AN EARLY ELECTRICAL INVESTIGATOR.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7395, 22 February 1902, Page 4 (Supplement)

AN EARLY ELECTRICAL INVESTIGATOR.

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 Carmylie, and when he was 21 became a stxident at St. Andrew's, working at his trade during the college recess. In 1841 he was appointed teacher in Dundee Prison at a salary of fifty pounds. He worked alone at his scientific labours on the verge of starvation in I the one poor room he could 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 1535 by an electric light of his own installation and publicly exhibited an electric lamp that year in Dundee. In 1845 he suggested ths 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 500 yards wide. In 1859 he telegraphed in this manner across the liiver Tay at Glencarse, where it 1 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 advertise.ment 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 instead of gas, and heated by- it instead of coal 9, and machinery will be wrought by it instead of steam, all at a trifling expense." At, the time of his death he was engaged on, a dictionary of 56 languages, the MSS of which is now in the Dundee Museum. He had got a volume of ponderous bulk, 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 the I same line as the original.