Technical terms are difficult to understand in this country, but America often helps us out of difficulties by her picturesque language. For instance, a “snooper in” is a person who listens to other people's conversations on the telephone. And “the trouble man” is an excellent name for the individual who investigates faults on a wire. It is the long-distance calls which appeal most strongly to our sense of the marvellous. Owing to our insular position the extension of the range of telephonic speech has always been a difficult engineering problem, as the insertion of a length of submarine or underground cable in a telephone circuit has a “choking” effect, and materially limits the distance over which speech is possible. In order to minimise this difficulty, which affects Great Britain so adversely, a cable treated with loading coils was laid in 1909 between Abbot's Cliff, Dover, and Cape Grisnez on the French coast. It is the resistance capacity and induction of a circuit which decides whether a long-distance conversation will be satisfactory or not, and the insertion of “loading coils” in a cable artificially increases the induction, thus increasing the volume and improving the quality of speech received at the end of a circuit in such a cable. There are sometimes difficulties in the maintenance of a cable in a busy waterway like the English Channel, as it is no uncommon occurrence for vessels to foul cables with their anchors, and sometimes even in lifting the anchor the cable is heaved to the surface. Everybody asks the question, “How far can I speak on the telephone?” In this country at least that will ultimately depend on the way the difficulties of the submarine cable are surmounted. You can talk in England to Paris and Brussels and many provincial towns in France and Belgium. The new cable has enabled telephonic communication to be made between Paris and Glasgow: Manchester can speak to Paris, Nottingham to Lyons, and Ipswich to Bordeaux. The engineers of the Post Office talk of the possibility of a conversation between London and Astrachan.