CARRYING ON

Taranaki Daily News, 23 March 1935, Page 21 (Supplement)

CARRYING ON

PROFESSOR BRANLY AT 90. MADE WIRELESS POSSIBLE. Quietly working in an old-fashioned laboratory at Paris is an old man bf 90. A journalist called on this famous scientist to ask him what he thought of the political problems of the day and of the Stavisky scandal. ■ “Stavisky,” replied the old man, “who is he? I never look at the papers; I spend all my time in my laboratory." All his life has this quiet man spent in his laboratory, for he is. Professor Edouard Branly, whose inquiring mind and persistent experiments led to the invention which made wireless possible. It vzas only a little instrument that he invented, an instrument which others improved and Marconi . perfected, the coherer. But it was , this coherer that enabled Marconi to receive the first messages across space. Improved methods soon replaced the coherer, but neither instrument nor Professor Branly will ever be. forgotten in the story of wireless. The existence of wireless waves had long been known—indeed Professor Hughes had discovered that a tube of glass filled loosely with zinc and silver filings when joined up with a battery and a telephone was sensitive to electric sparks at a distance. Heinrich Hertz, too, had discovered that wireless waves resulted from the discharge backward and forward of electricity from a Leyden jar. He also had made an instrument’ which would pick up these waves at a short distance, but the bent wire hoop which he used would not react even to a powerful sending apparatus when placed a long distance away. Many a long year might have been lost before communication by wireless began had it not been for the experiments which Branly carried out at the quiet institute in Paris where he taught boys science. He set himself to find some method of detecting these feeble wireless waves, too feeble to emit a spark or show their presence in any direct way. Branly found that certain metal filings were sensitive to these waves. He placed these filings in a tube, cut the wire between a battery and a galvanometer, and inserted the tube between the two ends of the wire.

Every time a wireless wave was produced by the Hertzian sparking apparatus the filings in the tube cohered together and the current from the battery was able to pass through and move the needle of the galvanometer. In this way Branly sent his first wireless signals across the quadrangle of the institute. Practical wireless was born. Yet for a few years’even men of science did not realise its possibilities. Then Sir Oliver Lodge produced a practical form of this coherer, and Marconi, improving it still more, used it for receiving messages across the sea. But Professor Branly has gone on teaching and experimenting; counting the mysteries and wonders of Nature of far greater account than the petty scandals of political life.. .. ... .?