Straddling a shield wire, Ti crawls along a transmission line looking for everything from high grass to low trees.

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In 1874, Edison invented the quadruplex telegraph, which allowed the transmission of two signals in each direction down one wire.

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Helium-cooled superconductors like those found in MRI machines and the LHC cannot, however, compete with ordinary copper wire in more pedestrian applications, like transmission cables, where the advantages of superconductivity do not merit the enormous costs.

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Wall Street worries that ever more copper-wire customers will quit and switch to cellular, with its expensive transmission towers and subsidized handsets.

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Lucent's 30, 000 techies work on such advances as plastic fiber flexible enough to wire your home, a new over-the-air laser system for local optical transmission and routers with mind-boggling capacity.

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