BEFORE MARCONI.

Evening Star, Issue 11676, 7 February 1902, Page 1

BEFORE MARCONI.

Wireless telegraphy is by no means so modern as we are apt. to imagine. Its discoverer was a poor Scotch weaver, James Bowman Lindsay, who was born in 1799 at Carmylic, and when he was twenty-one became a student at Rt. Andrews, working at bis trade during the college recess. In 1841 he was appointed teaches in Dundee Prison, at a salary of £SO. He worked alone at his scientific labors, on the verge of starvation, in the one poor room ho conld afford, pinching himself in every way to purchase materials for his experiments. He was probably the first, to use the electric light, for he lit his one room in 1835 by an electric light, of his own installation, and publicly exhibited an electric lamp that year in Dundee. In 1845 he suggested the possibility of extending the electric telegraph to America. In 1853 he maintained that it was possible to establish electrical communication through water without connecting wires, and in 1854 patented this invention, and conducted experiments in London and at Portsmouth, where he successfully telegraphed without wires across water five hundred yards wide. In 1859 ho telegraphed in this manner across the river Tay at Glencarse, where it. is half a mile wide, and read a paper before the British Association at Aberdeen. In presence of the members he conducted experiments at the Aberdeen Docks, which proved the correctness of his theories. His prescience will be seen in the advertisement announcing the opening of his science classes, which appeared in a Dundee newspaper of 1834; “Houses and towns will in “ a short time be lighted by electricity in- “ stead of gas, and heated by it instead of " coals, and machinery will, be wrought by “it instead of steam, all at a trifling, ex- “ pcnsc.” At the time of his death he was engaged on a dictionary of fifty-sis languages, the MSS. of which is now in the Dundee Museum. He, had got a volume of ponderous hulk, and had ruled it in narrow lines across and across, so as; to allow of the equivalent of each word being written in many languages, in a small hand, on thesame line as the original.