A Review of Radio Communication in the Fixed Services for the Year 1935

International communication has been bettered by the opening of eight radiotelegraph and of nine radiotelephone direct circuits. The first around-the-world two-way telephone conversation took place this year in New York over wire to San Francisco, by radio to Java, by radio to Amsterdam, by wire to London and by radio to New York, a total distance of 23,000 miles. Many nations improved their national point-to-point radio communications. In the United States five cities were added to the national networks. The Pan American Airways completed a network of eleven stations in Alaska and built a chain of stations across the Pacific Ocean. To make their installations at Midway and Wake, particularly the latter, an uninhabited island, many difficulties were overcome; for commercial circuits of relatively short length, ultra-short waves were used. The value of these wavelengths for emergency installations was illustrated by their use in the bridging of a forty-mile gap created by the hurricane of September 2, 1935 in the wire-telephone-line circuit between Miami and Key West. General advantage was taken of the technical advances in the art to install improved equipment. The study of the ionosphere continued. John H. Dellinger of the National Bureau of Standards was able recently to associate a fading phenomena which recurs in fifty-four days with the rotation of the sun.