Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

by George Sutherland

In another direction the eagerness with which every advance in the telephone is hailed by the people may well offer an augury of rapid progress in the immediate future. In this department invention will aim just as much at simplification as at elaboration; and some of the pieces of domestic electrical apparatus universally used during the twentieth century will be astonishingly cheap.

The call to awake in the morning will, in cities and towns, be made by wireless telegraphy, which will also be used for the purpose of regulating the domestic clocks, so that if desired any suitable form of clock alarm may be used with the most perfect confidence. A tentative system of this kind has been adopted in connection with certain telephone exchanges, in which special officers are told off whose duty it is to call those subscribers who have paid the small fee covering the expense. These officers are required to time their intimations according to the previously expressed wishes of subscribers. This kind of service, as well as the regulation of the household clock, is eminently a department of domestic economy in which wireless telegraphy will prove itself useful, because it does not demand that a subscriber shall have gone to the expense of installing a wire to his house and of paying a rent or fee for the use of one.

The clock controlled by wireless telegraphy will doubtless undergo a rapid development from the time when it is first introduced. Practically the same principles which enable the electrician to utilise the "Hertzian waves," or ether vibrations, for the purpose of setting a clock right once a day, or once an hour, will permit of an impulse, true to time, being sent from the central station every second, or every minute, and when this has been accomplished it will be seen that there is no more use for the maintenance of elaborate clockworks at any place excepting the central station. The domestic clock will, in fact, become mainly a "receiver" for the wireless telegraphic apparatus, and its internal mechanism will be reduced, perhaps, to a couple of wheels, which are necessary to transmit the motion of a minute-hand to that which indicates the hours.

The fire-alarm of the future must be very simple and inexpensive in order to ensure its introduction, not only into offices and warehouses but also into shops and houses. The fire-insurance companies will very shortly awake to the fact that prompt telegraphic alarm in case of fire is worth far more than the majority of the prohibitions upon which they are accustomed to insist by way of rendering fires less likely. The main principles upon which the electric fire-alarm will be operated have already been worked out and partially adopted. In the system of fuses and cut-outs used in connection with electric lighting, the methods of preventing fire due to the development of excessive heat have been well studied. But simplification is particularly required in the case of those fire-alarms which are to be useful for giving intimation of a conflagration from any cause arising.

As the telegraphic and telephonic wires are extended so as to traverse practically all the streets of every city, the fire-insurance companies will find it to their advantage to promote a simple plan, depending on the use of a combustible thread passing round little pulleys in the corners of all the rooms and finally out to the front, where an electrical "contact-maker" is fixed, so that on the thread being burnt and broken at any point in its circuit, an electric message will be at once sent along the nearest wire to the fire-brigade station and a bell set ringing both inside and outside the premises.

Somewhat similar systems will be used for checking the enterprises of the burglar. The best protected safes of the future will be enmeshed in networks of wires encased in some material which will render it impossible to determine their positions from the outside. These wires will be so related to an electric circuit that the breaking of any one of them, at any part of its course, will have the effect of ringing a bell and giving warning at the police station, as well as at other places where potential thief-catchers may be on hand. For doors and windows very simple contact devices have already been brought out, but the principal objection to their general adoption arises from the fact that so very many houses remain unconnected with any telephone system which may be made available for calling the police. Even were all houses connected it is true that in some instances attempts might be made to cut the wires when a raid was in contemplation, but the risk of discovery in any such operation would prove a very powerful deterrent. In fact the telephone wire, more than any other mechanical device, is destined to aid in "improving" the burglar out of existence.

With the indefinite multiplication of telephone subscribers at very cheap rates, there will come a powerful inducement towards the invention of new appliances for rendering the subscriber independent of the attention of officers at any central exchange. The duty of connecting an individual subscriber with any other with whom he may desire to converse is, after all, a purely mechanical one, and eminently of a kind which, by a combination of engineering and electrical skill, may be quite successfully accomplished. In the apparatus which will probably be in use during the twentieth century, each subscriber will have a dial carrying on its face the names and numbers of all those with whom he is in the habit of holding communication. This will be his "smaller dial," and beside it will be another, intended for only occasional use, through which, by exercising a little more patience, he may connect himself with any other subscriber whatever. Corresponding dials will be fixed in the central office.

Under this system, when the subscriber desires to secure a connection, he moves a handle round his dial until the pointer in its circuit comes to the desired number. An electrical impulse is thus sent along the wire to the central station for every number over which the pointer passes, and the corresponding pointer or contact-maker at the central station is moved exactly in sympathy. When the correct number is reached the subscriber is in connection with the person with whom he desires to converse. If, however, the latter should be already engaged, a return impulse causes the bell of the first subscriber to ring. Of course the prime cost of installing such a system as this will be greater than in the case of the simple hand-connected telephones; but the two systems can be used conjointly, and the immense convenience, especially to large firms, of being able to go straight to the parties with whom they wish to communicate, will induce many of them to adopt the automatic apparatus as soon as it has been perfected.

Wireless telephony must come to the front in the near future, but at first for only very special purposes. The prospect of the profits that would be attendant on working up a business unhampered by the heavy capital charges which weigh upon the owners of telephone wires must stimulate inventive enterprise to a remarkable degree in this particular line. The main difficulty, however, in the application of the system to general purposes will lie in the need for an ingenious but simple means for enabling one subscriber to call another.

For this purpose probably the synchronised clock system already referred to will be found essential, each office or house being furnished with a timekeeper of this type kept in constant agreement with a central clock, and so arranged that only when the ethereal electrical impulse is given at a certain fixed point in the minute, will any particular subscriber's bell be rung. This may be effected by some such arrangement as a revolving drum, perforated at a different part of its periphery for each individual subscriber, and capable of permitting the electrical contact which makes a magnet and rings the bell only at the fraction of a moment when the subscriber's slot passes the pointer.