THE WIRELESS EXPERIMENTS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9996, 17 March 1910, Page 4

THE WIRELESS EXPERIMENTS.

Details of the remarkably successful experiments in wireless telegraphy conducted by Mr J. H. A. Pike, a 1 young Sydney enthusiast, by means of which, last Friday week, the first wireless message from New Zealand was received in Australia, are given by Sydney papers to hand. Mr Pike has a small private station, authorise 1 by the Government at Arncliffe, which is capable of receiving messages, but contains no means of replying. It was on February 27th that the New Zealand message was received. JH.M.S. Powerful was j moored in Auckland Harbour, and just before ten o'clock a faint shrill i note, characteristic of that made by the Powerful's spark, was detected.

Mr Pike had received her messages all the way across, long after the other warships at Sydney had lost her. His abilicy to hold the Powerful over a distance of 1,350 miles, Mr Pike says, is due to her new apparatus, which produces a magnificent spark—a high, clear note, which enables the signals to be heard through all the disturbances which are always present in the ether. As an evidence of tne high efficiency of Mr Pike's i apparatus, it is mentioned that when the P. and 0. steamer Malwa was 200 miles down the coast he could hear her calling up the warships m the harbour. The warships in their turn were calling up the liner, but neither of them could hear one another. Mr Pike heard both series of messages. It woutd seem as though ! the ether about Australian territory ] is literally throbbing with wireless [projections. "When Igo home at night," said Mr Pike, "I sit down and fit the receiver over my ears. After a few minutes, almost any night, I begin to pick up a message from somewhere. 1 have heard ships in every capital except Perth. On Thursday night I heard a signal. It was a wonderfully clear high note coming in the silence. It sounded like a tin whistle blown far off. That was H.M.S. Powerful, off the north of New Zealand, calling up H.M.S. Challenger. The Challenger was in Auckland. The next thing I caught was the Pioneer here in Sydney Harbour. She was saying that she could hear the Powerful. I picked up the Prometheus down in Melbourne—heard her quite plainly taking to a small ship in Bass Straits, asking her what sort of a passage she was having." Mr Pike supports with becoming modesty the honour i of having received the first New Zealand message in Australia, and i although he ascribes the major portion of his success to the great strength of H.M.S. Powerful's sending apparatus, he claims, with justice, that his detectors, which are of the crystalline type, and the most sensitive of their kind, have , contributed something to the note- , worthy result.