WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY. 71 



suddenly broken down, and this action goes on at a high rate of 

 speed, causing a torrent of sparks in the neighboring circuit. The 

 medium between the two circuits is thereby submitted to rapid and 

 comparatively powerful impulses. The discovery of this and simi- 

 lar chemical or molecular interruptions marks an era in the his- 

 tory of the electrical transformer, and the hopes of further prog- 

 ress by means of them is far greater than in the direction of me- 

 chanical interruptions. 



We are still, however, unable to generate sufficiently power- 

 ful and sufficiently well-timed electrical impulses to make wire- 

 less telegraphy of great and extended use. Can we not hope to 

 strengthen the present feeble impulses in wireless telegraphy by 

 some method of relaying or repeating? In the analogous subject 

 of telephony many efforts have also been made to render the serv- 

 ice secret, and to extend it to great distances by means of relays. 

 These efforts have not been successful up to the present. "We still 

 have our neighbors' call bells, and we could listen to their messages 

 if we were gossips. The telephone service has been extended to 

 great distances — for instance, from Boston to Omaha — not by 

 relays, but by strengthening the blows upon the medium between 

 the transmitting circuit and the receiving one, just as we desire 

 to do in what is called wireless telegraphy, the apparatus of which 

 is almost identical in principle to that employed in telephony. The 

 individual call in telephony is not a success for nearly the same 

 reasons that exist in the case of wireless telegraphy. Perfectly 

 definite and powerful rates of vibration can not be sent from point 

 to point over wires to which only certain definite apparatus "wdll 

 respond. There are so many ways in which the energy of the 

 electric current can be dissipated in passing over wires and through 

 calling bells that the form of the waves and their strength becomes 

 attenuated. The form of the electrical waves is better preserved 

 in free space, where there are no wires or where there is no mag- 

 netic matter. The difficulty in obtaining individual calls in wire- 

 less telegraphy resides in the present impossibility of obtaining 

 sufficiently rapid and powerful electrical impulses, and a receiver 

 which will properly respond to a definite number of such impulses. 



The question of a relay seems as impossible of solution as it 

 does in telephony. The character of speech depends upon num- 

 berless delicate inflections and harmonies. The form, for instance, 

 of the wave transmitting the vowel a must be preserved in order 

 that the sound may be recognized. A relay in telephony acts 

 very much like one's neighbor in the game called gossip, in which 

 a sentence repeated more or less indistinctly, after passing from 

 one person to another, becomes -distorted and meaningless. No 



