RADIO

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 May 1927, Page 9

RADIO

HISTORY OF THIRTY* YEARS

Just over 25 years ago, Britain and

America had a talk, one that was to revolutionise world history and mark a definite stage in the inarch of civilisation. For on December 12, 1901, the first wireless signal was transmitted from the great station at Poldhu, in Cornwall, and received without difficulty in Newfoundland.

The story of wireless is a story of romance, an epic of vision and aspiration, backed by dogged energy and patience.

Signor Marconi was just 21, when, in the closing years of last century, he followed up the work of Hertz and other pioneer investigators, and made bis first wireless signal in his father s villa at Pontec c.liio, near Bologna, in Italy. An induction coil, a ball connected to a metal can which was hoisted on a pole, and the other to a metal plate attached to the “earth” formed the transmitter.

The receiver was a small tube filled with metal filings, which only permitted of the passage of a current of electricity when- they were influenced by an electric wave. When the wave' passed through the tube it could be used to make a “click ’ in any recording instrument. With this crude wireless set, Marconi sent his first message from one room to another. For the first time wireless was a reality when that fiist message had been sent a matter of a few feet. Within twelve years that play with an induction coil and a tube of metal fillings was to grow to the transmission of messages across the Atlantic itself, and of this Marconi had his vision when he packed up his appaiatus and left Italy to go to England. Here, under the supervision of various Governient Departments, experiments were conducted for twelve months. The first wireless message ever transmitted in England was sent from the old General Post Office at St. Martain’s-le-Grand Io the Thames Embankment, a distance of nearly a mile. . .. Then on Salisbury Plain a four-mue communication was set up, and after that the young Marconi sent a message across the Bristol Channel from Penarth to Brean Down, a distance of no less than nine miles. He had found others to share in his enthusiasm by mis time, and the boy's dream was fast becoming the world’s reality. By 1898 the great corporation of Lloyd’s had taken up the new invention, and next summer a steamer was fitted with wireless to report the. progress of the Kingstown regatta races to a Dublin newspaper.

In August of 1898, Queen Victoria had wireless communication provided between the Royal yacht Osborne and Osborne House, in the Isle of Wight, to communicate with the Prince of>

Wales and learn of his progress back to health, after an accident he had sustained. When a quarter of a century ago the Atlantic was spanned by the wireless waves, and Britain and Aineiita talked together through the ether. Marconi might have counted his triumph complete. But his vision reached further yet; there was still wireless telephony to be achieved as a', commercial possibility. The enormous broadcasting system which links the world together today is only one outcome of the boy’s experiment with his set in a back garden. But. according to Signor Marconi, immeasurably greater developments are yet to come. . “It is in the British ’ Empire that (ho greatest improvers BAts are likely to be made,” he said In a special interview. “Isolation, which is one. of the principal difficulties in peopling the outer zones of Canada and Australia, will be overcome by the new beam system. . “By this system the signal strength for a certain power, and signalling speed as well, can be enormously increased. It will mean almost a revolution in ordinary telegraphic communication. . • “It is more than possible in the matter of the beam system in telephony that events taking place in England can be simultaneously broadcasted to every part of the world. “In parts of Western Australia aeroplane ambulances can be summoned by wireless to convey patients immediately to hospitals in the towns. This is a very valuable consideration, in settling oh the land where townships are infrequent.” How great a factor in our daily life the broadcast message has become since 25 years ago the first Atlantic message was sent is shown daily by the S.O.S. messages which go out for the relatives of sick or injured people, invariably winning the desired re-

sponse. Recently two urgent culls were broadcasted, one for a traveller in Mesopotamia to return to Rugland for a case of urgent illness, and the other to recall a man from Port Said. Both had their due effect.. Thirty years ago such miracles would not have been believed. They belonged to the category of children’s faily tales and ‘‘Arabian Nights,” impossibilities they were no more real than the magic carpet or Aladdin s lamp, but to-day they are facts, commonplace to all, and no longer wondered at. The latest dream of wireless conquest, transmission of power by etheric waves, is 'fast approaching realisation. It may be that in the next quarter of a century coaling and oiling stations will disappear, and vessels at sea will be “fed” with electric power from a transmitting apparatus. While land machines will also derive their power from a great central generating and distributing plant.