Communication Superhighways

Because of advances in communication, it has been said that more progress has been made in science and general living conditions in the last fifty years than in all the thousands of years preceding. Part of this is due to transportation improvements in all divisions--land, water, and air. Today, auto trips from New York to Chicago in about fifteen hours demonstrate strikingly what a big advance turnpikes make in surface travel. Such thoroughfares are important for the trucking industry, too, and government is pushing superhighway construction all over the country. On these highways traffic has exceeded all estimates, thus proving their value. The telephone is one of the important parts of the communication art which has contributed so much to our way of living. In its early days, amplification became a necessity for extending the talking distances, and fifty years ago the birth of the electron tube made this practical, as well as ushering in the electronic art which gave us our profession. And this tube, by the process of modulation, led to carrier systems, stacking up many individual channels on single transmission lines that became highways of communication. This was a big advance, greatly reducing the cost and increasing the amount of long distance traffic.