SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



This instrument of Sir Oliver Lodge's is probably 

 justly considered the ancestor of all the more recent types 

 of wireless telegraphs, in which the vibrations, or 

 syntonic responses, are similarly dependent upon ac- 

 curate tuning. It was by some such apparatus, or 

 modification of it, that Prof. A. Popofif, of the Cronstadt 

 Torpedo School in Russia, was able, in 1895, to send 

 messages successfully to a distance of five kilometers. 



Naturally the scientific world was thrown into a 

 state of intense expectation at the possibilities of these 

 telegraphs, and various investigators all over the world 

 succeeded in producing more or less successful wireless 

 telegraphs. Just what position a later generation will 

 assign these pioneers in the history of wireless telegraphy 

 cannot, of course, be now determined. One fact, how- 

 ever, cannot be gainsaid : the man who first succeeded 

 in transmitting messages across the ocean was Guglielmo 

 Marconi. 



THE WORK OF MARCONI 



Marconi did not discover any new and revolutionary 

 principle in his wireless-telegraph system, but rather 

 he assembled and improved a vast array of more or 

 less scattered facts, unified and adapted them to the 

 required end. Morse did the same thing with the land 

 telegraph; yet no one will belittle the part he played in 

 introducing the practical telegraph. Possibly future 

 generations will regard Marconi as the Morse of wire- 

 less telegraphy. 



Between 1894 and 1896 Marconi perfected a most im- 

 portant part of his telegraph, the coherer for detecting 



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