THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602100003
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
The world was all agog back in 1919 over a ``vacuum valve,'' judging from a breathless story out of San Francisco and printed in The Virginian-Pilot and Norfolk Landmark.
The excitement was prompted by a technological breakthrough at the Moorhead Laboratories. I learned about it recently while scanning some newspaper microfilm at the Kirn Memorial Library in Norfolk.
What the California lab had perfected, the news account said, was a remarkably sensitive radio-wave device. The type of implement referred to in the story as a ``vacuum valve'' was, I presume, the type of electronic widget that I knew in Army radio school (some decades ago) and elsewhere as a ``vacuum tube.'' The term ``valve,'' however, did seem to persist in Britain, according to the dictionaries of today and going by my own recollection of the word the Royal Air Force people used in World War II when dealing with aircraft radios.
All this aside, and getting back to the l9l9 report, the hopeful new radio refinement was described as one that ``detects and records the ether waves with a distinctness and completeness unattained by any previous discovery.''
Actually the glowing public disclosure and predictions of usefulness seemed to have been somewhat after the fact, for there was this:
``A set was installed on the George Washington for the use of President Wilson on his historic voyage to France. The appliance has been used during the war on submarines, surface craft and airplanes. In fact, there is no limit to its adaptability, and it is said that its possibilities for long-distance telephoning are unlimited . . . radio telephone sets have been used commercially in Europe during the last two years.''
At one point the story mentioned placement of government orders for the new valves by both Britain and the United States and quoted the laboratory's Otis Moorhead:
``We could undoubtedly get messages from Mars if she would send out the wireless waves. A submarine, submerged 150 feet can get messages. There may come a time when, by means of the radio telephone, we can talk privately with people in South Africa or Australia.''
Such splendid forecasts that paragraph delivered about the future of radio-telephony, which is what the story seems really to have been about: a major piece of progress in the efficient melding of two inventions from late in the previous century, Bell's telephone and Marconi's wireless.
What really grabbed my attention, however, was the headline on the story, based on another optimistic forecast set forth in the piece:
PHONE IN AUTO
IS POSSIBILITY
Egad. If they only knew. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk. by CNB