LIS 1 ENING-IN.
TILE rapid development of wireless telephony in America, while it is still being talked about in England, makes one feel somewhat impatient with the Post Office authorities, if indeed it is they who are to blame. The writer of a remarkable article in the August number of Scribner's describes how, eight years ago, at his home in Indiana, he installed a simple receiving-set and heard messages from stations in Virginia or Texas. Then he bought a vacuum-tube detector and was able to hear messages from steamers on the Atlantic or from the great station in New Jersey. The War interrupted his experiments, but he has resumed them with increasing success :— " Here we have sat in the little back bedroom in a house in Indiana and, with not even a wire extending beyond the lot, have gone to Detroit and Pittsburgh for a musical treat, heard the boys talking all over America, caught some of the chatter from the sea and the shore, set our watches by Naval Observa- tory time, taken a lesson in French direct from the Eiffel Tower, heard Panama and Hawaii, and a great chorus of others that we did not stop to identify."
To American readers this experience, marvellous in itself, doubtless seems a commonplace. For, according to Mr. A. Hyatt Verrill, the American author of Radio for Amateurs (Heinemann, 7s. 6d. net), there are over 700,000 receiving sets in use in the United States and over 15,000 sending stations have been licensed, and these numbers are increasing every week.
Wireless telephony, it is clear, cannot be very difficult to manage,.
and English people should be able to do as much with it as the Americans are doing if our officials would give the new invention free play. Mr. Verrill's book describes simply and clearly how anyone with a little knowledge of electricity may fit up receiving sets and even transmitting sets as well. He gives an elementary account of the theory and explains the working of the instru- ments. His illustrations are somewhat crude, but they are use- ful. Another American book, which will perhaps be of more use to the ordinary man who is content to buy the apparatus, is Radio Receiving for Beginners, by Rhey T. Snodgrass and Victor F. Camp (Macmillan, 3s. 6d. net). The authors define their terms as they go along and make the subject easily intel- ligible. Their illustrations, too, are very good. They show that wireless telephony is still in its early stages and offers abundant opportunities even to the amateur. As for the cost, in America, " someone has said that your apparatus should cost a dollar per mile of effective operation, from fifteen upwards." That is to say, a receiving set which cost £3 would take messages originating within fifteen miles, and so on. But nothing so cheap as that has been offered to the English public.
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