Wireless Telegraphy
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a system of sending telegraph messages without a conducting wire. Michael Faraday conceived the notion that light, heat, and electricity pass through a vacuum with no sensible medium, that is to say, without a known conductor. Various scientists tested the theory that electricity travels through space in straight lines without an ordinary conductor. In 1890 William Marconi, an Italian electrical engineer, a graduate of Bologna University invented apparatus for sending telegraphic messages through space and apparatus for receiving the same. The instruments are in a way modeled on the Morse instruments. The sending power, an electrical battery, is essentially the same. A storage battery may be used. Marconi sent messages across the English Channel in 1899. In 1901 he succeeded in sending a signal from Newfoundland to England. December 21, 1902, he sent a worded wireless message from Cape Breton Island to England. January 18, 1903, President Roosevelt sent King Edward a wireless telegram from Cape Cod . Improvements and competitive apparatus have come upon the market repeatedly. The Italian government granted Marconi a subsidy of $200,000 a year. The British government gave the Italian inventor substantial encouragement. The United States government, however, uses a competing system. Regular communication is maintained between San Francisco and Hawaii and between San Francisco and Washington. The use of the Washington Monument as a station was at one time under consideration, but a special mast 400 feet high has been constructed. It is not necessary for the operator to sit aloft. At the present time wireless telegraph stations are the rule in all cities of importance. An elevated tower with an open view is best. An ocean liner equipped with proper apparatus is able to keep in communication with the shore and to speak to other ships a thousand miles away. Like a ripple in the water, or the sound of a bell, a message goes out in all directions. The receivers cannot tell from what direction or how far the message has come. Some times an ocean message intended for New York is caught by a station far inland and is wired back to the coast. Many interesting incidents may be told of the value of wireless telegraphy. A railroad engineer 180 miles away read a warning in time to avoid a collision. In 1909 the Republic, a White Star Liner, was injured in a collision. A wireless call for help sent over the waters brought prompt assistance, and a sister ship 120 miles away caught the call and came to the rescue and brought the passengers safely back to port. See Telegraph
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account calls the inventor "William Marconi" and dates his apparatus to 1890 — his name was Guglielmo, and his patent came in 1896; he had already shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics by the time this was printed. The spark-gap system described here, which flung dots and dashes "in all directions" and could not tell the reader where a signal came from, was displaced within a decade or two by continuous-wave transmission and the vacuum tube, which carried speech and music: KDKA in Pittsburgh began scheduled broadcasts in 1920 and the word "wireless" gave way to "radio" in American usage. The Republic rescue of 1909, cited here as proof of the system's worth, was eclipsed by the Titanic in 1912, after which shipboard wireless watches became legally compulsory. Morse-code distress listening at sea, the very heart of this entry, was formally retired in 1999 when satellite-based GMDSS took over.
Written for this edition, 2026.