WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY— ITS PAST AND PRESENT 

 STATUS AND ITS PROSPECTS. " 



By William Mavek, Jr 



Long- before the dawn of the Christian era wireless methods of com- 

 municating intelligence to a distance were employed — not electric tele- 

 graphs as the term is generalh' understood, it is true, but wireless they 

 certainly were, and perhaps as this article proceeds it will not }»e diffi- 

 cult to perceive a close relationship, as regards the nature of the com- 

 municating medium employed, between some of the wireless telegraph 

 systems in vogue thousands of years ago, especially those that 

 employed the luminiferous ether as the communicating medium, and 

 the wireless telegraph systems of to-day. in which case it would simpl}' 

 be another verification of the old proverb, "There is nothing new 

 under the sun." 



Polybius, the Greek historian, describes a telegraph S3^stem 

 employed for military purposes, 300 B. C, in which torches were 

 placed on high walls in prearranged positions to correspond to letters 

 of the Greek alphabet, and by a suitable manipulation of the torches 

 messages were thus transmitted to a distance. The Gauls, too, were 

 wont to transmit important intelligence to a distance by a cruder but 

 simpler method. A messenger was sent to the top of a hill, where he 

 shouted his message, appai'ently to the winds. Soon from afar a 

 voice answered him, and this voice repeated the message to another 

 listener farther on, and thus, from one to another, the message sped, 

 and it is recorded that in three days a message calling all the tribes of 

 the Gauls to arms traveled in this way from Auvergne to the forests 

 of Amorica in one direction and to the banks of the Rhine in another. 



Later on came another wireless telegraph system — the semaphore 

 telegraph — which was in operation all over Europe prior to and for 

 some time after the introduction of the electric telegraph. This sem- 

 aphore telegraph emplo3'ed arms on posts akin to those seen to-day 

 along every railway in the world, and a certain position of the arms, 



"Reprinted by pennissioii, after revision by the author, from Cassier's Magazine, 

 January, 1902. 



''Author of American Telegraphy and Maver'ij Wireless Telegrapiiy. 



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