The high hopes that were entertained for the transoceanic telephone as an instrument of peace have not been fulfilled, according to Raymond Gram Swing, noted American radio commentafor, writing in "This Week," New York.
'A dozen years ago—just before the rise of dictatorships as a menace to peace—many believed that the problems of the world could be solved if only a few men came together and talked things out. And the transoceanic telephone, which then had just been given to the world, was heralded as a new, better and quicker way of settling international problems. The cable still holds its old supremacy for diplomatic communications. Today the wireless telephone is not as secret as it could be. The voice crossing the ocean can be perfectly gar-vied, and with such thoroughness and skill that ao eavesdropper, even with the best ungarbung instruments, stands more than an infinitesimal.chance of straightening out the speech and making it intelligible.
But the secrecy is only in the ether between radio control rooms, and not at the switchboards and beyond, Transoceanic state telephone talks, after they have been unscrambled and relayed by land wire, are regularly listened to by the secret services of foreign governments. But this does not preclude the use of the telephone for important state communications. A man in Washington and one in Europe or Asia who now each other intimately can say things over "ne telephone and, by using innuendo and jargon, convey meanings that would evade any secret service listener. But the practice is beset by too many dangers to be comfortable for diptomatic use, Telephonic Speed Rather Than Intimacy So the telephone is used in diplomacy for speed rather than intimacy. If events occur that require immediate diplomatic action, they will be telephoned. Washington will call up a European or Asiatic capital, or the other way round, But what of tomorrow? Once state departments and overseas embassies instal receiving apparatus of their own, the transoceanic telephone will beat the cable in every respect. The deficiency of secrecy today is not with the telephone engineers but with the system whereby speech is unscrambled and passed through land wires, where the home government or its secret service agents can tap it. It would not cost very much for each embassy to maintain its own wireless telephonic transmitters and receivers—providing the home government raised no oblections.
The science of scrambling or garbling speech has reached such a point that it vies with the best codes. The simplest method is to invert the Voice. High tones are made low and low tones high. A scale sung going up will be heard coming down. Speech is changed into a weird but nevertheless consistent language.
Here is the way "Mary had a little lamb" sounds when scrambled:
Noyl hob oh ylippey yond Heezz fludez yes your oz sway Umb ad jew yahrr thob novi yump Thoo yond yez theer pee gay There are many forms of garbling. Speech can be cut into chunks. Then the chunks can be juggled about. For a while they can be run in one arrangement, then in another. They also can be spread out or contracted. And various methods of garbling can be used at the same time.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.