Marcu 10, 1923] 
NATURE 
329 

lives ; and it would be ungrateful, as well as benighted, 
if we failed to render due homage to its omnipresent 
reality and highly efficient properties. It lies at the 
origin of all electrical developments, and forms the 
basis for this new and broadcast method of communi- 
_ cation. 
_ That is one thing: the second is to congratulate 
_all those whose wonderful and rapid advances have 
_ rendered possible the astonishing feat of, in any sense 
and by whatever means, carrying the human voice 
across the Atlantic. When Signor Marconi succeeded 
in sending the letter “‘s” by Morse signals from 
- Cornwall or Ireland to Newfoundland, it constituted 
an epoch in human history, on its physical side, and 
was itself an astonishing and remarkable feat. The 
present achievement of changing over from Morse 
signals to ordinary speech, made possible by the valves 
of Prof. Fleming and Dr. Lee de Forest and others, is 
a natural though still surprising outcome and develop- 
ment of long-distance transmission, and must lead to 
_ further advances, of which at present we can probably 
form but a very imperfect conception. 
Well now, I must go back to very early times. In or 
about the year 1875 Mr. Edison observed something, 
which at that time could by no means be understood, 
about the possibility of drawing sparks from insulated 
objects in the neighbourhood of an electrical discharge. 
He did not pursue the matter, for the time was not 
ripe ; but he called it ‘‘ Etheric Force ”—a name which 
_ rather perhaps set our teeth on edge ;—and we none 
of us thought it of much importance. Silvanus 
_ Thompson, however, took up the matter in a half- 
hearted sort of way, and gave a demonstration to the 
Physical Society of London in, I believe, June 1876— 
_ a paper which I have had a little difficulty in finding in 
the Proceedings of that Society. Nothing much came 
of it, however, though his argument tended to show 
that the sparks could be accounted for on known 
principles. The value of this is merely that it must 
have rendered Thompson susceptible to methods of 
ote real electric waves, when they were discovered 
ter. 
_ It was found afterwards that Joseph Henry, at the 
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, had observed 
something of the same kind so early as 1842. He 
seems to have had an‘intuition of the possible import- 
ance and far-reaching consequences of his observation, 
for he speaks as follows (I quote from a passage cited 
in my “ Modern Views of Electricity,” an appended 
lecture “‘ On the Discharge of a Leyden Jar ” +) :— 










“It would appear that a single spark is sufficient 
to disturb perceptibly the electricity of space through- 
out at least a cube of 400,000 feet of capacity, and 
. . . it may be further inferred that the diffusion of 
motion in this case is almost comparable with that of 
_ a spark from flint and steel in the case of light.” 
_ That is to say, so early as 1842 Joseph Henry had the 
genius to surmise that there was some similarity 
between the etherial disturbance caused by the dis- 
charge of a conductor and the light emitted from an 
ordinary high temperature source. 
In the kght of our modern knowledge, and Clerk 
Maxwell’s theory, we now know that the similarity is 
2 See also NATURE, vol. 39, pages 471-474. 
NO. 2784, VOL. 111] 
very near akin to identity. Both sources emit ether 
waves, though prodigiously differing in length. 
Subsequent to these early stray observations, a 
suggestive semi-private observation, of a partially 
similar kind, was made by that singular genius and 
brilliant experimenter, David Hughes, the inventor of 
the microphone or telephonic transmitter, and of the 
Hughes printing telegraph still used in France. He 
was a man who “ thought with his fingers,” and worked 
with the simplest home-made apparatus—made of 
match-boxes and bits of wood and metal, stuck 
together with cobbler’s wax and sealing-wax. Such 
a man, constantly working, is sure to come across 
phenomena inexplicable by orthodox science. As a 
matter of fact, Hughes unknowingly was very nearly 
on the trail of what was afterwards discovered, in a 
much more enlightened manner, by Hertz. Hughes, 
too, got sparks in the course of his experiments, but 
he also got something very like coherer action by 
means of his microphone detectors. They enabled 
him to get actual galvanometer deflexions—such as 
Hertz never got. 
I cannot at the moment fix the date, but it was early 
in the ’eighties and before either Hertz or me. Hughes 
was a telegraphist, and though he would never have 
worked out the subject mathematically as Hertz did, 
and would not have been interested in matters of 
theory, he might well have stumbled, even at that 
early date, on something like a rudimentary system of 
wireless signalling, had he been encouraged. But he 
was not encouraged. He showed his results to that 
great and splendid mathematical physicist, Sir George 
Stokes ; and Stokes, alas, turned them down, con- 
sidering that they were explicable either by leakage or 
some other known kind of fact. 
That is the danger of too great knowledge ; it looks 
askance at anything lying beyond or beneath its 
extensive scope ; whereas an experimenter operating 
at first hand on Nature may quite well occasionally 
stumble on a fact which lies outside the purview of 
contemporary science, and which accordingly neither 
he nor any one else at the time understands. Crookes 
himself had a similar experience. In his pertinacious 
and systematic way he explored many unfamiliar and 
untrodden regions ; and he also invited the attention 
of Stokes to a simple and easily investigated case of 
abnormal movement ; Stokes, however, perceiving that 
such motion was physically impossible, declined to 
take any interest in it or even to see it. His reason told 
him (and the reason he gave was) that on recognised 
principles the asserted phenomenon could not happen. 
But that was precisely its point of interest, and that was 
why Crookes with his instinctive sagacity conceived 
that such things held within them the germ of a great 
science of the future. 
In Crookes’s case the germ still remains unfructified 
by orthodox science. In Hughes’s case the germ was 
rediscovered and has borne fruit a million-fold. But 
this is to anticipate. Suffice it now to direct attention 
to the collection of Hughes’s apparatus now unearthed 
by the energy and piety of Mr. Campbell Swinton, and 
exhibited in the Science Museum at South Kensington. 
Let us try, however, to avoid imitating the mistakes 
of our revered scientific ancestors: though I admit it 
is a difficult task. So much rubbish is brought to our 
