Electronics: The Room-Size World

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Later Birds. According to Rosen, who makes no secret of his glowing euphoria, Early Bird's remarkable success is only a small beginning. In the works at Hughes are much-improved successors: HS-(for Hughes Satellite) 304 and HS-307, both of which will have more communication channels, more solar cells to give more power, and a better nudging system to keep them on station. Instead of using hydrogen peroxide to generate high pressure steam, they will decompose water electrically into hydrogen and oxygen and combine the two gases in delicate explosions to counteract drifting. HS-304 will have 1,200 voice channels instead of Early Bird's 240. HS-307 can have as many as 50,000 channels.

Among triumphant Hughes men, impressive dollar figures are familiar talk these days. HS-304, they say, will cost $2,500,000, weigh 172 Ibs., and can be put on station by a Delta rocket for $3,900,000. Four HS-304s can be clustered on a single Atlas ($6,500,000), and put on different stations around the earth. HS-307, weighing 770 Ibs., will need an Atlas for each launch. By comparison, say the Hughes economists, the new telephone cable that

A.T. & T. is about to lay between New Jersey and France will have only 128 channels and cost $56 million.

Lag & Echo. Despite such advantages, all communications experts are far from ready to agree that synchronous satellites are about to take over the world's long-distance telephoning and TV. For one thing, the round trip from earth to Early Bird hovering over the Equator is at least 44,600 miles, and radio waves, which move with the speed of light, take three-tenths of a second to go the distance. Smaller delays in landlines add to the lag. This makes no difference for TV and other one-way transmissions, but telephoning, say some critics, may sound disjointed with an extra one-half second between remarks and replies.

What effect this will have on the public can hardly be decided by laboratory tests. President Joseph V. Charyk and members of his board of directors who have already used Early Bird for phone conversations, claim that they cannot detect any time lag. But the lag is there, and it may affect some telephone talkers more than others. Deliberate speakers who listen politely until the other party has put a period on each spoken sentence will have no trouble, but impulsive talkers who constantly interrupt and throw in a word here and there may have difficulty.

Electronic echoes are another problem. They have been all but eliminated over the longest landlines, but at synchronous-satellite distances they may be annoying.*The public's decision will not be known until masses of ordinary telephone callers get real, unstaged experience with time lag and echoes in their talk.

Spaced & Random. Lower-flying satellites on orbits about 6,000 miles above the earth are still in the running as worldwide communicators, and two formidable teams, A.T. & T. allied with RCA, and Thompson Ramo Wooldridge working with International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., are hard at work on them. Spaced at even intervals around their orbits, twelve such birds will ensure that two or more will always be in line of sight from ground stations spotted around the earth.