Business: Communication

What, people wondered, would the great Postal Telegraph-Commercial Cable system, with its present monopoly of transpacific wire communication, do about the bigger & better Pacific cable, announced in project last fortnight (TIME, Aug. 15) by the Western Union Co.? The Commercial cable from San Francisco, via Honolulu to Shanghai can handle only 100 letters per minute. The proposed Western Union cable will carry 2,500 letters per minute. But it did not seem likely that Commercial would install improved equipment over the 9,100-mile route to meet its competitor. To do so would cost Commercial perhaps 16 millions and the job might not be finished before Western Union was ready to operate in the field.

From Clarence H. Mackay, head of the Postal-Telegraph-Commercial Cable interests, came no answer. He was shooting grouse in Scotland (see p. 11). And from his subordinates came no official statement. Nevertheless a reliable report got about last week that the Mackay interests would meet the Newcomb Carlton interests (Western Union) with measures never before adopted by a U. S. cable company with radio. For perhaps five millions, estimators said, the Mackay system could and would set up a “beam” radio service similar to the Marconi Co.’s present, and the Radio Corp.’s proposed, transatlantic services. The Mackay radio system across the Pacific would be in competition with the Radio Corp.’s present service as far west as Japan, but, said rumor, it would not be operated essentially as a radio competitor but as a cable adjunct, a swift air channel for excess traffic which the cable cannot at present handle without delay, and as a cable auxiliary in case of submarine breakdowns.