Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 1902. Wireless Telegraphy.

Manawatu Herald, 8 April 1902, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 1902. Wireless Telegraphy.

In McClure’s Magazine, there appears an able account of what Marconi has done, and, how he has done it. The paper deserves the widest publicity so that readers of the doings of Marconi may get some faint grasp of the facts which has caused him to follow up and investigate, leading to the successful results of communicating through space. In its bare outlines, Marconi’s system of telegraphy consists of setting in motion, by means of a transmitter, certain electric waves which, passing through ether, are received on his receiving apparatus. The explanation of ether is that it is mysterious, unseen, colourless, odourless, inconceivable rarefied something which is supposed to fill all apace. It has been compared to a jelly in which the stars and planets are set like cherries. About all we know of it is that it has waves—that the jelly may be made to vibrate in various ways. Etherio vibrations of certain kinds give light; other kinds give heat; others electricity. Experiments have shown that if the ether vibrates at the inconceivable swiftness of 400 billions of waves a second we see the colour red, if twice as fast we see violet, if more slowly—perhaps 280 millions to the second, and less—we have the Hertz waves used by Marconi in his wireless telegraphy experiments. Ether waves should not be confounded with air waves. Electricity is only another name for certain vibrations in ether. We say that electricity 4 flows ’ in a wire, but nothing really passes except an etheric wave, for the atoms composing the wire, as well as the air and the earth, and even the hardest substances, are all afloat in ether. Vibrations, therefore, started at one end of the wire travel to the other.

Electrical waves have long been harnessed by the use of wires for sending communications; in other words, we have had wire telegraphy. But the ether exists outside of the wire as well as within; therefore, having the ether everywhere, it must be possible to produce waves in which it will pass anywhere, as wall as through mountains as over seas, and if these waves can be controlled, they will evidently convey messages as easily and as certainly as the ether within the wires. The waves which come from the transmitter are too weak to operate an ordinary telegraph instrument, they however possess strength enough to draw the little particles of silver and nickle in the coherer together in a continuous metal path, which becomes a good conductor for electricity, and a current from a battery near at hand rushes through, operates a Morse instrument, and causes it to point a dot or a dash ; then a little* tapper, actuated by the same current, strikes against the coherer, the particles of metal are jarred apart, or ‘decohered,’ becoming instantly a poor conductor, and thus stopping the strong current from the home battery. The system of ‘ tuning,’ as the inventor calls it, the construction of a certain receiver so that it will respond only to the message sent by a certain transmitter. He has so' constructed a receiver that it responds only to a certain transmitter. That is, if the transmitter is radiating 800,000 vibrations to a second, the corres- j ponding receiver will take only 800,Qfjo - ;iv ..i; Jn the same • wa.), a iamiiiac tumag-fork will re-1 spend only to another taning-fork

having exactly the same ‘ tune,’ or number of vibrations per second.

Mr Marconi informed his interviewer that since his experiments in Newfoundland have been successful the time when the messages would be regularly flashing between Europe and America was much nearer than most people realised. One of the projects which he hoped soon to accomplish was to communicate between England and New Zealand. If the electric waves follow the curvature of the earth, as the Newfoundland experiments indicate, he sees no reason why he should not send signals 6,000 or 10,000 miles as easily as 2,000.