Focused Radio

Dr. Frederick August Kolster, who has contributed as much to radio as any man now alive, has invented yet another radio device, a machine for shooting a radio beam at whatever point on earth he pleases. His previous inventions have been the invaluable radio compass, the radio fog signal system, the mobile radio beacon to protect ships in fog, the decremeter which measures wave lengths and dampens radio oscillations, the Kolster radio receiving set. He created the Bureau of Standard's radio section and is its chief. He is chief research engineer of the Federal Telegraph Co. and its allied companies.*

News of Dr. Kolster's latest invention developed last week as work went on to set up an experimental station near his Palo Alto, Cal., home.

The transmitter consists of a parabolic reflector, at whose butt end is an enormous vacuum tube. The tube sets like the heating element of the common portable electric heaters. The heater's reflector is basin-like. Dr. Kolster's radio reflector is so vast (20 feet across the rim) that it resembles a funnel.

Its shape, size and attachments (so far undescribed) all concentrate the short waves from the transmitting bulb in a straight, narrow beam, much like the beam from a search light.

By lay supposition, such a straight-going beam would be tangential to the earth's curvature and so never reach distant earth points where radio stations may be. By scientific theory, two possibilities exist. The Kolster beam may be skillfully aimed at the Heaviside Layer/- and be reflected down to its receiving station, just as a pool player bounces a ball from cushion to pocket. The other possibility is that gravity will drag the beam to the proper curve of the earth.

Dr. Kolster's beam differs from Guglielmo Marconi's. In the Marconi system a number of wires at each side of the sending antennae keep the waves from spraying sideways, but not from up-&-down. It is not properly a beam at all. It is a very narrow sheet of short waves that go around the earth like a ruff. They suffer the same troubles, in less degree, that the diffuse long waves do.

-Kolster Radio Corp., Federal-Brandes Inc. (wireless communication equipment). International Telephone & Telegraph Co. recently bought control of Federal Telegraph. Hence it profits from Dr. Kolster's devices and knowledge.

/-A theorical envelope of the earth's atmosphere, estimated to be 350 miles out. That it exists is the best current explanation for radio static, fading and silent pockets. Radio waves spray out from sending stations. Supposedly some hug the earth on their way to receiving sets; others reach the sets tardily by reflection from the Heaviside Layer. Probably the sprayed waves, going by the two paths, interfere with each other. One idea is that the Layer lies close to earth at the two Poles. The Byrd Antarctic expedition took along a Westinghouse ossilograph to find out.