Masterpieces of Science 



candle-power. We have thus a means of com- 

 paring the sensitiveness of the retina to light 

 with the responsiveness of the Marconi coherer 

 to electric waves, after both radiations have 

 undergone a journey of miles. 



An essential feature of this method of etheric 

 telegraphy, due to Marconi himself, is the sus- 

 pension of a perpendicular wire at each terminus, 

 its length twenty feet for stations a mile apart, 

 forty feet for four miles, and sc on, the telegraphic 

 distance increasing as the square of the length 

 of suspended wire. In the Kingstown regatta, 

 July, 1898, Marconi sent from a yacht under full 

 steam a report to the shore without the loss of a 

 moment from start to finish. This feat was re- 

 peated during the protracted contest between 

 the Columbia and the Shamrock yachts in New 

 York Bay, October, 1899. On March 28, 1899, 

 Marconi signals put Wimereux, two miles north 

 of Boulogne, in communication with the South 

 Foreland Lighthouse, thirty-two miles off.* 

 In August, 1899, during the manoeuvres of the 



* The value of wireless telegraphy in relation to disasters 

 at sea was proved in a remarkable way yesterday morning- 

 While the Channel was enveloped in a dense fog, which hac? 

 lasted throughout the greater part of the night, the East 

 Goodwin Lightship had a very narrow escape from sinking 

 at her moorings by being run into by the steamship R. F. 

 Matthews, 1,964 tons gross burden, of London, outward 

 bound from the Thames. The East Goodwin Lightship 

 is one of four such vessels marking the Goodwin Sands, and, 

 curiously enough, it happens to be the one ship which has 

 been fitted out with Signor Marconi's installation for wire- 

 !ess telegraphy. The vessel was moored about twelve miles 



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