Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 133, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 December 1909 — Wireless Telephone a Possibility Of Not Far Distant Future. [ARTICLE]

Wireless Telephone a Possibility Of Not Far Distant Future.

According to General James Allen, chief signal officer of the army, wireless telephony will be used not only in the army and navy, but by the general public within a few years. General Allen, who is an Indiana man, is devoting special attention to the progress inventors are making with the problem of transmitting articulate speech directly through the ait without intervening wires. The ariny appropriation bill of last yea): contained the following item: ' 1 “For the purchase and development of wireless telephone apparatus, $30,000.” This appropriation became available first of last July, and General Allen hopes to get some important results with it. Gongress will be asked at this session to appropriate a similar amount for the fiscal year beginning the first of next July. General Allen says that wireless telephony is today further advanced than wireless telegraphy was ten years ago. Quietly, but with business foresight the great telegraph companies which now do the wire business of this country are planning eventually to make use of the wireless system in handling the commercial and press business of the day. Of course, the companies do not intend to give up their wires until they have to; but they foresee that the time is not far distant when wires will have to be dispensed with, if competition is to be met. General Allen hopes to be able within the next year or two to demonstrate the practicability of the wireless telephone in the field. As soon as the experiments which are now being conducted at Norfolk and elsewhere are completed, some real tests—tests such as would have to be made in case of actual warfare—will be made. While the federal government is .keenly alive to the possibilities of wireless telephony, it is not displaying any more interest in the subject than are numerous capitalists, who are alive to the fact that the time is probably not far distant when the telephone business of the country, new as it is, will be revolutionized. The patent office is greatly interested in the developments from month to month and year to year. It has full knowledge of the spirited race between inventors to get hold of the real thing.