SPECIAL ARTICLE.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIV, 12 April 1927, Page 5

SPECIAL ARTICLE.

ROMANCE OF RADIO. Just over twenty-five years ago Brii tain and America had a talk, one that ■was to revolutionise world history and mark a definite stage in the march of civilisation. Fhr 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 twenty-one when in the closing years of last century he followed up work of Hertz and other pioneer investigators and made his, first wireless signal in his father’s villa at Pontecchio, near Bologna in Italy. An induction coil, a bull connected to a metal can which was hoisted on a pole, and the other to a metal plate attached to the “earth” formeu the transmitter.

The receiver was a small tube filled with- metal fillings, 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 telegraphy was a reality when that first message had been sent a matter of a few feet.

From the interior of the villa he removed his apparatus to the garden outside, testing it on longer distances. When he had sent a message the full length of the garden—fifty yards and more—he knew success was in his

grasp. Within twelve years that play with an induction coil and a tube of metal filings was to grow to the transmission of messages across the Atlantic itself, and of this Marconi had his vision when he packed up his apparatus and left Italy to come to England. Here, under the supervision of various Government 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. Mar-tin’s-le-Grand to the Thames Embankaient, a distanee-of nearly a mile. Then on Salisbury Plain a four-mile communication was set up, and after that the young Marconi sent a message icross the Bristol Channel from Penirth to Brean Down, a distance of no ess than nine miles. He had found others to share in. his enthusiasm by this 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 Quee i 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 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 America 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 to-day is only one outcome of the boy’s experiments with his set in a baek garden. But, according to Signor Marconi, immeasurably greater developments are yet to come. “It is in the British Empire that the greatest improvements 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 on the land where townships are in frequent.’’

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 almost daily by the S.O.S. messages which go out for relatives of sick or injured people, invariably winning the desired response. Tims a week or two ago two urgent calls were broadcast, one for a traveller in Mesopotamia to return to England for a ease of urgent illness, and the other to recall a man from Port Said. Both had their due effect. Thirty years ago such miraeles would not have been believed. They belonged to the category of children’s fairy tales and Arabian Nights impassibilities; they were no more real thap 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 etherio " r 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 jmwer from a transmitting station something like broadcasting apparatus, while land machines will also derive their power from a grent central generating and distributing plant.