It was Eckert of the ENIAC team who had suggested the use of a delay line to store the pulses of an electronic computer.
ENIAC小组的埃克特提出，使用延迟线可以存储电子计算机的脉冲信号。
There were several ideas involved.
但这里面存在几个问题。
The pipe, or delay line, would have to cope with pulses separated by only a millionth of a second, and to transmit them unsmudged.
管道，或者说延迟线，需要接收百万分之一秒的脉冲信号，并让它们原封不动地进行传输。
It was also necessary that the pulses should be stored not just for a thousandth of a second,
此外，脉冲不只是存储千分之一秒，
but indefinitely, which required recirculating them through the delay line again and again.
而是需要永久存储，这就要让它一遍又一遍地在延迟线内反复循环。
If this were done naively then the pulses would soon become too blurred to be distinguishable.
如果只是单纯地让它回流，那么脉冲很快就会变得非常模糊，以致无法识别。
So electronics had to be devised to detect the existence of a (somewhat degenerated) pulse arriving at the end of the line,
所以，必须设计一种电子装置，来检测到达末端的（已经略有衰减的）脉冲，
and to start off a clean pulse at the beginning—the electronic equivalent of the relay used as a telegraph repeater.
然后从发端重新发送一个干净的脉冲。这个装置有点像电报系统的中继器，
This would have to be combined with the facility to accept pulses from the rest of the computer and to feed them back in as required.
它在计算机内部接收脉冲，再根据要求转发出去。
It was well known that it was advantageous to use a medium other than air for the sound waves, and mercury was already being employed in radar applications.
众所周知，空气不是传播声波的好介质。雷达系统中使用的介质是水银，
This appropriate element, was to haunt the developments of the next few years.
这种元素，将贯穿接下来几年的发展。