COMMUNICATION - NOW AND THEN

Communication was very much on the agenda for the 7^th January. The radio-telephone and the translating computer made their debut on this day. Now, just about everybody carries a cell/mobile telephone which also has the capacity to connect to the internet and any number of translating programs which will translate English into sixty five languages and back again. 

The 7^th January 1927 saw the first commercial radiotelephone service between the UK (London) and America (New York). 

In February 1926, engineers achieved two-way voice communication between two radio stations and a month later journalists gathered at the trunk exchanges in London and New York to take part in a demonstration of two-way voice communication. Finally, on 7th January 1927, the service opened with a call between Sir Evelyn Murray, the Secretary of the GPO and Walter S. Gifford, the president of AT&T, followed by calls between those subscribers who had booked calls for that day.

Initially this was just one circuit, with an average of 2000 calls per year.  The cost of calls was prohibitive; in 1928 the basic rate for calls to New York was reduced to £9 for 3 minutes' conversation.  The system was subject to atmospheric disturbance and fading, and at best had a limited number of frequencies available for circuits.

The Georgetown-IBM experiment was an influential demonstration of machine translation, which was performed during the 7^th January 1954. Developed jointly by the Georgetown University and IBM, the experiment involved completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. The demonstration took place at the New York headquarters of IBM.

Reports by journalists appeared the next and following days (many on the front page) and were syndicated to numerous other newspapers throughout the United States. The demonstration was also widely reported in the foreign press.

The newly invented computers were treated with much awe in those days. They were frequently referred to as ‘giant brains’ and ‘robots’, and so we find that typical headlines were “Electronic brain translates Russian”, “The bilingual machine”, “Robot brain translates Russian into King’s English”, and “Polyglot brainchild”. Each reporter had his own slant on the proceedings but there is enough similarity and agreement in the reports for us to gain a good impression of what took place. Many reports were based on IBM’s press release (IBM 1954); and many quoted it verbatim.