Hayes Smartmodem 300™ is a direct-connect modem for the new Apple IIc. Hayes Micromodem IIe installs easily in an expansion slot in the Apple II, IIe, III and Apple Plus. Packaged with Smartcom I™ companion software, both are complete systems. Best of all, both systems are from Hayes, the established telecomputing leader. Just plug in-and the world is your Apple!

We connect you to all the right places. Bulletin boards, databases, information services—naturally. And that’s just the beginning. Let your Apple plan your travel itinerary, including flight numbers, hotel and rental car reservations. Watch it retrieve and analyze daily stock and options prices. Work at home and send reports to and from your office. You can even do your gift shopping by computer!

Would you care to see our menu? Make your selection. Really With Smartcom I, you just order up what you want to do. The program guides you along the way. You can create, list, name, send, receive, print or erase files right from the menu. From the very first time you use it, you’ll find telecomputing with Hayes as easy as apple pie! We’ve got your number! We know that you want a system that’s flexible and accommodating. That’s why Smartcom I is so versatile, accepting ProDOS™ DOS 3.3, Pascal and CPM® operating systems. It provides you with a directory of all the files stored on your disk. And in combination with your Hayes modem, Smartcom I answers calls to your system, without your even being there.

Your Apple’s telephone goes anywhere the phone lines go. Hayes modems allow your Apple to communicate with any Bell-103 type modem over ordinary telephone lines. You simply connect directly into a modular phone jack to perform both Touch-Tone® and pulse dialing. Hayes Smartmodem 300 and Micromodem lie both transmit at 110 or 300 bits per second, in either half or full duplex.

Follow the leader. Over the years we’ve built our reputation as the telecomputing leader by developing quality products that set industry standards. Now we invite you to see for yourself just how simple it is to add powerful, easy to use telecomputing capabilities to your Apple computer with a complete, ready-to-go system from Hayes. Visit your Hayes dealer for a hands-on demonstration. And get on line with the world.

Hayes. We’re here to help.

Hayes

Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc.

5923 Peachtree Industrial Blvd. Norcross. Georgia 30092 , 404/441-1617.

Circular-Type Radio Antenna

Designed for mobile use, this General Electric “doughnut” antenna shown at the recent convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers, can be installed directly above the roof of an automobile and is claimed to give the same results as the tall whip-type (vertical) antennas commonly seen on police squad cars. Efficient for both receiving and transmitting, it provides equal radiation of radio waves in all directions horizontally. The demonstration model was mounted on a toy train.

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Signals from the Stars

EVER since it was first indicated that the static present in the output of radio receivers was due in part to physical disturbances on the sun a new field of research has attracted popular scientific interest. It is radio astronomy, whose equipment and observers listen not to man made responses, but instead to continuous “static” from the stars. That cosmic radio noise exists was realized as far back as 1931. Early records proved it to be most intense when receivers probed toward the Milky Way, or lengthwise through our enormous watch-shaped galaxy. By contrast, the sun emits very weak signals, principally from its chromosphere and corona, although at longer wavelengths these show tremendous variations up to several thousand per cent. It is easy to imagine the annihilating results such changes would have on the earth were they at the visible portion of the spectrum. Yet in terms of total solar radiant energy, the effect of radio waves is insignificant.

Radio astronomy differs from the visual in two principal ways. First, of course, is the fact that we are studying unseen phenomena—radiation at wavelengths much longer than that detectable by the eye. And, second, instead of lens systems and photographic plates, very sensitive radio receivers teamed with high resolution antennas are used to make the observations. Current television stations operate from 1.39 to 1.75, and 3.4 to 5.5 meters (the latter, channels 2 to 6). The FM radio band lies in between, covering 2.8 to 3.4 m. But standard AM broadcasting transmits from 180 up to 550 meters. For example, WNBC New York, at 660 kilocycles on the dial, has successive wave crests separated by approximately 1,500 feet, nearly as high as the Empire State Building, all racing toward listeners with the speed of light. Up to the present time radio astronomy investigations have been confined to measurements at wavelengths between 3 mm. and 20 meters. At the shortest wavelength the successive wave crests are separated in space by about twice the thickness of a penny.

The instruments used for celestial microwave study, while resembling reflector type telescopes in appearance, differ considerably in operation. Moreover, weather clouds which prevent optical work will not appreciably interfere with the collection of stellar radio data. This was vividly demonstrated at Attu, Alaska, on September 12, 1950, when the Naval Research Laboratory’s expedition successfully recorded a total eclipse of the sun during a rainstorm. But in resolving power, radio telescopes cannot equal conventional ones because of the much longer wavelengths used.

Since radio astronomy itself is a comparatively new field, where the tools and observing techniques are still undergoing modification, definite conclusions regarding the cause of noises heard from out in space would be premature. Interesting is the fact that none of the brighter stars we see in our sky contributes much in the range of radio waves.

Just as advances in terrestrial nuclear _ physics have explained the heat and behavior of stars, they also aid scientists in formulating theories on the origin of cosmic rays. Some years ago, it appeared plausible that loose electrons in interstellar space sent out radiations as they sped past protons or other heavier particles. The more modern idea, however, proposes that some unusual stars of lower than naked eye luminosity and temperature may be responsible. Stronger emissions from the summer constellation of Sagittarius, toward the center of our galaxy, suggests a concentration there.

Exploration of the universe has thus been vastly expanded with the growth of radio astronomical apparatus permitting study of celestial radiation at frequencies never before investigated. Who can predict what great and hitherto “invisible” objects will be discovered?

—P. A. Leavens

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Self-Answering Telephone Thinks and Talks

By Harry Kursh

“HELLO, hello. This is the residence of Mr. John Smith. Your message is being recorded automatically. Ready! Please speak now.”

Don’t be surprised if that’s what you hear one of these days when you dial the familiar number of one of your friends. For Ipsophone—the robot telephone device with a brain—has been placed on the market and is rapidly coming into use all over the world. Three of these ingenious Swiss inventions have already been installed for the King of Egypt but their cost ($38 per month) will make them practical for even the smallest businessman.

How does it work? Well, suppose you have to go out and leave the phone un-tended. When it rings, there’s no one there to answer so after three buzzes, the Ipsophone voice swings into action with the words quoted above.

Your caller, if he’s not too astounded, leaves his message and hangs up. The message is recorded for you to listen to at your own convenience. You can get it when you return home or by calling from your office or any other part of the world where you can reach a telephone and ring the Ipsophone number.

How do you get the message?

As soon as the phone rings, the voice will again say: “Hello, hello. This is the residence of Mr. John Smith. Your message is being recorded automatically. Ready!” But before the Ipsophone says “Please speak now,” you break in with the words “Hello, hello.” Then, instead of recording a message, the Ipsophone will repeat the message it had recorded for you.

If you want to keep the message a secret and make sure nobody else gets it, you tan put an Acoustic Code Key into operation. This is a secret combination of numbers which you can set on your Ipsophone which makes your message as safe as if you had placed it in a burglar-proof vault. You yourself can get it only if you remember the secret code.

Here’s how it’s done. If you call your Ipsophone after putting the Code Key into operation, the voice begins to repeat a series of numbers beginning with zero. After each number, the voice stops for four seconds. To use your Code Key to un- lock the secrets of its brain, you repeat the word “hello” twice after each of the numbers you selected.

If someone else tries to break your code, “Ipsophone disconnects him or gives him a busy signal whenever he says “hello” after the wrong number. Since the Code Key can be changed as often as desired, unauthorized snooping is impossible.

The language used on Ipsophone can be adjusted by the company to accommodate any spoken language. In Switzerland, Ipsophones are already in operation in French and German. Jelmoli department store uses four to record orders for purchases after ordinary business hours. Banks use it to receive important messages after banking hours. The Journal of Geneva has an Ipsophone reserved for messages from its foreign correspondents around the world. Reuters, the British news agency, has an Ipsophone in use in Geneva, too. Doctors are making effective use of it by instructing patients to describe their condition to the Ipsophone in the event they are away from the office. From what the Ipsophone tells the doctors when they return, they are able to determine whether or not there’s an emergency.

Arrangements are under way with an American corporation to mass-produce thousands of Ipsophones because the Swiss company turns out only about 30 a month. And then they are merely leased.

So far, the most difficult (though easily solvable) problem the Ipsophone makers have encountered is caused by the same people who leave their keys under the doormat and then forget where they hid them. They forget their own secret code!

HEART DIAGNOSIS BY PHONE
YOUR heart may soon be diagnosed for ailments by telephone. A new five-lb. transistorized unit which transmits heart sounds and electrocardiograph signals via telephone has been developed by the University of Kansas Medical Center. The device is designed to solve many of the problems of phone consultations between heart specialists. The patient, with transmitter attached, sits or reclines next to a phone mouthpiece. At the receiving end, a second unit transmits the signal to another electrocardiograph machine for consultant’s reading.

WINDOW WASHERS TALK IN BROADCAST
Perched on ledges high above the street, two window washers, one in New York and the other in Chicago, communicated by radio recently in a novel broadcast sent out over a nationwide hook-up. With portable transmitters strapped to their backs, the workmen carried on a lively conversation about their work for the entertainment of the listening audience scattered all over the United States.

The idea that your calls are safe from eavesdropping because you have a specially tuned radio is also incredibly naive. All you’d need was a general radio with a tuner and you could listen to all the calls.

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NOW — POWER IS BROADCAST!

by Thomas J. Naughton

The Klystron, greatest radio advance, transmits energy without use of wires!

LIKE schoolboys in a classroom, more than 100 deans and professors of Eastern universities stood in a laboratory of the Westing-house plant at Bloomfield, N. J. Each of the learned gentlemen held in his hand a light-bulb with a few inches of bare wire attached; all of them expectantly watched the Westing-house engineer who was tinkering with two small doughnut-shaped, contraptions, connected to a six-foot loudspeaker-like horn, at the front of the room. The engineer straightened up.

“All right, gentlemen. Ready!”

At the words, the savants, like Statues of Liberty, raised their light-bulbs overhead and held them there. The engineer flicked a switch, swung the big horn to point toward them; pivoting smoothly, the big horn came to rest focused on the cluster of bulbs. And as it did so, every one of the bulbs lit up.

No wires, except for the little tail-like antenna, were attached to those lamps. They contained no batteries, they were entirely unconnected to any source of power. Yet they were alight. How?

The answer to that question records the achievement of a goal, a Promised Land of Science that has been sought for 40 years. It is something new under the sun. For those lamps were receiving power from the big horn, through the air. Power, in that laboratory, was being broadcast.

Those little lights, shining in a prosaic laboratory, marked the coastline of a new land. No powerlines march Indian-file over the hills and through the valleys of that land; no wirepacked conduits lie buried under the streets of the cities; no third-rails or overhead wires parallel the railroad tracks. The people there do not need those things, for they can tune in a supply of power as easily as we tune in a radio program.

There are no gas stations in that land. Automobiles have no gas tanks, no batteries; driven by electric motors, they draw their power from the airwaves. Airplanes are free from the leash of limited fuel capacities, for they carry no fuel; they can fly from New York to Hawaii, to Hong Kong, to India, with never a stop.

Houses have no furnaces, no oil burners, no steam pipes or radiators; they are heated by electrically-activated coils set in the walls. Power is everywhere, in the air itself, always available, waiting only to be funneled out through a strand of wire and put to work in a thousand ways.

That is the land whose first dim outlines were picked out by the light of the little lamps in that laboratory. It is the El Dorado for which cranks, dreamers and geniuses alike have been looking for two generations.

Our passport to it is the pair of doughnut-shaped copper containers manipulated by that Westinghouse engineer. Separately, the containers are called rhumbatrons; together, with a copper pipe connecting them, they form an invention which has been authoritatively described as “the most important advance in radio since the invention of the audion in 1906″: the Klystron.

For the Klystron, newborn though it is, has already proved itself the wonder-child of electrical technology. Probably no other invention of recent years has been the master-key to so many doors, has swept away obstacles from so many different paths of progress. Broadcast power is only one of the great vistas opened up by the Klystron; other fields in which advances are already being made with it are airplane travel, telephony, and television; and it is an important new tool for national defense.

Yet for all its versatility the Klystron, like most great inventions, is essentially simple; , it consists chiefly of nothing more complicated than two oscillating magnetic fields. Through the first field, in rhumbatron No. 1— called the “buncher”—a stream of electrons is squirted from a cathode; the field, shuttling rapidly back and forth, alternately speeds up and slows down the electrons passing through it so that they emerge from it not in a steady stream, but in bunches, with empty spaces i between. These bunches of electrons, traveling at a clip of 25,000 miles a second, shoot through a copper pipe to the second rhumbatron, the “catcher”; there they hit the ; second, or backstop, magnetic field, which absorbs their motion -energy and converts it into high-frequency radio waves. These are the waves of power.

The whole process -takes place inside a space no larger than that occupied by a portable radio. A Klystron, complete, weighs only about five pounds. Even the name of it and its parts are, as scientific names go, compact and simple; the rhumbatron is so called because of the rhythmic motion of the magnetic field inside it; “Klystron,” derived from Greek, signifies “waves breaking on a beach”—a phrase which pictures very aptly what happens in the “catcher” rhumbatron.

But the waves produced by the Klystron are different from any ever known before. The Klystron waveband is narrow—the wavelength is from one centimetre to one metre—but there is room in it for about 500,000 separate signals, as compared to about 100 separate signals possible in the standard 200 to 450 metre band. Also, the Klystron wave travels through air in a straight line; it does not follow the curvature of the earth, and it goes through the Heaviside Layer, that mysterious ionized stratum which serves so usefully as a backboard for all other radio waves, like a bullet through cardboard. If directed into a copper pipe, however, it will flow in that pipe like water, even around turns.

These characteristics cause communications engineers to regard the Klystron as being little short of a gift from heaven. Because of the enormous multiplicity of its signals, they believe it will soon enable them to transmit as many as 500,000 telephone messages at once on a single cable. Then all the long-distance telephone calls in the country could be handled by one or two main trunk lines with comparatively short tributary branches. Messages from New York to Pittsburgh, Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco, for ex- ample, could all be poured into the same cable; those bound for the inland cities could be unerringly picked out of the crowd at the right time and shunted off to their proper destinations while the others shoot through. Television engineers expect to use the Klystron similarly, so that the cost of television networks—up to now so huge that no such network has ever been formed—can be cut to a fraction of its present figure by transmitting many programs through a single copper pipe.

In short-distance communication the possibilities opened up by the Klystron are even greater, for it may in most places actually eliminate wires altogether. Wires are not needed in this age of radio for transmitting messages; that is being done without wires all the time. Where there are a great many messages, however, wires are necessary to keep them separated, because without wires only as many different messages could be in transit at any one time and place as there are distinguishable wavelengths available— under present circumstances, a few hundred. But the Klystron makes possible half a million simultaneous messages, each distinct from all the others, without wires. That is to say the Klystron makes possible, for all except the very largest cities, radio telephone.

Your radio telephone will have two parts: a receiver, set at a fixed wavelength which will be your telephone number; and a transmitter, ajustable by a dial to whatever wavelength you want to call. You won’t have to worry about eavesdroppers, because no receiver will be able to pick up any messages not tuned to its own built-in wavelength, and all the receiver wavelengths in any one community will be different. One city’s system will not cut in on that of any other city, as long as the two are at least 200 miles apart, because the Klystron wave travels in a straight line in air, and therefore cannot be tuned in beyond the horizon as seen from the transmitter. The short-range receivability of the Klystron wave, which appears at first glance to be a limitation, is actually an advantage.

Nor is its straight-line travel an advantage only for radio telephony; it combines perfectly with two other characteristics of the Klystron wave to make the instrument a powerful tool both for safety in air travel and for national defense. One of these characteristics is so remarkable that, if the Klystron had nothing else to recommend it, it alone would be enough to ensure the invention an important place in engineering history. It is that Klystron waves can be focused with precision on an objective—not merely directed in a general way, like present-day airlane “beams,” but aimed at a point. The airlane “beam” is a cone, fanning out from the source; the Klystron beam is extremely narrow and can be shot out like the ray of a searchlight.

Already that controllable precision has been put to use where it was badly needed. The Klystron is the heart of a new blind-landing system for airplanes, a system as superior to all previous ones as a modern pursuit ship is to a jenny. For even the best of the older systems had serious faults; they were not thoroughly reliable under all conditions and, even under the best conditions, most of them were fantastically complicated. The Klystron beam system, simple, boring through static like a high-speed drill, has solved the problem. Army and Civil Aeronautics Authority planes, using it, have made more than 1000 blind landings in all kinds of weather, and every one of them has been perfect.

Although the Klystron beam penetrates electrical disturbances and the Heaviside Layer with undeviating ease, however, it will not go through any substance which is not a good conductor of electricity. Whenever it hits an electrically-resistant surface, it bounces back from it like light from a mirror. This is another apparent liability which is in fact a considerable asset.

For because of it the pilot aloft in dirty weather can use the Klystron to shoot a beam downward and, by measuring the time it takes to rebound, determine a vital fact no altimeter can tell him: his exact distance from the ground. Over rough country he can shoot a Klystron beam ahead, and with it feel his way past shrouded mountain peaks.

And if he can see mountains, he can see other planes. Reports of R.A.F.’s new radio-rebound device to increase the effectiveness of fighter planes against night bombers indicate that the Klystron is doing its part to keep the Luftwaffe out of English skies!

In the improvement of ground defenses against aircraft, the Klystron is proving invaluable. Antiaircraft watchers probing opaque skies with its far-reaching, invisible finger can spot approaching planes long before any sound of motors could be picked up by even the most sensitive microphones. The Klystron can aim and fire guns automatically in pitch darkness with greater accuracy than human gunners can achieve on a clear day!

In that field the Klystron jumped to maturity almost as soon as it was born. But in other fields, in which it remains still an infant, it will attain the greater stature. It grows toward the day when wires, now vital nerves of civilization, will be left to moulder in forgotten conduits; when your telephone, your stove, your heating plant, your light —all will inhale power through an antenna on your roof. Automobiles, airplanes, trains, ships, will ride the pulsing power in the air like surf-boarders on the crest of a wave—the wave of the future, which will emanate from a couple of copper doughnuts called a Klystron.

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Beating the Celestial Strip-Tease

by Bill Williams

THE Eskimos call them “the dancing souls of the dead.” The ancient Norsemen said they were Valkyries carrying warriors to Valhalla. Modem scientists call them a “celestial strip-tease.” But communication engineers call the Northern Lights a plain pain in the neck.

The Northern Lights—the Aurora Borealis —have been the subject of superstition and folk-lore for ages. There have been tales as fabulous as the eerie lights themselves—of immense radium mines in the Arctic that glow at night, of frigid goddesses of the glacial ice, of vast fires that bum beyond the rim of the earth.

So long as the ghostly Gay White Way of the Heavens did nothing more to disturb us than frighten a few superstitious people, scientists paid no particular attention to them.

But since the advent of radio and long-range telegraphic and cable circuits, it has been noted that the Northern Lights are always associated with tremendous magnetic storms which play havoc with communications systems. And this discovery has spurred our scientists to a closer study of the stratospheric fireworks, until, now, we are beginning to learn something other than myth about them..

A few years ago, a magnetic storm accompanied by an unusual display of Northern Lights usually meant a complete breakdown of radio and telegraphic communication for several hours. Today, due to new facts which study of the phenomena have yielded and new methods of “dodging” electronic pyrotechnics developed by engineers, an outburst of the Aurora is not nearly so serious a threat to the vital flow of intelligence among humans.

The terrific display of Northern Lights and its accompanying magnetic storm on September 18 of this year—the most intense ever recorded in the United States—found communications engineers prepared. For the first time during such a storm, as a result, they were able to maintain radio communications, even with Europe. The tricks they used in keeping information channels open were almost as interesting as the latest explanations of the phenomenon of Aurora.

In the first place, it should be made plain that the Aurora and the magnetic storms on the earth’s surface are merely related phenomena, and not the same thing. Both, however, are due to gigantic exploding “spots” which show up on the face of the sun.

Only this year have scientists been able to make the definite assertion that both the Northern Lights and the terrestial magnetic storms are certainly due to sunspots. In the past, they have noted the relationship between these phenomena, but have not been sure that this relationship was not merely coincidental. This year, however, H. W. Wells of the Department of Terrestial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institute, was able to predict accurately the September 18 display several days ahead of time.

Before the September 18 Aurora, also, motion pictures were made of one of the sun’s spots for the first time, according to the report of Dr. Edison Pettit of the Mount Wilson Ob- servatory, using a new type of instrument known as an interference polarizing monochromator. The sunspot was shown to be a solar tornado of fiery gas, whirling on the surface of the sun at a speed of 120,000 miles per hour.

When first seen, the tornado was 8,000 miles wide at its base and 38,000 miles high! A smoke-like column projecting from its top reached an elevation of 68,000 miles, and during the course of observation a knot of gas broke away from the top and was hurled upward at a speed of 130,000 miles per hour!

But this “movie actor sunspot” was a baby compared to many sun-spots!

In the unimaginable heat of these fiery cyclones of the sun, hydrogen and helium atoms are being constantly broken up and reformed, and in the process great waves of solar radiation are shot out into space.

It has now been definitely determined that ordinary solar radiation—sunlight, as we know it, from the infra-reds through the ultra-violets— increases measurably during periods of sunspot activity. But also, observations by Dr. Harlan T. Stetson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have definitely shown that sunspots produce another radiation, different from sunlight, in the form of relatively slow-moving electrically charged particles, somewhat akin to electrons and protons.

Whereas light travels at a speed of 186,324 miles per second, these electrically charged particles travel at a speed of only 1,200 miles per second, approximately. These mysterious electrical “shots” are about 150 times slower than light.

Light, at its terrific speed shoots down upon the earth without being appreciably affected by the earth’s magnetic field.

But the sunspot’s slower electrically charged particles, traveling only about 1,200 miles a second, are seized upon by the earth’s magnetic field as they enter the outer atmosphere, and are drawn toward the magnetic poles.

Now, these slow-moving streams of electrical particles are what cause the Aurora, as we shall explain in a moment. Their attraction to the magnetic poles, due to their slowness, is the reason why the Aurora is seen principally in far northern latitudes. At times of great sunspot activity, more of these electrical particles are produced and they tend to “pile up” and back down into the lower latitudes. The September 18 Aurora was seen as far south as Georgia and Southern California.

Now for the manner in which these mysterious energy-bombardments from the sun cause the Northern Lights to light: The Norwegian geophysicist, Vegard, has recently explained that, in the simplest terms, the Northern Lights are lit in very much the same manner that one of our modern neon advertising signs is made to glow!

A neon sign is a sealed tube containing neon gas at low pressure, with an electric filament introduced. When the electricity is turned on, the filament shoots off electrons and the electrons bombard the gas. Outer electrons are stripped from the gas atoms by this bombardment, trans- forming the gas into an unbalanced energy-state which causes it to glow. Neon produces a red color. But scientists can reproduce all the eerie colors of the Northern Lights in the laboratory by bombarding various types of gases. Nitrogen glows green; mercury vapor, a blue-green; argon, a pink shade, and so on.

Scientists have now proven to their own satisfaction that this is exactly what happens in the upper areas of the atmosphere when the gases of the atmosphere, at low pressure, are bombarded by the electrified particles shot off from sun-spots. The Aurora is a celestial “strip-tease,” in which energy-particles from the sun strip electrons from the gas atoms of the super-stratosphere and cause them to luminesce.

They have even reproduced exactly the mysterious yellowish-green which is characteristic of the Aurora. This color, due to a single wave-length no where else duplicated in nature, puzzled researchers for a generation, until Sir John McLennan of the University of Toronto demonstrated in the laboratory that it is given off by atomic oxygen in a peculiar state of excitation, and then only when mixed with some of the other gases normally found in the atmosphere—argon, neon, helium and nitrogen.

The significance of this green line light is due not alone to its presence in the Aurora. It is also the most conspicuous light-line found in the luminescence of the night sky which is present all over the earth every night. On a clear, moonless night, sky-light is equivalent to that of a 25-candlepower lamp about 300 meters away. It has been found that the stars contribute approximately one-fourth of this light, and the balance is due to luminescence.

Experiments done by Stormer almost complete man’s knowledge of the Aurora. Stormer, in recent tests, determined that the Aurora occurs not at great distances above the earth, as was originally believed, but in that section of the atmosphere ranging from 50 to 80 miles from the earth’s surface. He measured the Aurora by photographing the phenomenon against a background of stars and then calculated by triangulation.

Dr. Stetson, of M. I. T., explained recently that there is a regular sequence of magnetic phenomena. First, sunspots are observed. There is a lag of about a day, and then the Aurora appears in the night sky. At about the same time, short- wave radio transmission is affected—in some cases completely blanketed out. Then, about a day later, standard-broadcast waves are affected.

In some instances, telegraphic communications are blanketed out, and the news teletypes in newspaper offices, and tickers in brokerage offices cease to function or bring in nothing but garbled messages.

During the September 18 storm, radio and telegraphic engineers whipped the sunspots for the first time in history.

By experimentation, they had learned that only east-west messages, or those running counter to the south-north magnetic field, are affected by these magnetic outbursts. They had also learned, as outlined above, that shortwave and standard broadcast frequencies are affected at different times during a magnetic storm.

RCA beat the magnetic waves on their foreign broadcasts by sending their messages “around the elbow.” They fired their radio messages south from New York to Buenos Aires, where it was automatically made to “turn the elbow” and was relayed to London, thereby dodging the storm by a 12,000-mile north-south detour. The messages made no stop in the Argentine and were flashed directly across the South and North Atlantic to out-trick nature’s bombardment.

Success was also achieved for transoceanic messages by alternating between long wave and short wave broadcast senders. The storm lasted for 25 hours, according to RCA engineers, but at no time was service cut off.

From the first observations recorded by literate men, the sublime display of the Northern Lights has stirred practical observers to lyrical ecstasies, and the scientific explanation detracts little from the enthusiasm.

One of the best descriptions is quoted from a Norse manuscript of the year 1250: “It appears like a flame of strong fire seen from afar. Pointed shafts of unequal and very variable size dart upwards into the air, so that now the one and now the other is the higher, and the light is floating in a shining blaze. So long as these rays are highest and brightest, this sparkling fire gives so much light that, out of doors, one can find one’s way about and even hunt. In houses with windows it is light enough for men to see each other’s faces.

“But this light is so variable that it sometimes seems to grow obscure, as if a dark smoke or thick fog is breathed on it, and soon the light seems to be stifled in this smoke. As night ends and dawn approaches the light begins to pale, and disappears when day breaks. Some people maintain that this light is a reflection of the fire which surrounds the seas of the north and south. Others say it is the reflection of the sun when it is below the horizon. For my part I think it is produced by the ice which radiates at night the light which it has absorbed from tlie day’s sunshine.”

Dr. Irving Krick, noted meteorologist, recently announced that he had determined a definite cycle of weather behavior which corresponds to the known 11-year cycle of sun-spot activity, which may make possible long distance weather forecasting hitherto undreamed of. The Harvard School of Business has released a report showing a direct relationship between solar radiation and the ups and downs of the stock markets. Scientists have found a relationship between sunspot radiation and crimes of violence. It has even been pointed out as significant that both World War I and World War II broke out at periods of maximum sunspot activity.

Science has explained the mystery of what makes the Northern Lights light. Perhaps even greater mysteries of the Northern Lights and their effect upon mankind’s behavior are only now opening up.

Two Ears Now Can Listen at One Telephone

A TELEPHONE attachment which permits the user to listen to a long distance call with both ears, and incidentally allows two people to hear from a single receiver at the same time, has been designed especially for noisy offices. The device is a sound-distributing chamber which slips over the end of the standard telephone receiver and sends part of the sound through a rubber tube ending in a metal cup, similar to that on a doctor’s stethoscope, which fits in the opposite ear of the user. Thus the person who is telephoning can listen to the conversation undisturbed by outside noises, and has one hand free to make notes, the maker points out.

When it is important for two people to hear a telephone conversation, one may listen through the standard receiver, the other through the rubber tube. The attachment can be slipped on the receiver or removed in an instant.

Sitting here on my 50 mbs internet connection I’m going to say that guess was a bit off. The total amount data they are talking about transmitting over a year is less than the size of the images in this post.

I also particularly liked that the searches on the third page are for “Computer, Privacy Surveillance, NSA and Tapping”. Just a hunch but I’d guess that the person who made that screenshot probably later joined the EFF.

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Trends in Telecommunications

On-line search software and faster modems for PCs

by John Markoff

Now that the personal computer (PC) has won the battle for office desktop space, software developers are turning their attention toward programs that combine the storage capacity of mainframe computers with the local processing power of PCs. Although mainframes offer PC users access to huge on-line databases of specialized information, how to get to the information and bring it to the PC in a usable form is another question entirely.

In recent months, a new class of PC software has emerged that facilitates the redistribution of tasks between mainframes and PCs. It is called “on-line search” or “database-access” software, and these programs give us a glimpse of how radically PCs will alter the traditional mainframe database-access model based on one central processor and hundreds of remote dumb terminals.

In contrast, on-line search software uses the processing power of the PC to mediate between the researcher and the mainframe database and can offer potentially both a simpler user interface for novices and a more powerful searching tool for experts.

During the past decade there has been an explosion of new sources of electronic information. Several mainframe electronic-information providers such as The Source, CompuServe, and Newsnet have designed their systems specifically for novice users, but most on-line database services require special training to be used effectively. These include databases such as Dialog Information Retrieval Service, Nexis and Lexis, and Data Resources Incorporated.

The high cost of on-line information is also a deterrent to new users. Some databases on Dialog cost more than $100 an hour. This has meant that users generally must undergo extensive training to learn how to develop search strategies to minimize connect time.

Reducing Costs PC-based on-line search software will be beneficial to database users because it will simplify complex user interfaces now found on many mainframe databases and it will permit extensive off-line preprocessing of searches, there- by reducing the cost of information retrieval.

On-line search software introduced to date can be placed in two distinct categories. The first category is composed of programs that are “loosely coupled” to a specific mainframe database. These programs are extensions of intelligent communications software programs and generally permit automatic log-on, query, and downloading from a host mainframe computer.

The second category includes software that has been “tightly coupled” to one or more particular databases. By tailoring programs for interaction with a host computer, software designers are able to create user interfaces that require little knowledge on the part of the user of either micro-to-mainframe communications or the formal database query process.

The emergence of new communication network standards and standards in the on-line information industry will tighten this coupling to the point where the relationship between the mainframe database system and PC software will approximate the current relationship between operating systems and application programs.

Dialog, a subsidiary of the Lockheed Corporation, is the largest collection of public online databases. It has more than 75 million records of information including articles from over 60,000 journals. These records are contained in more than 200 separate databases ranging form biographic databases such as American Men & Women of Science to statistical databases such as U.S. Exports.

Most Dialog reference records are currently available as abstracts that require you to go to a library to obtain the entire article or source (articles can be ordered on line for an extra fee). However, there is a trend toward making the full text of documents available on line. One Dialog database provider, Information Access Corporation, recently introduced two such databases, called Magazine ASAP and Trade & Industry ASAP, that will cover 120 different popular magazines and publications ranging from Scientific American to Playboy.

In-Search.

In-Search is an example of an on-line search program that has been tightly coupled with the Dialog databases.

In-Search, initially designed to be used on the IBM PC or PC XT, was introduced recently by the Menlo Corporation of Santa Clara, California. This program costs $399. It differs from other database-communication programs both in its scope (the program and its assorted reference files occupy more than one megabyte of disk space) and in the sophistication of its user interface, which offers a window-based display environment and “unhooks” the control of the database query process from the Dialog mainframe computer. “Unhooking” means that you’re able to prepare your query in a screen-oriented editor while either on or off line. The process takes place with little interaction with the Dialog mainframe computer.

If the query has been prepared off line, you can log on to Dialog and have the query sent automatically. When Dialog responds with abstracts, they appear specially formatted in an overlapping window display.

Here, again, the user interaction is not dependent on the control of a remote mainframe computer. If you wish to interrupt the flow of information from the Dialog mainframe, you can do so simply by paging backward or forward through the information in much the same way that you can scroll through a text document in word-processing software. Because information from Dialog can be captured in a buffer (In-Search tailors the size of the buffer to the available memory level of an individual computer) on your PC, it’s possible to selectively mark records for later printing. You also can store retrievals to disk as ASCII (American National Standard Code for Information Interchange) text that can be edited by a word processor or called up for viewing by In-Search.

In designing the In-Search user interface, Menlo Corporation has attempted to take concepts from other popular types of PC software. For example, when working in the query editor, you can edit and change lines of text exactly as though you were working with a document text editor. In-Search has even supplied users with the option of the familiar WordStar command-key sequences for cursor control and word and character deletions (the cursor-control keypad is functional as well). The basic In-Search display also contains a menu of command options that are arranged similarly to those provided by electronic spreadsheet programs. By pressing a function key, you can enter a command mode and select a command that will cause In-Search either to send a particular command to the Dialog system or to retrieve information from its own local database.

Although it is possible to first prepare a particular search strategy off line and then retrieve references quickly to minimize connect-time charges, In-Search is based on a different, more interactive philosophy of on-line database use.

Menlo’s president, Lloyd Kreuzer, argues that In-Search is designed to function in a highly interactive manner. This sets it apart from other PC front-end software packages that assume you know what you want before going on line.

In contrast, Kreuzer believes that the most effective way to use a database like Dialog is to be able to alter a search strategy depending on the nature of the data revealed on a search. “Interactive searching is less precise and therefore more likely to turn up things,” he says. “The keyboard is never dead and [in fact] it is uncoupled from the Dialog process.”

When using In-Search on a fixed disk, the program provides local on-line detailed information on each individual database. This information, traditionally provided as printed textual documentation by Dialog (on forms called “blue sheets”), allows you to obtain information on the scope of an individual database as well as information on specific database indexes that aid in refining searches.

In-Search also supplies you with local context-sensitive on-line help both for using Dialog and In-Search. If you have an IBM PC without a fixed disk, you must insert one of four separate floppy disks that represent major database categories: arts, education, and social sciences; biology and medicine; busi- ness, government, and news: and engineering, mathematics, and physical science. On a fixed-disk PC, these files are directly accessible by the program and in the future it may be possible for the Menlo Corporation to use Dialog to download updates both to the on-line reference sheets and to the In-Search program itself.

The search process begins with selection of a database to search in. The first In-Search display shows three windows. Two small windows on the left side of the screen allow you to select one of the four major categories and to select further specific subject areas within each category. After you select category and subject you can select a specific database. At this point you are placed in the query editor (In-Search calls this the Search Keywords and Phrases screen) to formalize a search.

After In-Search sends the query to Dialog, the references yielded by each search are displayed in a separate window referred to as a reference text display. Any search words that you entered in the query editor appear as highlighted text as they are scrolled on the reference text screen.

At the same time, information on modem status is given in a small window in the lower-right corner of the display. When Dialog is sending records, the window indicates Phone-Working. The status changes to Phone-Online after the records have been retrieved or when you interrupt the retrieval process.

For a simple search to answer the question “Are there any books currently available that describe bicycle tours of the California wine-growing region?” You would first select the Books in Print database and then enter the words “bicycle.” “wine,” and “California” in the query editor. You enter each of these words on a separate line. The first three lines of the editor are labeled S1, S2, and S3. On line S4, you enter the phrase “S1 AND S2 AND S3″ to insure that any reference in Books in Print that contains the first three words in its abstract will be located. (Running this query with In-Search located one book: Grape Expeditions: Bicycle Tours of the California Wine Country.) In-Search documents the AND, OR, and NOT logical operators, which are subsets of Dialog’s complete range. However, expert users can implement all the other search operators that Dialog permits.

Effective searching of the Dialog database, even with In-Search, is frequently complicated. Since Dialog is generally a collection of document abstracts, it is heavily indexed, and it is important to understand the structure of the indexes to conduct a complete search.

A Dialog database is broken into records that are composed of fields. A typical record might include fields such as title, author, journal, abstract, descriptors, and identifiers. (Descriptors and identifiers are standard and nonstandard terms used by the database publisher to identify the subject matter of a record.) Each field is indexed either as a word index or as a phrase index.

In-Search gives you on-line access to specific indexes for each database. You can select an index for any term or phrase entered on the query editor screen. You also can send the Dialog database an “Expand” command that shows a listing of indexed words around the particular search word for a particular field in the database. This often will aid in narrowing down the focus of a search. (It is possible to search only one Dialog database at a time, however, some preselection is possible by searching the subject index first with a special command.) The importance of indexed searching was exemplified when I searched for my last name in The Computer Database. No references were found; however, when the author index was specified, Dialog located 106 references.

Possibly the most intriguing aspect of this new class of software is the change that it portends in the realm of microcomputer-to-mainframe communications. The analogy that casts the mainframe database in the role of an operating system, linked simultaneously to many remote application programs, brings many possibilities into view. In this model, interaction between microcomputers and mainframe computers would be similar to program calls to an operating system.

Menlo’s Kreuzer has called upon online database providers to develop an open-architecture, machine-to-machine interface standard that would permit third-party software developers to create a new generation of applications programs.

“(What is needed is) a universal set of calls to create an open standard for the on-line community that will let us, or anyone, write applications programs,” he says. “The information industry literally will explode once we have a machine interface to all the data.”

Such an architecture would move in a philosophically different direction than the one currently being followed by some on-line information providers who have been setting up systems based on hierarchical “user-friendly” menus for novice users.

Instead, Kreuzer is aiming at fundamentally changing the division of labor between mainframes and PCs. While it is logical that the data searching and sorting algorithms will remain on the mainframe computer, the PC can be expected to handle the user interface, on-line help, and preprocessing of the search request more efficiently.

Further Benefits

Tighter coupling of the communications process between mainframe host and remote PC potentially can yield other dividends as well. Higher data-communications speeds is one obvious possibility. In-Search already uses a significant amount of data compression on the large on-line reference files that are stored on the PC to reduce their size by almost 40 percent. There are a series of simple strategies for increasing the data-communications bandwidth as well. If the applications program can be coupled more tightly to the host computer, it is possible to employ a variety of data-compression strategies to go beyond the current 1200-bps (bit-per-second) limitation over phone lines.

Post-processing is another significant area. While In-Search currently formats only downloaded information and stores it to disk or outputs it to a printer, several other on-line search programs permit later manipulation of information as well. SciMate, from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, is an on-line search program that is priced at $880 and designed for IBM PC, Apple II, and CP/M computers. It provides for automatic logon and query of four different database systems and includes a local database manager that makes it possible to store downloaded information. The database component of SciMate is called Personal Data Manager. It will take advantage of the record and field structure of information from a host computer or permit you to create your own structure for a local database. Although there are limitations on field and record size, Personal Data Manager permits you to link records to store longer textual documents. You also can move files to word-processing programs or merge locally created notes or documents into the database.

In a smaller fashion. Informatics General Corporation and VisiCorp have developed two complementary programs, Answer/DB and VisiAnswer, that permit the transfer of quantitative data from a corporate mainframe computer to an IBM PC where it can then be loaded into a VisiCalc spreadsheet program for local analysis.

Faster Modems for PCs

Today there are a series of barriers confronting high-speed PC data communications. Most of these barriers fall within the realm of the voice-grade telecommunication network and into existing modem technologies designed to send data over this network.

Yet, while digital technologies are promising dramatically higher communication speeds, a series of new modem designs is being introduced that will bring PC-to-PC data rates up to 9600 bps and, with additional data compression, may push speeds higher.

The new technology wasn’t originally developed for personal computer users, but rather for digital-facsimile transmission systems. Now that the technology has been moved to PCs, it raises a number of possibilities, including using facsimile machines as remote input-output devices for PCs.

Gamma “technology, a Palo Alto, California, data-communications corporation, recently introduced the FAXT-96, a half-duplex 9600-bps synchronous modem board for the IBM PC and PC XT.

Priced initially at $1995 and designed to be used with a synchronous adapter card, the FAXT-96 plugs directly into a card slot in an IBM PC or PC compatible and permits 9600-bps communication over ordinary dial-up telephone lines. The modem includes auto-dial, autoanswer, and multiple-speed features. It connects directly to a phone line and to a synchronous adapter.

The use of dial-up 9600-bps communications is new. It has been made possible because of improvements in modem technology and improvements in the method of encoding digital data on bandwidth-limited voice-grade lines. Control of the FAXT-96 is handled in software from a “master control panel” screen on the IBM PC.

Previous high-speed synchronous modems have been stand-alone units that have been intended for either remote-terminal or micro-to-mainframe communication. The Gamma Technology modem differs in that, although it can be used as a high-speed micro- to-mainframe communications link, a software package also is being offered that permits error-checked PC-to-PC file transmission at 9600 bps.

The shift from asynchronous to synchronous transmission protocols at higher data rates frees the communication process from the start-stop bit overhead, a difference that automatically yields about a 20 percent increase in transmission efficiency.

The significance of higher data communications rates has grown with the deregulation of the communications industry because communication costs are expected to rise. Gamma Technology is claiming that an eightfold increase in data rate (from 1200 bps to 9600 bps) will save several thousand dollars a year if 160K bytes of information are transmitted daily across the United States. Savings would be even greater if data were transmitted overseas.

The FAXT-96 can be programmed to meet several international modem standards set by the CCITT (International Consultant Committee for “telegraph and “telephone). The standards include CCITT V.29 at 9600, 7200, and 4800 bps and CCITT V.27 at 4800 and 2400 bps. Until now, U.S. modem signaling standards have been dominated by AT&T-developed standards. That’s changing, both because of the global need for communications and because AT&T has less influence in an area of deregulation.

There are some limitations. Because sending data at 9600 bps is pressing to the limit what currently is possible with voice-grade lines, poor line quality can make it impossible to send data at that speed. “lb cope with line-quality problems, the Gamma “technology modem automatically tests line quality during an initial handshaking phase and then sets transmission speed at the highest data rate the line will support, ranging from 9600 bps down to 2400 bps. The line test is done by having one system send a known signal to the receiving system. The receiving system knows what it is supposed to get and can make adjustments to make the closest fit.

A recent study by Xerox of facsimile-system performance showed that the same modem technology that Gamma is using would support 9600-bps data transmission worldwide approximately 75 percent of the time over voice-grade lines. Over domestic long-distance lines the 7200-bps rate had to be selected only 27 percent of the time.

In addition to cutting communications costs, higher-speed data communications opens up new applications. Facsimile-to-PC connections would make the transmission of the textual information possible for bit-mapped display on the IBM PC. At 9600 bps the facsimile-transmission time for an by 11-inch piece of paper is 30 seconds. Another possibility is for the transmission of specialized database information that includes diagrams or other images.

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Wounded Veterans Discover New Joys in Wireless Music

Radio Outfit Now Becomes Hospital “Nurse”

By Armstrong Perry

DO you know what “ether” means to thousands of weary hospital patients these days?

It no longer suggests shock and the painful after effects of an operation. Rather, the word brings thoughts of pleasure, recreation, and amusement. For the radiophone has at last entered the hospital— where, above all places, it belongs—and musical entertainments, broadcasted daily through the ether from dozens of transmitting stations, are now being borne into hospital wards and orphan asylums, bringing comfort and delight to the lonely inmates.

Radio amateurs, in regions where broadcasts are thick, have long since found wireless a blessing in hours of illness. It is, indeed, a common practice now, around New York City, for the owner of a receiving set to liven up a sickroom—his own or a relative’s—by hooking up his apparatus to the bed springs, which work wonderfully as an aerial. The patient, donning the head phones, can lie at ease by the hour, hearing the gossip and news of the great outside world, and catching in endless variety the lectures, sermons, songs, and instrumental music with which the great transmitting stations are now filling the ether.

From this use of radio in the sickroom at home to the installation of receiving sets in hospitals, has been an inevitable step. Equipped with a loud speaker, one reasonably priced receiving set can now entertain an entire ward, wiping out forever the gloom and hopelessness of hospital life.

Ask the boys in Ward 37, at Fox Hills Hospital, Staten Island, N. Y., for instance. They know! For the “godmothers” of the twenty-five wounded soldiers in this ward of the great government institution on Staten Island gave their “boys” a radio set last Christmas. Since that time, there are few dull moments in the ward.

The boys began by receiving an elaborate Christmas program from the Newark, N. J., station. At that time the loud speaker had not been delivered, but the inmates of the ward and their visitors passed the receiver from ear to ear, and improvised a paper horn that made the songs and messages audible to an attentive group. This new interest in life, and the keen pleasure that the radiophone has brought the wounded veterans, is doing as much for their health as careful nursing.

In fact, in numerous instances radio is making it possible for the hospital staffs to give their patients something more than medical care. In one of the greatest army hospitals located in Washington, D. C., several hundred patients at a time have been entertained by one pleasant-voiced nurse, who reads magazines into the transmitter, tells stories, and sings or says the little cheering things that only a woman can say.

At other times during this second experiment, a phonograph was started in the central station. It was connected with a radiophone transmitter that changed the sound waves into radio waves. The radio waves swept over and through the hundred or more buildings that constitute the hospital. Wherever they encountered metal, they sent electric currents through it.

In a white iron bed a soldier snapped a little clip onto his bed spring, picked up an instrument that resembled a telephone receiver, and heard the music of the distant phonograph as distinctly as though the machine were playing beside his bed. The electric currents were changed back, by the radio receiver, into sounds he could enjoy.

Hospital authorities who see in this an example worthy of imitation — and experience proves that it is—may be interested in a technical fact. The inventor of the system discovered that he could transmit voice and music within the area covered by the hospital without using high frequency currents such as are required in ordinary radio work. The radio waves from his apparatus travel through space at the rate of less than 10,000 waves a second. Passing through the magnets of the receiver, they cause vibrations of the diaphragm slowly enough to be heard as sound by the human ear. The bed spring is the “aerial.” The body of the patient, quite unknown to him, serves as a “counterpoise,” and makes it unnecessary to have a ground connection.

The particular system to be used is not important. One large hospital may broadcast its own entertainment throughout all the buildings. Another, like Fox Hills, may have an ordinary receiving set equipped with a loud speaker that permits a roomful of patients to “listen-in” on the regular broadcasts now blanketing the nation.

The latter is the simplest and most promising plan. And everybody who knows the ordinary gloominess of life in great institutions will realize how completely it will cheer the dreary life of the patients.

A Radio Letter from One Reader and a Broadcast Message to All
Editor of popular Science monthly: When I lost my eyesight,. some months ago, I suddenly found myself deprived of the majority of pleasures that others enjoy. I realized then how dreary and lonely must be the lives of thousands of inmates of homes for the blind—and, indeed, of all institutions.

But to-day, despite my misfortune, I have a brilliant vision for the happiness of these people. A wireless telephone, installed a few weeks ago, has brought me again all the joys that mean most to mankind. I hear daily of the doings of the outside world. I get the news—national, international, political, every kind—even before people who are able to read it in their newspapers. I hear lectures, sermons, and concerts.

Hours of suffering are turned to ceaseless pleasure wherever a radiophone receiving set is at hand. Let me urge you to advocate the installation of receiving sets for the benefit of those confined to homes and charitable institutions.

Roswell Prescott.
Newark, N. J.

“popular science monthly requires no urging in this cause. Founded fifty years ago by a famous blind scientist, E. L. Youmans, who contributed greatly to the development of science in America, the magazine feels a special sympathy for the blind. Moreover, POPULAR science MONTHLY believes that few marvels of applied science in all the magazine’s 50-year history have brought blessings to mankind exceeding the present promise of the wireless telephone.

We therefore raise the banner now for the extension of radiophone communication by popular demand to its maximum of utility.

And we ask public spirited readers in every city to start a local campaign for the installation of wireless receiving sets with loud speakers, in deserving institutions.

Think what this will mean to the shut-ins in orphanages, in homes for the aged or the blind, and in hospitals. It means that the walls of the institutions are extended to the limits of the earth, as the listeners hear concerts from New York, opera from Chicago, press messages from all over the world, church services from Pittsburgh, news from the local paper, music from many broadcasting stations—more entertainment, more points of interest, one is tempted to say, than the average healthy person enjoys.

Many newspapers, like the Newark, N. J., Call, the Detroit News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, are already sending out wireless broadcasts. In every town a newspaper might go a step further and take up this campaign for radio in hospitals and asylums. Three hundred subscriptions of a dollar each would completely equip one hospital.

Which town will be first?

Popular science Monthly stands behind the enterprise, ready to give all possible cooperation and information.

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To communicate voice and data simultaneously the ordinary modem leaves a lot to be desired.

Introducing the Tel-A-Modem.

Now you and your personal computer can talk on the same phone at the same time.

Let’s say, for example, certain data you were transmitting via your personal computer to a remote computer user needed some verbal explanation to go along with it. With the ordinary modem it couldn’t be done. Not simultaneously.

You’d have to first call the user to inform them that data was coming. Hang up. Re-dial in order to connect modems. Transmit the data. Hang up. And then call back with your explanation. If you had additional input to transmit and discuss, you’d have to begin the whole process again. Talk about frustration.

Code-A-Phone’s solution to this problem is the Tel-A-Modem. An innovative two-line desk telephone integrated with an intelligent modem capable of transmitting voice and data simultaneously.

Of course, the genius of Tel-A-Modem doesn’t end with its unique communication capabilities and state-of-the-art convenience.

Specially designed for use with RS-232C compatible computers and terminals, it offers a full spectrum of both telephone and modem cost effective features, including: single button selector for voice or data on either line; full-duplex mode; automatic answer/origi- nate modes; 300 and 1200 baud data transmission rates; automatic selection of baud rates; switch dialing for tone-dial or pulse-dial systems; memory autodial; and modem status LEDs.

So much for words.

For more information and the name of your nearest Tel-A-Modem dealer, call 1-800-547-4683. That is, just as soon as your computer gets off the phone.

In Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii, call 1-503-655-8940.

Code-A-Phone A SUBSIDIARY OF CONRAC CORPORATION

No Static on Micro-Waves

LIVELY interest has been aroused, among television and short-wave enthusiasts, in New York City, by the present activities of the National Broadcasting Company, in regard to experiments on ultra-short waves. Apparatus is being set up in the tower of the lofty Empire State Building, and short antennas erected about its mooring mast. While official information has not been forthcoming as to wavelengths and schedules, it is evident from the dimensions of the antenna that the work is on ultrashort waves, such as are now being similarly tested in Holland and Germany.

The ultra-short wave is readily reflected, so that it does not pass beyond the horizon of the antenna; and obstacles such as hills cast shadows in its path. It is therefore adapted only to local broadcasts of this nature, so far as present knowledge goes.

The “micro-wave,” however, is in still another order of wavelength—less than a meter (39.37 inches). It is even more markedly “quasi-optical”—that is, subject to the laws governing the transmission of light; but with extremely low power it is capable of transmitting distinct signals between any two points between which there is a clear space. Recent experiments were very successful across the English Channel.

The Marquis Marconi, who has always taken especial interest in short-wave work, states in a recent interview that he is now working on 10- to 20-inch waves (25 to 50 centimeters) on distances between ten and twenty miles, with perfect speech transmission. These waves penetrate brick and wooden walls readily, though steel-frame buildings reflect them. Since their frequency is above that of interference from “static” and electrical appliances, reception is unmarred by noise.

The particular value of the micro-waves for television is shown by the fact that they may be modulated with wavebands a hundred times wider than those used for ordinary broadcasting; and therefore they are adapted to the transmission of the most detailed images; while, for local programs, perfect reception, free from “atmospherics” and “man-made static,” may be relied upon. At the present time, the entire spectrum of micro-waves, with its numerous channels, is open for experiment by all licensed stations. Developments in the next year will be rapid.

“The great advantage in the use of ultra-short waves which has been yet discovered is that there is a complete absence of the static and fading, so troublesome on somewhat longer waves. Operation, also, is extremely economical.”

—Marconi

MOBILE STATIONS Broadcast Major EVENTS

HISTORY in the making is now brought into the homes of millions of American people through the use of mobile radio stations capable of broadcasting from the actual scene of any major event or catastrophe. Carrying broadcasting and receiving equipment, announcers and engineers, the mobile stations can rush to fires, flood areas, political and other events at a moment’s notice.

While one crew of engineers rushes to the scene another group hurriedly sets up high frequency receiving apparatus atop nearby buildings for picking up the signals from the portable or mobile station. Special telephone lines then carry the announcer’s voice to the key station where the broadcast is sent out to network stations throughout the country.

MAGNETS TOSS VOICE BACK LIKE AN ECHO

When a World’s Fair visitor speaks into the device shown above, an electric echo throws back his words after a pre-set interval up to several minutes. One set of magnets impresses the voice on a moving steel tape, and a second set picks it up. The effect sounds like an echo from a cliff, but undistorted and amplified. Delayed speech is useful in transatlantic radiotelephony, where a speaker’s reply is held up in transit to give relays time to close.

That was actually a pretty good guess.

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COMSAT: Communication in the Space Age

Not experimental, but commercial, instant worldwide information transmission by satellite
By RAY D. THROWER

In the 17th century, it took about 4 months for news of the New World to reach Europe. Now, with satellite communication, news whips around the globe in seconds. In less than 3 years, instant global communication will be a reality. Advanced communications equipment and the space-age vehicle, the Communications Satellite Corp. and its international partner, Intelsat, are all together responsible for that.

“Just what is COMSAT?” is a question one frequently hears. Many have the idea that COMSAT is a government agency, staffed by Federal civil-service personnel. This mistaken idea probably comes from the fact that COMSAT was authorized by the Communications Satellite Act passed by Congress in 1962. The basic Communications Act of 1934 made no specific provisions for satellite communication. In fact, in 1934, satellite communication was placed in the category of Buck Rogers space adventure stories, popular in the late 1930′s. COMSAT’s relationship to the Federal Government is about the same as the relationship of other communication companies such as General Telephone & Electronics, American Telephone & Telegraph, and International Telephone & Telegraph. They are all Government-regulated, profit-making stockholder-owned organizations.

Radio-Electronics visited the new earth-station facilities at Brewster Flat, Wash., and Paumalu, Oahu, Hawaii, and obtained an interview with Wallace M. Lauterbach. Western area manager for the Communications Satellite Corp. Lauterbach has been in communications for about 25 years.

He was graduated in 1941 from the US Military Academy with a BS in electrical engineering. He obtained his MS from the University of Illinois. During World War II. he commanded signal troops in the Pacific Theater. Since then, he has been executive officer to the Chief Signal Officer, Department of the Army; a member of the US delegation to the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva; military assistant to the telecommunications adviser to the President; and first Commanding Officer, US Army Strategic Communications Command.

When Colonel Lauterbach retired from active duty in June, 1965, he was an obvious choice for Western area manager, Communications Satellite Corp.

After we toured the COMSAT site at Brewster Flat, Wash., Lauterbach invited us into his office for some discussion about COMSAT and the future of space-age communications.

RADIO-ELECTRONICS: What is COMSAT’s purpose?

COLONEL LAUTERBACH: It’s to be a world-wide commercial communications satellite network to provide communications services to business, government, and individuals. Understand one thing: When we speak in terms of “communications” here at COMSAT, we mean not just telephone conversations, though they will be an important part of COMSAT’s activity. But I think the important contributions will be data transmission and. to a lesser degree, video communication.

R-E: Well, will the communications satellites be flexible enough to handle the different kinds of communications circuits you’re talking about? For example, can one single satellite take care of voice, data and video traffic, too?

LAUTERBACH: I’ll give you a qualified yes to that question. Qualified only because of the way it was worded. Yes, the present satellites can handle voice, data and video. But not all at the same time. They can handle a mixture of voice and data. The exact number of circuits depends on the speed, and therefore the bandwidth, of the data circuit. The real limiting factor is the terminal equipment used at the earth stations. The receivers and transmitters are the same for all modes, but the demodulating and modulating equipment is different for voice, data and video.

R-E: How many of each type circuit can satellites handle?

LAUTERBACH: Early Bird, which was our first program, can handle 240 two-way telephone conversations, or 6,200 full duplex, simultaneous teletype circuits, or one television video circuit. It can handle a few computer circuits or hundreds. As I mentioned before, the exact number of computer circuits will depend on the speed of transmission of the data.

R-E: I see. I’d guess that the communications satellites launched early this year can handle more than the 240 voice circuits of Early Bird, true? Do you have a name for the current program?

LAUTERBACH: Let’s take those in reverse. Early Bird was one name for what we call Intelsat I. That’s a single satellite located over the Atlantic off the east coast of South America. The current program, the one that affects us here at Brewster Flat and at Paumalu. is called the Intelsat II series. We have several satellites for this second phase. One did not achieve a usable orbit and is idle. The second is stationed above the Pacific Ocean about halfway between here and Australia. A third will be put on the opposite side of the globe over the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa.

As to channel capacity, Intelsat II spacecraft have the same capacity as Early Bird but more than twice the area of coverage. However, we’re constructing what we call Intelsat III. That will be what we call a “multiple-access” type communications satellite. These so-called global satellites, for use starting in 1968, will have a capacity in excess of 1,200 voice circuits each.

R-E: You’ve mentioned Intelsat several times. What is that?

LAUTERBACH: Intelsat stands for International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium. It’s an organization made up of a group of the member nations of the ITU. the International Telecommunications Union, which is an arm of the United Nations. Right now we have more than 55 member nations in Intelsat. Intelsat owns the satellites. COMSAT holds a majority interest, and acts as manager of Intelsat. Each member nation, or its commercial representative, will own its own earth station. We expect to have as many as 30 earth stations operational by 1968.

R-E: You also mentioned ”multiple-access” satellites. What do you mean by that?

LAUTERBACH: Well, by using a single broadband input receiver, a large number of earth stations, say, 10 or more, can communicate through the same satellite simultaneously, even though each earth station transmits on a different frequency. In fact, for the system to work, each earth station must transmit on a different frequency. Each station is assigned a band in the satellite receiver’s spectrum so one earth station’s transmissions won’t interfere with those of another.

Actually, you know, the communications satellite is a glorified translator, comparable to the vhf/uhf translators used to serve a lot of communities with TV. Our translation frequency is 2.225 GHz.

R-E: What bands do you operate in? I read that it was in the 6-GHz and 4-GHz bands, but there are already so many microwave systems operating in those bands, it would seem you’d have quite an interference problem.

LAUTERBACH: Exactly. Actually, you have no idea of the number of common-carrier microwave systems in operation.

R-E: What are common carriers?

LAUTERBACH: A common carrier is an organization, like a telephone company, that sells communications services. There are so many in operation in the bands we operate in that we’ve had to get sort of a special dispensation from the FCC that any future systems in our vicinity will be installed and operated on a noninterference basis. General Telephone Co. of the Northwest brings in the microwave relay channels that carry the COMSAT circuits out of Brewster Flat. They had to do some special engineering to get their microwave in here in the 1 1-GHz band, so as not to interfere with our 4- and 6-GHz operation.

R-E: What about the case where there was already a system in operation in your band? What do you do then? I’d think this might be pretty important when it comes to site selection.

LAUTERBACH: You’ve just hit on one of the most difficult things about setting up an earth station: site selection. Yes, we have to have an “electronically quiet” environment. Our receivers, which are cryogenic systems by the way, have a sensitivity of —159 dBm*, so, not just any place will do. We looked for quite a while before finding the Brewster Flat site. We’re in the bottom of a saucer-shaped depression between several mountain ranges. The mountains shield us from other microwave systems. Of course, we have a certain maximum angular elevation limit on our surroundings. Anything above 4° might obstruct the path to the “bird.”

R-E: You mentioned your receivers are cryogenic devices. This means they’re supercooled to reduce the natural electron noise, doesn’t it?

LAUTERBACH: Yes. They’re cooled to 4° Kelvin. And that’s close to absolute zero.

R-E: That should keep anything quiet!

LAUTERBACH: It does a good job of it. Actually, we’re not the first to use cryogenics. Radioastronomy systems have been using them for years and many of the telemetry systems for space work use cryogenics.

R-E: Besides the use of cryogenics, are there any other specific technical details in the COMSAT system that aren’t used in the usual communications system?

LAUTERBACH: Oh, yes. One thing that seems to surprise quite a few technicians and even some of the younger engineers is the fact that we transmit and receive simultaneously on the same antenna.

R-E: Could you explain how that works?

LAUTERBACH: The technique has been used for years in microwave and vhf and uhf communications. We use what we call a duplexer. It’s a resonant-cavity device, actually two cavities, one tuned to the transmit frequency and one to the receive frequency. At the resonant frequency, the cavity represents a low impedance to any energy it sees. At any other frequency it looks like an extremely high impedance, so the transmitter output is effectively isolated from the receiver input, but the receiver can still “see” any signal that’s on its frequency.

R-E: Sounds like something very useful. It lets you get away from having to build two of these “monster” antennas for each direction of transmission, doesn’t it?

LAUTERBACH: It sure does. And that cuts down on the overhead. There are some microwave systems that connect as many as eight transmitters and eight receivers to the same antenna, all operating simultaneously.

R-E: Whew! Let’s see. COMSAT was organized in 1962, and you launched your first satellite, Early Bird, in 1965, if memory serves me right . . . ?

LAUTERBACH: That’s correct.

R-E: Then, how did you manage to get all the engineering talent together to design your systems on such short notice?

LAUTERBACH: Our initial ground systems were designed and built by private contractors such as Page Communication Engineers, Sylvania, ITT Federal Labs and others. This may change with COMSAT engineers designing at least portions of the systems. Also, we already find ourselves having to provide engineering and technician advisory services to many national governments. Our transportable earth stations can be taken to remote locations and made fully operational in about 30 days and for a fraction of the cost of the large fixed station. [Since this interview, the 42-foot transportable antenna at Brewster Flat has been dismantled and shipped to the Philippines, where it has been leased for a year.—Editor] We realize that many of the countries that install these systems won’t have personnel trained. So, there is the definite possibility that COMSAT, through Intelsat, may provide the technicians and engineers to train some of the technicians and engineers of newer Intelsat members.

R-E: It seems like COMSAT will be a very interesting job opportunity. I imagine a few engineers and technicians would like to work for a prestige organization like yours.

LAUTERBACH: Definitely. And, with our expansion programs, we’re always looking for people with skills we can use. At a typical earth station, we need about 40 to 50 technical people. About 20% are engineers, the rest technicians. Multiply that by those 30 earth stations I mentioned a moment ago and you have a sizable work force around the world involved in commercial satellite communications.

R-E: What kind of background do you look for in an engineer or technician?

LAUTERBACH: Experienced communications people. We need technicians with vhf and microwave experience and backgrounds in multiplex carrier communications. Solid-state and cryogenic experience is highly desirable.

R-E: Mr. Lauterbach, is a satellite communications system really necessary? Aren’t the undersea cables reliable enough?

LAUTERBACH: The undersea cables? Yes, they certainly are reliable. They’ve served us well for many years and they’ll continue. But their capacity and flexibility are limited. In 1960, there were only about 600 communication circuits out of the United States to the rest of the world overseas. Most of these were by cable, a few by radio. With the growth of the world’s population and the increasing business and government communication needs, we’ll need 12,000 circuits by 1980. We added 240 circuits with Early Bird. This amounted to an increase of about 30%, but the most impressive improvement is the instantaneous availability of these circuits over an area of tens of thousands of square miles.

R-E: What kinds of customers will COMSAT serve?

LAUTERBACH: The most often mentioned example is NASA. We’re providing just about every conceivable type communications circuit to NASA for the Apollo program. Probably one of the most interesting services we propose is to provide voice and data communication to aircraft in flight on trans-oceanic runs.

R-E: Oh, I think I understand. On long over-water flights, vhf communication won’t work, and the hf radio bands are pretty crowded—and not always reliable.

LAUTERBACH: Exactly. Direct communication will play an important role in air traffic control in the future, especially when the 2,000-mile-per-hour passenger liners go into service. Recent estimates show that at any given moment there are over 280 aircraft over the Atlantic alone. And don’t forget the ships at sea. We can provide them with telephone and data service to the home office. That way, if there’s a change in the price of say, oil, in a certain port, the home office can direct the tanker to go to another port where the price is better.

R-E: What about the possibilities of satellite communications systems being used for worldwide educational television? Does COMSAT or anyone else have anything along these lines?

LAUTERBACH: Yes. ABC, CBS and NBC have already expressed interest in this area. Certainly it would be technically feasible. Actually, when we consider the ETV aspect of satellite communications, the only thing that keeps us from doing it is “doing it.” The technology exists. The only thing still necessary is the political and economic backing. COMSAT has already outlined a program for a domestic US satellite system that would serve the major TV networks as well as handle ETV.

R-E: How about computers? Couldn’t they be tied together by communications satellites? This would help in making data available on a world-wide scale. Hugo Gernsback, editor-in-chief of Radio-Electronics, in editorials for December 1959 and May 1964, urged the establishment of a “national facts center.” Using your facilities, a facts center could be international, couldn’t it?

LAUTERBACH: Someone’s been reading our mail! Seriously, though, the establishment of information grids, connected by relay satellite, has already been proposed. Some authorities think that in less than 10 years a student will be able to dial a local computer on his home telephone and program problems into it. This is already being done on a limited scale, but not with relay satellites for computer interconnect. But it could be done.

R-E: I’ll bet engineering firms and other businesses would benefit from being able to tie into such a system.

LAUTERBACH: They certainly would. And they’d find the cost not much more than a monthly telephone bill and a lot less than owning and maintaining their own computer.

R-E: Seems like you’re going to have a lot of people relying on your satellite. What happens if it goes bad after just a few days of operation? Or what if it doesn’t work to begin with? You can’t send a man up to fix it—not yet, anyway. What do you do?

LAUTERBACH: To begin with, our systems are designed to minimize failure. Each component and each unit is designed and tested to meet extreme requirements. The chance of failure is pretty remote. If a failure should occur in a critical component after the bird is up, we still wouldn’t have a failure because the equipment has built-in redundancy. That means there is a parallel unit that will take over the function of the defective unit. And, if, just if, the bird should be a total failure, we do have a couple of spares we can send up. But that’s expensive.

R-E: I guess you’re pleased with Early Bird’s performance. It went up in, let’s see, April of 1965, wasn’t it? And it’s still operating.

LAUTERBACH: Yes, Early Bird had a life expectancy of 18 months. It’s exceeded that by quite a margin. And looks like it will keep going for a while yet. The satellites orbited this year are designed to operate for 3 years and the ones planned for Intelsat III are being designed for a life of 5 years. R-E: What is the power of the transmitter in the satellite?

LAUTERBACH: Six Watts.

R-E: Six watts? But the one at the earth station is 12,000 watts!

LAUTERBACH: It does seem strange, but remember that right now our techniques don’t permit a very high power-to-weight ratio. We’re limited to low-powered transmitters on the satellites. We make up for this by using the large antennas and cryogenic receivers at the earth station. Going the other way, we can transmit from earth with high power and large antennas, with their high gain, and come up with a respectable signal level for the satellite receiver. This way, we can use fairly conventional circuits for the receivers in the birds and get away from having to put huge antennas and cryogenic receiver systems in orbit.

R-E: Then, actually, the complicated circuits are at the earth stations, more so than in the satellites?

LAUTERBACH: In a manner of speaking, that’s true. But that isn’t to say that the circuits in the satellites aren’t up to the state of the art. Some of our equipment is far advanced from the equipment of the more conventional, earthbound systems.

It has to be, because of size and weight limits.

There’s a great future for satellite communications and its engineers and technicians—a future where not even the sky is the limit.

In late January, Intelsat II’s Pacific satellite Lani Bird began to serve in two major functions. AT&T started using the satellite for commercial telephone service—with 6 circuits to Hawaii and 30 to Japan. And ITT initiated commercial TV use of Intelsat II with transmission of an NBC newscast to Nippon Television Corp. Fulltime commercial service is now underway between North America, Hawaii and Japan. The Atlantic satellite Canary Bird was lofted March 22. —Editor

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Wired for Sin – THE VICE RACKET BEHIND THOSE PHONE ANSWERING SERVICES

Bigtown call girls operate freely because slick tele-fronts handle their incoming calls
By JACK MITCHELL

THE TALL, sleeky-dressed blonde got off the hotel elevator and made her way swiftly across the lobby to the telephone booths. Tossing aside a mink stole from her shapely shoulders, she took pencil and notebook from her pocketbook, dialed a number and said softly: “This is June. Any calls?”

“Hi, June,” said a female voice on the other end of the wire. “Sure, lots of action tonight. Mr. Cooper wants you to call him. Says you know the number. And a man named Al says he’s here from Chicago. Here’s his number. And then a Mr. Smith at…”

This scene, played by hundreds of blondes, redheads and brunettes, is being repeated many times in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and other major cities these days (and nights) as the telephone answering services from coast to coast emerge in a unique role — the call girl’s “home away from home.”

What was once the sedate, respectable and sin-proof medium for transmitting messages to busy doctors, lawyers, brokers and other professional men has blossomed into a bustling business for the dollar doves and scarlet Sadies who have at last found a cop-free method of plying their trade.

The public had little inkling of this role of the conventional answering service in the cuddle-for-cash trade until Nella Bogart, an admitted call girl, told the New York jury that subsequently acquitted her that she made as high as $500 weekly using a service switchboard that cost her $20 a month.

Despite this startling revelation, there was no flurry of activity on the part of hundreds of answering services to discontinue suspected “clients.” Trade went on as usual after Nella’s testimony exploded like an H-bomb on the front pages. Even the vice cops shrugged their collective shoulders from Boston to San Francisco. There’s little they can do about this, for the ladies of the evening have come up with a virtually tap-proof formula for evading the law.

TAP-PROOF FORMULA What’s more, this electronic “home away from home” is inexpensive, dependable and has the added factor of reassuring the “John” (the name call girls give their customers) that a squad of detectives won’t be listening in when he dials his play-for-pay doxie.

For an on-the-spot account of how this new sin-with-safety program works, TOP SECRET interviewed several service switchboard owners, message girls and even a soiled dove who had married one of her “Johns” and settled down to being an honest woman.

We’ll call her Angella because she’s now a popular young matron in a neat Long Island community. But not long ago she was one of Miami’s most successful call girls.

“I was bugged twice for pros (arrested for prostitution)” Angella told this reporter. “The cops got me on a wire tap. Then I tried the answering service.

“I didn’t even go to their office in downtown Miami. They didn’t ask any questions such as my address and home phone. They explained the charge was $18 a month and I sent them a money-order. It was as simple as that.”

“Didn’t they want to know your occupation?”

“No. I told them I was a model. They seemed satisfied. It worked fine and I never had any trouble. The cops can’t put on a phone tap because the girl always calls from a pay phone and even if they try to trace her call back, she’s gone by the time they get there. What’s more, the bulls are leery of fooling around with the answering services — most of them have plenty of respectable clients.”

A “headset” or message girl who worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift for a West Coast switchboard service said during her fourteen months on the job “at least twenty call girls were clients of my outfit.”

“I got to know them all pretty well,” she told TOP SECRET. “Their voices, their habits, their regular customers, the guys they liked and the ones they didn’t want to see. I used to give them little extra services and most of them asked for my home address and sent me a ten or twenty dollar bill every month as a tip. Since I made a buck an hour on the switchboard, those tips came in handy.”

“That’s a pretty heavy tip.”

She shrugged. “They could afford it. Some of the girls would get a dozen messages during my eight-hour shift. At $20 to $50 a call, I could figure out they made plenty.

“One girl named Joan had a friend who used to come down every two weeks from Portland. He’d never fail to call about 9 a.m. and ask the girl on the morning shift for Joan’s home phone. She told him we didn’t have it, which was the truth. Then he’d ask for Joan’s address. We didn’t have that either. We knew he wasn’t a copper, but every answering service has one rule that never changes: Even if we have a home phone and address, we must never give it out.

DAY STARTS AT 3 “Most of the call girls give us only their first names and usually send in their monthly payment either by money order (using a phoney surname) or cash.”

“Don’t you keep a record on them.”

“Sure,” said the message girl. “A file card with the name ‘June’ or ‘Margie’ or whatever it is and the occupation which usually is ‘model.’ Sometimes instructions such as ‘will call for messages after 3 p.m.’ Most call girls sleep until then and the bulk of their business is done in the late afternoon and evening.”

“What’s a call girl’s average day like?”

“Pretty much the same pattern,” said the switchboard service operator. “By time she’s awake and calls in, we usually have half a dozen messages for her. The more messages, the greater her success in her trade, so to speak. The prostitute who gets only one or two a day I figure is either getting too old or too lazy.

“Most messages just give first names of the ‘Johns’ and their phone. A fellow named Joe wants her to call room 506 at his hotel at 6 p.m. That means his wife won’t be back until late. Carl wants her to call him back. Says she knows the number. A fellow named Jimmy says he’s a friend of George’s and to call him at his hotel. Most call girls are leery of this ‘friend of a friend’ business and tell me to forget the message.”

The switchboard operator said in only one case in her experience did a call girl leave a home phone. “Most of them are scared to death of wire taps and use phone booths. When they get through with one job, they just go to a public phone and call me.”

A Washington switchboard service owner said he felt certain some of his feminine clients were soiled doves. “But I’m not a cop,” he said. “And about half my revenue comes from ladies who never tell us much about themselves. I’m not breaking any laws by giving them telephone service and I don’t intend to. If the cops want to investigate, I won’t stand in their way. But I’ve never seen these clients and probably never will.”

A New York vice officer pointed out that one of the evils of the “home away from home” switchboard service is that by its very nature, it blocks police efforts to round up the call girls.

“LIVE AND LET LIVE”?

“Suppose we go after a subscriber who really is a model?” he said. “Then we have an invasion of privacy suit against the city on our hands, to say nothing of the howls about civil liberties that would go up. We get into enough trouble with wire taps. Tracking down an answering service client and proving that she uses the telephone to engage in prostitution is mighty tough.”

To prove his point, the Nella Bogart and Pat Ward cases are among the very few on record where call girls admitted using an answering service. Pat Ward, the best known dollar dove in the famous Mickey Jelke case, said the oleo heir (who was convicted) told her: “The first thing a call girl needed was an answering service.”

And, interestingly enough, Pat’s use of a switchboard service did not figure in the evidence. Despite her disclosure, nothing was done to investigate the hundreds of answering services that take up ten pages in the New York City classified telephone directory.

Of the arrests made each year in the major cities for prostitution, nine out of ten of the play-for-pay pretties are streetwalkers or bar girls who solicit business. The smart call girl scorns such a practice. Not only does it pay low — as little as five dollars a customer — but the chances of arrest are greatly increased.

The call girl who can make as high as $500 a week also has another factor working for her — the changed attitude of judges, social welfare agencies and others towards prostitution.

Chief Magistrate John M. Murtagh of New York recently proposed that the local vice squad be abolished and a “live and let live” policy be adopted toward the city’s sin sisters.

This promptly brought a retort from Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy that his force would “keep after the prostitutes.”

“Big shots or little shots — make them blank-shots,” were his orders. “Put them out of business and keep them out of business.”

The latter directive is going to take a lot of doing. With her address and home telephone known only to herself, the successful call girl can go through her lifetime of selling sex by the hour with little fear of arrest — thanks to that switchboard service.

Vice officers in one mid-western city tried to put the heat on the “Johns.” Seizing a bunch of messages at one answering service, the cops contacted the girl’s customers, demanding to know where the girl lived. Unanimously her “clients” told the bluecoats that they hadn’t the vaguest idea. They had never been in her home, knew only the number she gave them — the answering service. Convinced the “Johns” were telling the truth, the cops tried to plant a message, sending two officers to a hotel with instructions to call the switchboard and leave word for the cuddle-for-cash lass to buzz “John and Al.”

But the $20 monthly tip the lady of the evening sent her friend on the switchboard paid off. When she checked in, the message-taker slipped her the word that the cops had been in and were on the prowl. The call girl took the next plane for Miami and plied her trade there for a couple of months. When she returned, it was simple to contact her favorite operator again and leave a code name.

At this writing, she is averaging between $350 and $500 a week and the vice squad is still looking for her.

As one veteran law enforcement officer summed it up: “These answering services have many legitimate clients. They have no information on those they suspect are call girls. They can’t help us too much. Even the 100-per-cent honest managers have no proof to offer us. So it’s a war of communications and right now the call girls are winning hands down.”

Aquatic telephones let skin divers talk under water

This swimmie-talkie uses water as a medium for sending high-frequency sound waves, on the principle of the hydrophone employed in the early 1900′s for communicating between ships, and in World War I for detecting submarines. Being adjusted here on a frogman, the Aquavox includes a face-mask mike, transducer (on belt, left), transceiver (right), earphones (on thigh). Cotton Associates, Philadelphia, developed it.

Interestingly this kind of thing is currently being considered, but for wireless networking, though an important distinction being that it is done inside a room, not in the open.

Television Programs Sent on Light Beams

TELEVISION transmitted on a light beam, opening the way to a new era in the art of broadcasting, has been successfully demonstrated at Schenectady, N. Y. by Dr. E. F. W. Alexanderson, noted radio engineer.

In the laboratory tests, instead of the electric impulses being fed into the radio transmitter as heretofore, they were modulated into high frequencies on a light beam from a high-intensity arc. This beam was projected the length of the laboratory into a photo-electric tube, which transformed the light waves back into electric impulses. These latter impulses reproduced the original image by means of an ordinary television receiver.

Light-transmitted television points the way to the development of a new method of communicating with planes whereby a fog penetrating light, modulated into voice waves, is projected to photo-electric cells on the wings of a plane, so that landing directions may be transmitted through fog for prevention of smash-ups

Electronically New…

PORTABLE CLOCK RADIO also serves as alarm. Button under thumb causes light (arrow) to illuminate clock or radio dial. Earphone jack provides quiet listening. Six-transistor circuit has push-pull output. Comes in tan or blue case. Toshiba Model 6TC-485. Clock radio is priced at $59.95 from Transistor World Corporation, 52 Broadway, New York City 4, N.Y.

WIRED TRANSISTOR 1200 INTERCOM is a two-station set for the home or farm which provides distortion-free two-way communication. Two-wire cable included extends one mile. Operates from single low-cost battery, has built-in buzzer for signaling. Comes with 9-volt battery, cable. $19.50 from P. A. Brown, Dept. MC-1, 54 Ruxton Rd., Great Neck, L. I., N.Y.

QUIET STEREO is provided by these hi-fi stereo earphones, similar to those used by astronauts. Impedance of 16 ohms and flat response is provided over full audio range. Plug can be wired for stereo or mono operation. Phones adjust vertically, axially. $37.50, Roanwell Corp., 180 Varick St., New York 14

COMBO TELEPHONE AMP and radio provides hands-free telephoning simply by resting phone on cradle-top. When not in use as telephone amplifier, the unit serves as four-transistor AM radio. Automatically switches to amplifier when phone is in place. $32.95 from H and N, 6452 Lankershim, N. Hollywood, Calif.

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You and your telephone

ON BEING A WOMAN: DR. JOYCE BROTHERS

Trying to reach a friend by phone the other day, I got the busy signal five times in a row. The first few times I fumed—there’s something about that frustrating buzz that sets my nerves on edge—but by the fourth try I was amused, remembering how, just a few days before, she and I had been on the phone at least half an hour, talking about a party we’d both been to.

That set me thinking: What is it about women and telephones, anyway? We do make more calls than men—strictly business calls aside— and if we’re honest, we have to admit we gab a lot longer. This male-female difference shows up early. A recent Bell System survey of teenagers confirms what every mother suspects: at all ages, girls use the telephone more than boys (as much as one to three hours a day, according to another study). What’s more, sixty-five percent of their calls are “just to chat.”

It’s in those teen years, when girls first begin to take serious notice of the opposite sex, that the fascination with the telephone begins. (Sometimes, I suspect, it’s the fascination of the snake for its victim!) It doesn’t end there, though. Confess—don’t you, even now, feel a slight stab of excitement; of expectancy, every time the phone rings?

THE TELEPHONE AS TYRANT

That emotion, partly an uneasy one, isn’t confined to women. It’s a rare person, man or woman, who can bear to let a ringing phone go unanswered. Even a phone ringing in a movie or on television creates a feeling that you ought to do something about it. According to Marshall McLuhan (the “medium is the message” man), that’s because the telephone is a highly personal instrument, a form of communication that demands a partner. You can’t ignore it, or treat it as background noise, as you can radio or television; you have to react to it.

A woman’s reaction is heightened by an emotional hangover from her dating days. Then the telephone was the instrument, par excellence, of romance. It brought invitations to parties and movie dates and Cokes, as well as tete-a-tetes as intimate as love letters. Every call, then, started a girl’s heart thumping, in the expectation that it might be from her current heart throb.

Just as often, though, the phone was likely to remain stubbornly silent and she would go through the agony of waiting for the call that never came. Popular songs, from the oldie All Alone by the Telephone to the current Please Let It Be Him, faithfully reflect this feminine anguish over the least vulnerable of double standards: the male’s prerogative to make the advances, telephonic or otherwise.

That’s all behind us wives and mothers now, thank goodness. But the trill of a telephone still has the power to raise an echo, however faint, of the love-hate feelings we once had for that unreliable go-between. We’d be utterly lost without our phones, not just because they’re a great convenience, but because we have a strong, if ambivalent, attachment to them.

THE TELEPHONE AS PET

Most of the time our feelings of fondness for the gadget win out. McLuhan suggests that children and teenagers best express the personal nature of the telephone. They treat it as a kind of animate thing, a pet, fondling the cord and embracing the receiver with obvious affection and involvement. But grown-up women, too, often betray their emotional attachment in similar ways.

For a woman, a phone is a means for exercising her special talents. Women tend to be more verbal than men; on the average, they talk at an earlier age and learn new words more quickly. They are also more concerned with interpersonal relationships—analyzing human behavior, sympathizing, criticizing or just plain gossiping—and are more sensitive to nuances of feeling and behavior. Men tend to be interested, primarily, in what people do; women, in why they do it—a subject that calls for a lot more palaver.

At the same time, a woman’s role in the home cuts her off from direct contact with much of the outside world, especially when her children are young. So she makes up for it by using her telephone as an extension of herself, as a vehicle for social chitchat, for catching up with the local news, giving and receiving moral support— the kind of conversation her husband’s involved in all day at his work (without even noticing it), but which —if it weren’t for the phone—she’d be largely deprived of.

There’s another thing men forget when they complain about phone bills and that is it’s usually the wife’s job to maintain friendly contacts with her husband’s family as well as her own. That’s no small task, and the woman who prefers just to pick up the phone rather than carry on a never-ending correspondence can hardly be blamed. (Incidentally, two-thirds of all longdistance calls from home phones are made by women.) But women’s love affairs with the telephone are hardly one long idyll. There are calls from salesmen who won’t take no for an answer, invitations they’d just as soon duck, umpteen fund-raising appeals. Increasingly, too, these days women are bothered by anonymous calls from weird, sick people who derive pleasure from shocking others with obscene conversation.

Unless you resort to an unlisted number (a device, incidentally, as popular with status seekers and bill dodgers as with those who need protection), you are more or less at the mercy of anybody with a dime. The phone is a great invader of privacy.

All this, together with the fact that a phone can be the bearer of bad news as well as good, helps to account for our mixed feelings toward Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. In addition, a telephone can actually create an intense feeling of loneliness, for, by remaining silent though connected, potentially, to all the world, it seems to mock the person whom no one cares enough about to call—at least just then.

All the same, the Bell people don’t have to worry. Women are no more likely to desert their telephones than their husbands, and men had just better get used to the idea!

Dolls Dance to Radio Music

FROM Germany comes the latest radio novelty. It is a platform upon which a group of dolls dance to the tune of music issuing from your radio receiver.

The device is a mystery until you understand the dance platform is caused to vibrate by means of a small needle which connects with a headphone, as illustrated in the accompanying drawing.

This headphone is connected up with your radio receiver, so that the same current sounds the music and excites the dancers. The effect of the contrivance is extremely fascinating.

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“I’ve just had my eyes opened… to the fact that some of our business problems were really communications problems!”

An active business is constantly changing. It broadens its products, expands its market, hires more people, gains more customers, faces more competition. And with these changes come problems.

A lot of those problems involve communications . . . because communicating is vital to nearly all business operations.

How do you spot those problems? How do you know if and where you need better communications?

Simple. You call in a Bell System Communications Consultant. He does a thorough, expert study of your operations and gives you a full report and recommendation. The analysis costs you nothing.

Try it. Just call your Bell Telephone Business Office and ask for the services of a Communications Consultant.

Bell System
American Telephone and Telegraph Co. and Associated Companies

Radio Speaker Like Chandelier

LOUD speakers which are placed in or on top of your receiving set cabinet are now being supplanted by a new amplifier that hangs from the ceiling like a beautiful metal chandelier.

The new amplifier is made up of a number of tone tubes which not only amplify the sounds but also give musical notes a rich tone. Each tube tones one note. Any electrical connection may be used between receiving set and chandelier.

No-finger dialing

It’s here at last—relief for your throbbing dialing finger. Just slip this plastic card into Bell Labs’ experimental dialer phone and the number is dialed automatically. The card could also be used to transmit information over telephone lines to computers, or even to check bank balances.

down to the last component SONY CB-901 spells quality

SONY
RESEARCH MAKES THE DIFFERENCE

Unlike ordinary Citizens Band transceivers, there are certain distinct advantages in owning the SONY CB-901 fully transistorized unit. One of the most important is the separate speaker and microphone, rather than the combined speaker-microphone found in other sets. This means greater ease in operating and superior clarity in transmission and reception. Components in the SONY are designed and manufactured by SONY itself, rather than bought on the open market. This includes—most importantly—the 9 transistors. From raw materials to finished product. SONY quality control watches its components, to make certain only the finest pos- sible parts are used. But undoubtedly the most significant advantage is the SONY reputation for quality, gained in years of pioneering leadership in the field of transistorized electronics. Powered by 8 penlite cells, with push-to-talk control, telescoping whip antenna, range of up to 6 miles, and earphone for private listening, the SONY CB-901 operates where others fail. Including batteries, leather case. $149.95 per pair.

SONY CORPORATION OF AMERICA 514 Broadway, New York 12, N.Y.

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What the Sputniks Said

Russian scientists disclose how radio waves travel from their satellites to earth

By A. J. Steiger

Radio LISTENERS who tracked the earth-circling travels of Sputnik I have reported new discoveries in short-wave propagation, including a round-the-world echo, according to preliminary findings published in a recent issue of Radio, a Russian popular electronics journal.

What the Sputniks discovered about prospects for using solar power to operate space vehicle instruments is also discussed in the Moscow journal. These reports on Russia’s pioneer space vehicles’ discoveries, the first to be published, are translated here.

Propagation Conditions. “Preliminary results of reception of Sputnik I radio signals,” writes Prof. A. Kazantsev, Doctor of Technical Sciences, in Radio, “show that in the 15-meter wave band these signals were received at very great distances, far surpassing the distance of direct visibility and in a number of cases reaching 10, 000 kilometers. Very valuable material on possible ways of short-wave propagation can be derived from study of the data on long-distance reception of these signals.

“It will be recalled that the satellite orbit’s perigee (its lowest point) was in the northern hemisphere and its apogee (highest point) was in the southern hemisphere. The apogee’s altitude reached about 1000 kilometers above the earth’s surface. In the southern hemisphere, therefore, the satellite traveled above the principal layer of the ionosphere, layer F2, which conditions short-wave reflection.

“Concerning the northern hemisphere, especially interesting short-wave propagating conditions were created. At certain intervals Sputnik I was above the F2 layer of maximum ionization, at others below it, and at certain times close to the maximum.

“When Sputnik I was above layer F2, then passing from above through the mass of the ionosphere, the radio waves were reflected from the earth’s surface and propagated further by single or multiple reflection from layer F2 in those areas where its critical frequency had sufficiently high values (Fig. 1).

“It is also possible that radio waves coming into the ionosphere from above at a sloping angle are considerably refracted and therefore penetrate into an area outside the bounds of direct geometric visibility (Fig. 2).

“When Sputnik I was below layer F2 (Fig. 3), and approached an observation point from a global area lighted by the sun, the radio signals on the 15-meter wave band could come from the satellite to a point of reception, after going through consecutive reflections from layer F2 and the earth’s surface, and then through direct visibility.”

Limited Reception. “If the satellite, after passing over the observation point, moved away into an unlighted area of the globe, signal reception ceased in a relatively short distance, depending on limits of visibility.

“Non-symmetrical reception conditions were also observed. When the satellite was close to layer F2 of maximum ionization, then especially favorable conditions might develop for the formation of radio-wave conducting channels able to propagate radio waves over very long distances (Fig. 4).

“There is evidence, in fact, that along with satellite signals which reached the observation point by the shortest route, signals were sometimes received that had traveled around the globe (round-the-world radio echo). One of the USSR’s most skillful radio amateurs, Yu. N. Prozorskiy of Moscow, on October 8 at 0007-0008 hours recorded the reception of such a round-the-world radio echo in the 15-meter wave band.

“Concerning signals in the 7.5-meter wave band, as far as can be judged at present, they were as a rule received in the limits of direct visibility, although in certain cases owing to high values of daytime critical frequencies of the F2 layer, this wave could be propagated also outside direct visibility.

“A conclusion can be drawn as to precisely what way radio-wave propagation occurred after correlation has been established between the altitudes of Sputnik I and the real altitudes of the F2 layer at one and the same moment, and analysis of the propagation conditions.”

Sun’s Radiation. Discussing preliminary findings of Sputnik II with respect to solar radiation in outer space, Russian Academician A. I. Berg, leading Russian authority on space-flight electronics, wrote in Radio: “Of special interest for radio specialists was the data picked up by the second Soviet satellite on solar radiation in the short-wave band which has a direct effect on conditions in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

“During the course of more than a hundred years, scientists have been exploring the intensity and spectral composition of the radiant energy which falls on the earth from the sun, and have on this basis indirectly been attempting to determine what these magnitudes are for conditions outside the earth’s atmosphere.

“The most reliable data at present permit assuming that the density of the stream of the sun’s radiant energy, beyond the limits of the atmosphere, is equal to 1.4 kilowatt per square meter. In actinometry and meteorology, this magnitude is called the ‘solar constant.’ About 9% of this stream falls on the ultraviolet part of the solar spectrum, about 40% on the visible part, and 51% on the far red and infrared parts of the sun’s spectrum.

“At the earth’s surface, with the sun standing at an altitude of 30° above the horizon, the density of the stream of solar energy is considerably less owing to the dispersion and absorption of solar energy by the atmosphere. It amounts to not more than 30 to 35% of the stream density beyond atmospheric limits and is differently distributed. Only 2 to 3% of it falls in the spectrum’s ultraviolet part, 44% in the visible spectrum, and 54% in spectral heat rays.

“Making these data more precise, particularly the direct measurement of stream density of the sun’s radiant energy, i.e., the solar constant beyond atmospheric limits, will make it possible to determine accurately the sun’s effective temperature and density of the radiant energy stream emitted by a unit of solar surface. Precise measurement here is of interest to astrophysics first of all, but it is of more than [theoretical] importance.”

Battery Requirements. “If a transistor solar battery of 1 square meter in area be constructed and faced toward the sun even with the accuracy of a 30° angle, then as might be expected this surface will be exposed to solar power of the order of 1 kilowatt. With 10% battery efficiency in conversion of solar energy to electricity, the output of such a solar battery surface might be expected to reach 100 watts of electric power.

“But if it be assumed that a satellite flying at a great height is exposed to the sun’s rays approximately two-thirds of its orbit circuit time around the earth, then the solar battery can be expected to produce 100 watt-hours of energy. However, to secure such conditions, the spectral characteristics of the transistor battery must be close to the above-indicated frequency distribution of solar energy, especially in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum, and, moreover, such a battery must operate on an optimum load.

“Unfortunately, the materials presently known that will permit creating batteries that possess high internal resistance are complex and cumbersome. A much lower-magnitude of electric energy should therefore be expected. But even this would nevertheless have great importance as a possible alternate way of powering space vehicle measuring instruments—a solar battery, for example, used in combination with an ordinary or storage battery.” —

It seems impossible today… but it will be so tomorrow!

Our entire resources are at the command of our National Government… we are doing our utmost to fulfill the demands of our various military services by supplying precision- built radio communications equipment.

HARVEY-WELLS COMMUNICATIONS
Are Helping to Win the War

HARVEY-WELLS Communications inc

HEADQUARTERS
For Specialized Radio Communications Equipment
SOUTHBRIDGE, MASS.

Call Indicator for Telephone
THE numbers dialed on automatic telephones can now be recorded on a call indicator device invented by William Green-berg of Portland, Ore. In the center of the regular telephone dial is a space where the numbers being dialed are reproduced, showing what number is being called, and warning immediately of any error. Pressing a small button at the top of the device clears the figures for the next call.