AN ELECTRICAL PIONEER.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 9303, 16 November 1901, Page 2

AN ELECTRICAL PIONEER.

Dundee, Scotland, has just unveiled a monument erected to the memory of James Bowman Lindsay, who his fellow l citizens proudly claim to have been the world's pioneer m applying electricity to the uses of mankind. It is said of him that he anticipated by half a century not only electric lighting and electric power distribution but wireless telegraphy as well. In a brief biographical sketch of Lindsay given m the London Chronicle it is stated that m 1834 he promulgated his views of electric energy and its utility, aud metde experiments m sending messages across the Tay without wires. In the. same year he went to London and submitted, his theories and his experiments to the British Association, but nothing resulted from his visit One of the scientists of that time who served on the committee appointed to investigate Lindsay's " inventions is still living, and m explanation of the failure to profit by them recently said that there was m 1834 no demand for such appliances. He went on to argue that an invention to be of service musfc be produced at the appropriate moment. If it be premature it is uesless. Lindsay had the misfortune to be ahead of his time. Instead of being hailed by the whole civilised world as Marconi is to-day. and gaining honors and being enriched by his invention, he died obscure, and gets nothing but a monument m his native town. "■■ The misfortune of the Scottish inventor is by no means singular. Many a supposed new invention of our time is but a revived of something that was known yeai-s ago but was useless m the civilisation that then prevailed' Of 'course, any credit given to. Lindsay by no means detracts from the honor due to Marconi. There is no evidence that the experiments of 1834 resulted m anything which would be of practical value even now. Lindsay managed to strike out theories that were far m advance of his time, but Marconi, m competition with hundreds of the brightest scientists and mechanical inventors, has been first to devise a system of wireless telegraphy that meets the heed of his age and is practically valuable. It is, m fact, the achievement of Marconi that has been the occasion of the erection of the monument to Lindsay. The Scotch-

man and his inventions were forgotten even m his own land" until the marvels wrought by the young Italian revived an interest m the bygone experimenter and made his townsmen ieel that something of honor is due to the memory of the man who fifty years ago did m some measure at least prove the possibility of wireless telegraphing.