NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



ure of Signer Marconi's contributions to this won- 

 derful work has become slightly mixed. He is 

 neither the discoverer of electric-waves nor the sole 

 inventor of the apparatus which has made wireless 

 telegraphy possible. He would be the first to dis- 

 avow such claims. They have been ascribed to 

 him by persons ignorant alike of his own work and 

 that of others. 



These are matters of history which should be 

 made clear. Signor Marconi did not conceive the 

 existence of electric-waves, of near kin to those of 

 light, and thus reach the belief that electricity and 

 light are one. That was worked out by Professor 

 Clerk-Maxwell, of Cambridge, England, nine-and- 

 thirty years ago ten years before Marconi was 

 born. 



He did not experimentally prove the existence of 

 such waves and find a way to detect and measure 

 and study them. That was the discovery which 

 made the fame of von Helmholtz's brilliant proteg, 

 Heinrich Hertz, a young German professor at Karls- 

 ruhe, just turned thirty. Marconi was then a boy 

 of thirteen. 



He did not devise the ball-oscillator, which made 

 it possible to send out waves of great power- 

 eventually to bridge the Atlantic. That was an 

 idea which came to the Italian professor Righi, of 

 Genoa. 



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