76 



PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



themselves and the company by speaking through 

 the demonstration instrument in dialect. 



At the meeting in 1888, at Bath, Fitzgerald, as 

 president of Section A, made the announcement of 

 Hertz's verification of Clerk Maxwell's theory of 

 electro-magnetic waves. A discussion on lightning 

 conductors also took place, in which the importance 

 of self-induction in connexion with sudden discharges 

 was for the first time emphasised, and the production 

 of waves of measured length on conducting wires 

 was first made public by Sir Oliver Lodge. At the 

 Oxford meeting in 1894 Sir Oliver Lodge gave the 

 first public demonstration of ( wireless/ over a dis- 

 tance of a few hundred yards, effecting the reception 

 of Morse signals by the long and short deflections of a 

 Thomson marine-signalling galvanometer, such as had 

 been used in cable telegraphy. Thus was revealed 

 the possibility of signalling by means of Clerk Max- 

 well's and Hertz's electro-magnetic waves, although 

 the name of wireless telegraphy was introduced only 

 in 1896 by Marconi, when its practice was begun in 

 the face of many difficulties, initially with the help 

 of the Post Office authorities in this country. In 

 1907 at Leicester, Duddell, in giving an evening 

 discourse on the arc and the spark in radio-telegraphy, 

 showed experiments which formed the foundation 

 for continuous wave telegraphy. 



With such advances as these, as with those in 

 other departments of engineering for instance, the 

 steam turbine, the internal combustion engine, the 

 aeroplane our engineering section has been prin- 

 cipally concerned. Thus, at the York meeting in 

 1881, J. Emerson Dowson showed his plant for pro- 

 ducing gas for motive power in the factory, etc., and 



