"THE NEW WIRELESS"
(NON-METALLIC CONDUCTORS)
By Newcomb Weisenberger

The Communication Highway is really, in a ditch, beside the road!

Ever since Samuel Morse's telegraph wire was strung across the Country we have used electrical conductors for voice communication, power grids and alarm systems. The best of metals made the best conductors-those rich with electrons in their molecular structure.

Gold, silver, copper and aluminum were used with copper being the best metal for the cost. All metals are expensive to find and extract. They are relatively rare when compared to many minerals found in the earth.

The new "Looking Glass"

Fused silica, glass, has from the first, become an efficient insulator, (with few electrons exposed.) Inexpensive, strong and readily cast, glass separated radio antennas from the ground. Glass safely isolated high voltages and prevented power leaks from high-tension lines. Glass is surprisingly resilient. It resists fatigue, where metals fail. It has become both a paradox and a mind-stretch to accept glass as a medium for signal propagation! We can't ignore the fact that it is happening now.

Very long extrusions of glass are being laid into trenches across the nation. These bundles of strands are made to be coherent. That is, the strands are kept in position, so that at both ends of the cable, a given strand will appear in the same position relative to each of the others. This has the effect that when we illuminate a fiber end in Los Angeles, the other end in Boston will show a light. If it is at the upper left end here, the upper left end will be seen there.

Now we could flash code onto that single strand and without wires communicate with Boston. (The Globe is belted, around and around with multiple cables of glass.) If we use a cable of 525 by 525 fibers we can show a picture on the cable end with the quality of TV. Each end spot will be the same color or black and white as the original. With this big difference! We can send the whole picture at once! Your eye won't need to hold the various dots in memory, while we build the picture, one dot at a time! If we send some twelve pictures per second, you will think that the picture moves!

WAVEGUIDES

Here I want to demystify Wave Guides. (I am using a 6.6 grade vocabulary. This will be High School physics from the mid 30's.) First we will see that you are already familiar with waveguides. They are to be seen most everywhere. When you cup your hands to your mouth to yell, you are forming a wave-guide. When that yell is into a canyon and you hear an echo, that canyon too, is a waveguide. If you hear more than one echo, the original yell is being reflected repeatedly. The Islander, who picks up a dead conch shell, is holding a waveguide. The ancient shofer, (ram's horn) and the Swiss Alphorn are also waveguides. All are ready to shape the sound waves. Early steamships used speaking tubes. A simple open pipe ran from the bridge to the engine room. The audio pressure waves were literally funneled through the pipe to its end. It worked in both directions. (The sound waves reflected from the inside surfaces of the pipe and traveled through its length! (Clearly enough for voice recognition.)

I remember the Parents Day at my high school. The teacher asked me to set up the light box in the dark room. It was a simple wooden box with a small round window where light could fill it. The top was open to a stream of water. A small pipe let out a stream of water curving downward like a small waterfall. When the box was lighted and filled with water flowing out of the pipe, you could see an interesting display. In the darkened room, the light filled the stream and bent with it. The internal light carried by the water resembled neon tubing. If we used colored light, colored light filled the stream. The light repeatedly bounced off the inside surface of the tubular stream and exited at its end.

The exponential horn, used by early radio receivers, is an acoustic wave-guide. There is a waveguide in your kitchen microwave. A popular radio receiver uses a waveguide to provide a better sound from a small box.

A strand of glass fiber is an optical waveguide. The modulated light is carried efficiently as it repeatedly reflects off the inside surface of the glass. At last it arrives at its destination, at almost the speed of light! It travels under the oceans, over the mountains, bending its way as needed. Like water, it finds an easier path out the end than through the sides of the glass pipe. The glass that insulated us from ground is now buried in the ground, carries our signals as a flash of light!)

The old transmission line, that connected the KFI 50,000-watt transmitter to the 750-foot tower, used two spaced conductors inside the open frame of four parallel wires. This too was a waveguide, for low frequencies.

There are at least two recognized theories used to more precisely explain the 'light pipe'. [Please Look up Quantum and Traveling Wave theory to explore this further.] Expect that there will be some disagreement. Engineers have taken various positions. Some say that, the radiation of light is better explained by 'Quantum'. Some others will say that it takes both Theories! Note: There is some indication that electrical current flows mostly on the surface of solid metallic conductors as well. The old wireless and the new wireless are parts of the same spectrum.