Fences Have Ears

Astatic Microphone Laboratory, Inc. (of Youngstown, Ohio) was puzzled when Du Pont gave it orders, with a high Government priority, for numbers of sensitive phonograph pickups. Astatic Microphone was still more surprised to find out that Du Pont engineers were putting the phonograph needles not on phonograph records but against factory fences, relaying the wires' vibrations to amplifiers. So Asiatic's engineers redesigned their pickups to make them more compact and weatherproof. Du Pont last fortnight announced the result: fences (equipped with five pickups to the mile) which can catch a wren's song or the sighing wind, and relay the sounds to a watchman five miles away. These pastoral effects, however, are usually filtered out; what the pickups are after are such contact noises as climbing, tunneling, wire-snipping and other signs of sabotage and trespass. Result: as good a watch in fog, blackout, darkness and storm as could be maintained by guards standing elbow to elbow.

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