Anybody listening outside the door of our overseas communications room around six o'clock in the evening might think that we had trapped a hornet in a rain barrel. That angry noise is, however, the voice of our London "talker" coming in over the transatlantic radio telephone at some 300 words a minute.

"Voice radio" is not new to the U.S. press, but it has still to be widely adopted. The New York Herald Tribune has used it for almost a decade to speed up the foreign news traffic from its correspondents abroad. We began using it during the war for the same reason. With us it generally works this way: when one of our correspondents has written the story we asked him to get, he turns it over to a professional talker who chants it as fast as he can into a radio transmitter. At this end we record his words on film, disk or wire recorders from which the story is transcribed for the editorial department.

"Voice radio" is only a symbol of the technological revolution taking place in world communications. Cable, radio and telephone companies are involved in a fundamental reconstruction of their facilities. World War II increased their traffic tremendously, and their need now is to handle more words more swiftly and directly. The worldwide communications network woven by the U.S. Armed Forces during the war has helped considerably. It went a long way toward standardizing communications procedures and equipment throughout the world, and it left a great deal of automatic equipment on location on five continents.

One interesting gadget now being installed in communications companies' offices the world over is the automatic teletype printer--a kind of typewriter-substitute for the time-honored telegrapher's key. You can type out a message on the keyboard, have it automatically transmitted overseas by radio or cable circuits to come out in print on a teletype at the other end.

The installation of these teletypes--especially radio teletypes--around the world is of great significance to the U.S. press, or to anyone interested in faster, more direct overseas communications. For one thing, these machines do away with several time-consuming operations, such as having to transcribe messages from Morse code into words. They also promise a solution to one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in overseas communication: the job of getting the message from the office of the communications company in, say, Bombay, to TIME'S Bombay office. In most cases delivery is now in the hands of local officials, and it may take from one hour to three days.

If all goes well, U.S. communications companies expect to short circuit this obstacle by installing teletype printers in the home office of any U.S. firm or news periodical, with reciprocal teletypes in each of its offices or bureaus abroad, so that both can communicate directly with each other in typed English at a moment's notice.

Although this system has been common in the U.S. for some time, its application between continents has obvious world-shrinking aspects. For U.S. editors it advances the exciting prospect of getting world news to readers at home almost as quickly as domestic news. For TIME, the prospect is doubly exciting: not only will U.S. readers get their foreign news more completely and swiftly, but TIME'S news of the U.S. and the world will be speeded to the readers of its foreign editions all over the world.

Cordially,

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