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TELEPHONY AND TELEGRAPHY ON THE SAME WIRES SIMULTANEOUSLY.

For the last eighteen months a system has been in active operation in Belgium whereby the ordinary telegraph wires are used to convey telephonic communications at the same time that they are being employed in their ordinary work of transmitting telegraphic messages.  This system, the invention of M. Van Rysselberghe, whose previous devices for diminishing the evil effects of induction in the telephone service will be remembered, has lately been described in the Journal Telegraphique of Berne, by M.J.  Banneux of the Belgian Telegraph Department.  Our information is derived from this article and from others by M. Hospitalier.

The method previously adopted by Van Rysselberghe, to prevent induction from taking place between the telegraph wires and those running parallel to them used for telephone work, was briefly as follows:  The system of sending the dots and dashes of the code—­usually done by depressing and raising a key which suddenly turns on the current and then suddenly turns it off—­was modified so that the current should rise gradually and fall gradually in its strength by the introduction of suitable resistances.  These were introduced into the circuit at the moment of closing or opening by a simple automatic arrangement worked exactly as before by a key.  The result, of the gradual opening and gradual closing of the circuit was that the current attained its full strength gradually instead of suddenly, and died away also gradually.  And as induction from one wire to another depends not on the strength of the current, but on the rate at which the strength changes, this very simple modification had the effect of suppressing induction.  Later Van Rysselberghe changed these arrangements for the still simpler device of introducing permanently into the circuit either condensers or else electro-magnets having a high coefficient of self-induction.  These, as is well known to all telegraphic engineers, retard the rise or fall of an electric current; they fulfill the conditions required for the working of Van Rysselberghe’s method better than any other device.

Having got thus far in his devices for destroying induction from one line to another, Van Rysselberghe saw that, as an immediate consequence, it might be concluded that, if the telegraph currents were thus modified and graduated so that they produced no induction in a neighboring telephone line, they would produce no sound in the telephone if that instrument were itself joined up in the telegraph line.  And such was found to be case.  Why this is so will be more readily comprehended if it be remembered that a telephone is sensitive to the changes in the strength of the current if those changes occur with a frequency of some hundreds or in some cases thousands of times per second.  On the other hand, currents vibrating with such rapidity as this are utterly incompetent to affect the moving parts of telegraphic instruments, which cannot at the most be worked so as to give more than 200 to 800 separate signals per minute.