4. Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922)

UNITED STATES EARLY RADIO HISTORY

THOMAS H. WHITE

s e c t i o n

4

Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922)

● Next Section: Radio at Sea (1891-1916) ● Previous Section: News and Entertainment by Telephone (1876-

1925) ● Home Page: Table of Contents / Site Search

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After Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the existence of radio waves, some were enchanted by the idea that this remarkable scientific advance could be used for personal, mobile communication. But it would take decades before the technology would catch up with the idea.

Both the telegraph and the telephone transformed communications in the 1800s, and at the close of the century radio was poised to start a third revolution. Some of the earliest speculation about radio's future centered on the almost mystical idea of portable individual communication. In the February, 1892 issue of Fortnightly Review, Sir William Crookes' Some Possibilities of Electricity looked forward to the day when two persons could use radio signals to privately communicate with each other. Crookes' review included one particularly arresting sentence: "...some years ago I assisted at experiments where messages were transmitted from one part of a house to another without an intervening wire by almost the identical means here described". J. J. Fahie contacted Crookes about this intriguing statement, and was told that the unidentified experimenter was David Hughes, who beginning in 1879 apparently had transmitted and received radio signals, although he was discouraged from further research by reviewers who thought he had not done anything unusual. In 1899, Fahie convinced Hughes to write a short memoir of what he had accomplished twenty years previously, which was included in the Researches of Prof. D. E. Hughes appendix of A History of Wireless Telegraphy. A few months later Hughes was dead -- his obituary appeared in the January 26, 1900 issue of The Electrician. Two decades after that, the March 31, 1922 issue of The Electrician carried an announcement in Wireless Notes (Hughes Equipment) that the inventor's original instruments had been found in a storage area, and put on display at the Science Museum in South Kensington. A photograph of some of this equipment appeared in World's First Wireless Outfit Found in London Tenement, from the August, 1922 issue of

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4. Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922)

Popular Science Monthly. It is interesting to speculate how history might have been changed had Hughes been encouraged to continue his original research. Experimentation in "wireless telephony" included technologies that predated radio, employing such things as induction instead of the electromagnetic radiation used by radio transmissions. None of these earlier approaches achieved commercial success, although some came close. A. Frederick Collins was one of the better known experimenters along these lines, and two articles written by him, The Collins Wireless Telephone from the July 19, 1902 Scientific American, and Wireless Telephony from the March, 1905 The Technical World, reviewed photo-electric and induction systems developed by Collins, Alexander Graham Bell, and Ernest Ruhmer. After the development of radio communication, Guglielmo Marconi soon experimented with mobile communication, as reviewed in Military Automobile for Wireless Telegraphy from the July 27, 1901 Western Electrician, and in a speech to a New York City meeting of the Automobile Club of America, reprinted in the May, 1902, The Cosmopolitan, suggested that in the future Wireless Telegraphy from an Automobile would be a "handy thing for automobiles in general". Charles Mulford Robinson, in the June, 1902 The Cosmopolitan, speculated about the effect unchaperoned Wireless Telegraphy communication would have on romance, and, more practically, suggested the new technology would ensure up-to-the-minute shopping lists. (Twenty years later, romance was still on people's minds, as a song published in 1922, Kiss Me By Wireless proclaimed "There's a wireless station down in my heart... operating just for you and me".) Five years after Crookes' article, Professor William Ayrton predicted that widespread personal communication using radio would eventually be developed -- a review of his thoughts, Syntonic Wireless Telegraphy from the June 29, 1901 Electrical Review, foresaw that someday "the calling which went on every day from room to room of a house" would be expanded into worldwide communication "extending from pole to pole", although "On seeing the young faces of so many present he was filled with green envy that they, and not he, might very likely live to see the fulfillment of his prophecy." (Ayrton died in November, 1908) Wireless Telephony, from the August 1, 1902 issue of The Electrician (London), reported that "a number of scientists scattered all over the civilised world are eagerly seeking the solution to the problem of wireless telephony", and although so far there had been only limited success, "A future generation may conceivably accomplish as much in wireless telephony as is dreamed of to-day by visionaries." (This review also gently chided Prof. Ayrton for his earlier assertion that being unable to contact someone by wireless telephone would mean that person was dead -- perhaps it was just a case of being temporarily unavailable for less dramatic reasons). The development of compact radio receivers, especially the crystal detector, increased public speculation about personal telephones, although some foresaw disadvantages to being in constant contact with the outside world, as an editorial comment in the December 17, 1906

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4. Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922)

New York Times, A Triumph, but Still a Terror, asked "How will it be when we're told, not that somebody's 'on the wire,' but that somebody's 'on the air,' and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere?" In a section of Recent Developments in Wireless Telegraphy, from the June, 1907 Journal of the Franklin Institute, Lee DeForest made light of the idea of wireless telephone as premature. However, following the introduction of Poulsen arc-transmitters for audio transmissions, speculation increased in the period from 1907 to 1911, as promoters claimed that important advances were at hand -- for example, in the August, 1908 Modern Electrics, The Collins Wireless Telephone by William Dubilier suggested that in the near future "every auto will be provided with a portable wireless telephone" in order to call for help if the car broke down. Two years later, A. Frederick Collins was again featured, this time in Wireless Telephone Wizardry from the May, 1910 Technical World Magazine, as author Winston R. Farwell enthusiastically reported "It is now possible to talk without the use of wires with persons in distant parts of a building or in adjacent buildings regardless of the number and thickness of walls and floors intervening. One may take a wireless telephone on an automobile, a motor boat, a yacht, an airship or a submarine, into a caisson, a tunnel or a mine and be able to converse with others at any given point or points on the surface as freely and as plainly as one can now talk over a local telephone with nearby points." Actually the article was a little too enthusiastic, for during the next year Collins and some of his associates at Continental Wireless would be arrested for stock fraud, as the company's actual accomplishments did not match its broad claims. (In its February 12, 1910 issue, Telephony magazine had warned its readers about Collins' dubious reputation in Another Wireless Installation in the Stock Selling Campaign). And not too be left behind in the race to sell worthless stock, United Wireless, in R. Burt's The Wireless Telephone from the November, 1908 issue of that company's The Aerogram, foresaw broad advances in both personal communication and broadcasting, which would actually come years after the company had disappeared into bankruptcy. By 1911, the lack of progress had triggered widespread skepticism, and when Modern Electrics reviewed Another Wireless Telephone in its October, 1911 issue, it noted dubiously that "the inventor displays the characteristic assurance of success". There were, however, continuing small advances, as Electric Auto as Wireless Station reviewed a successful radiotelegraph transmission, by W. B. Kerrick, from a car located outside Los Angeles, California, as reported in the July, 1911 Technical World Magazine. Also appearing in the same magazine was William T. Prosser's Wireless Telephone for Everybody, from the April, 1912 issue, which reviewed William Dubilier's high-frequency spark system, while the September, 1913 issue featured Edward J. McCormack's favorable report on Victor Laughter's work, also using high-frequency spark, in The Voice From the Air. But commercial success would continue to be elusive. After a lull of a few years, the introduction of vacuum-tube transmitters reinvigorated the development of audio radio transmissions, and in January, 1916, The Electrical Experimenter looked ahead humorously to the day when people would find it impossible to escape being

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4. Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922)

contacted, in The Wireless 'Phone Will Get You. (Eighty-three years later, Peter Laufer's Wireless Etiquette reviewed this same phenomenon, now a reality, in The wireless as leash). In the U.S. Navy Department's 1916 annual report, Secretary Josephus Daniels reported in Communication by Wireless Telephony that a May, 1916 test had successfully "brought to reality the prediction made to the Secretary some time previously that the time would come when he could sit at his desk and converse with the captain of a ship at sea". In the March, 1917 The Electrical Experimenter,Wireless 'Phone for Hotel Plan reported on investigations by Pacific Coast hotels into the possiblility of installing wireless telephones for guests to communicate with ocean liners. Alfred N. Goldsmith, in Future Development of Radio Telephony section of the 1918 Radio Telephony, predicted "a very rapid development", with the result that "it should become ultimately possible to keep in immediate touch with the traveling individual regardless of his motion or temporary location". In the 1919 U.S. War Department Annual Report, Signal Corps head Major General George O. Squier talked of "the day which I believe is not far distant, when we can reach the ultimate goal so that any individual anywhere on earth will be able to communicate directly by the spoken word to any other individual wherever he may be". In the August, 1919 Radio Amateur News, The Auto Radiophone by A. H. Grebe reported on the author's test installation of a wireless telephone in an automobile. Anticipation was also increasing in Britain, as Pocket Wireless Soon, Predicts Marconi Official, which appeared in the August, 1919 Electrical Experimenter, reported that managing director Godfrey Issacs "foresees the day, not far distant, when pocket wireless telephones will be in wide use". And the November 7, 1920 issue of the Boston Sunday Post featured John T. Brady's Talking by Wireless as You Travel by Train or Motor, which noted "It is now possible for a business man to talk with his office from a moving vehicle", as it reviewed a test two-way radio conversation the author had with Harold J. Power, head of the American Radio and Research Corporation, while Power was in a moving automobile. Radiophoning To and From "L" Trains from the March, 1922 Science and Invention reviewed an experimental installation on the Chicago Elevated Railroad, and predicted that "Pretty soon... it will be possible for you to call your home while in transit and suggest what kind of meat you want for dinner." In Margaret Penrose's 1922 The Radio Girls of Roselawn (communication extracts), two characters discussed whether they might, pretty soon, "carry receiving and sending sets in our pockets" which would allow them to "send or receive any news we wanted". Jessie is optimistic at first, declaring "It is going to be wonderful before long", and they might even be able to not only hear, but also see persons being talked to. However, later in the book she becomes more conservative, eventually dismissing the idea with "Oh! But that is a dream." And individual communication by radio was, in fact, still largely "a dream" at this time. In Radiotelephony and Wire Systems, from the January 7, 1922 Telephony, Henry Shafer calmed nervous telephone company executives by reviewing the "very substantial reasons why the radiophone cannot supplant the wire telephone systems". It wouldn't be until the 1980s that the technology needed for such things as pagers and wireless telephones would be perfected to the point that they became widely available consumer products. So, although the

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4. Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922)

telephone's use for individual communication largely overshadowed its applications for distributing entertainment and news, the reverse would be true for radio, with broadcasting dominating for decades, before radio transmissions would be significantly developed for personal, mobile communication.

"On the subject of communications, however, Sarnoff was an authority: 'Through communication satellites, laser beams, and ultraminiturization, it will be possible by the end of the century to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time, by voice, sight, or written message.' Some of this is already in prospect, and some of the ideas are attractive, although they rest on the supposition that by the end of the century the dream of 'one world' will come true. But about the degree of interaction among people that Sarnoff seems to regard as a valid objective I have my doubts, and I am sure I have plenty of company. To be able to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time is the opposite of being a recluse, and it seems to me just as undesirable. Shouldn't we spend more times with ourselves, in meditation or reading, both of which afford a certain privacy of thought, a communion with oneself, which surely has value as great as the give-and-take of two-way communication, whether for business or pleasure. I have an idea that in this extrapolation Sarnoff was influenced by his own temperament and managerial role, with its necessary concentration on decision making, which in turn required more communication than would be healthy for most people, or for society as a whole."--Carl Dreher, Sarnoff: An American Success, 1977

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5. Radio at Sea (1891-1916)

UNITED STATES EARLY RADIO HISTORY

THOMAS H. WHITE

s e c t i o n

5

Radio at Sea (1891-1916)

● Next Section: Early Radio Industry Development (1897-1914) ● Previous Section: Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-

1922) ● Home Page: Table of Contents / Site Search

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The first major use of radio was for navigation, where it greatly reduced the isolation of ships, saving thousands of lives, even though for the first couple of decades radio was generally limited to Morse Code transmissions. In particular, the 1912 sinking of the Titanic highlighted the value of radio to ocean vessels.

Prior to the introduction of radio, maritime communication was generally limited to line-of-sight visual signalling during clear weather, plus noise-makers such as bells and foghorns with only limited ranges. Beginning in the mid-1800s, an international convention was developed using special semaphore flags to exchange messages between merchant ships, as reviewed by the The International Code of Signals section of the 1916 edition of Brown's Signalling. In the same book, Examination Paper on the use of the International Code of 1901 provided an overview of signalling proficiency that a candidate needed to master in order to qualify for a Certificate of Competency issued by the British Board of Trade Examinations. Over time an extensive vocabulary of signals was created, even as the expansion of radio was beginning to make visual signalling obsolete. The Urgent and Important Signals: Two Flag Signals section of Brown's Signalling reviewed over 600 basic signals, grouped by category, with meanings as diverse as "Where are you bound?" (SH), "In distress; want immediate assistance" (NC), "Keep a good look-out, as it is reported that the enemy's war vessels are going about disguised as merchantmen" (OJ), and "Heave to or I will fire into you" (ID). And in addition to the two-flag signals, there were thousands of three- and four- flag groupings, for communicating a huge variety of messages, including ship identifiers, geographical names, temperature and barometer readings, compass points, and units of measurement. The thousands of signals in part resulted from an apparent attempt to include every possible variation of a phrase, e.g. BUP stood for "He, She, It (or person-s or thing-s indicated) had (has, or, have) not done (or, is, or, are not doing)", which is included in a small selection of

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5. Radio at Sea (1891-1916)

these additional signals from the U.S. Navy's 1909 edition of The International Code of Signals. The development of radio resulted, by 1911, in the addition of two more visual signals -- ZMX for "Wireless telegraph apparatus" and ZMY for "Report me by wireless telegraphy" -- which heralded the beginning of a major decline in the use of seaboard visual signals. However, to this day NC continues to be an international distress signal when using flag signalling. In the 1872 edition of the annual Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers, Captain P. Columb's Visual Telegraphy. Signals of Distress, &c., in the Mercantile Marine reviewed the confusion and limitations often encountered, prior to the invention of radio, by ships trying communicate during emergencies, while suggesting that the "immediate object for the Telegraph Engineer... should be devising means for communicating at night, and in fog". Just a few years after Heinrich Hertz's historic proof of the existence of electromagnetic radiation, the Notes section of the April 10, 1891 The Electrician (London) included a strikingly advanced suggestion, that someday lightships might use microwave beams to overcome the problem of fog interfering with shore communication. In a December, 1891 lecture given at Inverness, Scotland, Frederick T. Trouton returned to this topic, noting that "There is little doubt that a powerful beam of this sort would, unlike light, be unabsorbed by fog; so, looking into the future, one sees along our coasts the light-houses giving way to the electric house, where electric rays are generated and sent out, to be received by suitable apparatus on the passing ships, with the incomparable advantage that at the most critical time--in foggy weather--the ship would continue to receive the guiding rays." A similar prediction appeared in the July, 1892 issue of The New England Magazine, as an extract from Elihu Thompson's Future Electrical Development stated "electricians are not without some hope that signalling or telegraphing for moderate distances without wires, and even through dense fog may be an accomplished fact soon", making possible a sort of radio-wave lighthouse. Although it turned out it would take decades before practical microwave transmissions were developed, a few years later Marconi would introduce a successful system using longwave signals, and soon many of the larger passenger liners began carrying radio equipment. The addition of shipboard operators quickly captured the public imagination -- The Work of a Wireless Telegraph Man, by Winthrop Packard, from the February, 1904 The World's Work, recounted the activities of a Marconi operator on the passenger liner St. Paul, at a time when shipboard radio transmitters were so rare that operators had to wait for other similarly-equipped vessels to come into range. In the December 23, 1911 issue of Chamber's Journal, an unnamed Marconi Wireless operator reminisced about a decade of Life as a Wireless Telegraphist, including a time when mysterious printing by a tape-coherer receiver turned out to be due to the fact that "a big beetle was crawling about the relay of the receiver". Wireless Telegraphy on Mail Steamers, from the November 19, 1904 Electrical Review, featured Emile Guarini's overview of radiotelegraphic operations by mail packets running between Ostend, Belgium and Dover, England. Wireless Tracking of Fish, from the December 1, 1906, Electrical World, reported that six Atlantic Coast vessels of The Fisheries Company had been outfitted with DeForest equipment, so they would be able to "notify each other and all assemble

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5. Radio at Sea (1891-1916)

without delay to the location where the fish are being caught". By 1912, when Francis A. Collins' The Wireless Man was published, all the major passenger liners were equipped with radio transmitters. In the opening chapter of this book, Across the Atlantic, Collins reviewed how radio now kept vessels on transatlantic voyages in nearly constant communication with shore stations and each other. Initially large passenger liners were the primary commercial ocean-going vessels to install radio transmitters. But in the 1913 edition of Marconi's annual The Yearbook of Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony, Wireless Telegraphy and the Mercantile Marine promoted the money-saving benefits of radio for smaller ships, proclaiming that "Wireless telegraphy is now recognised as an essential part of the equipment of ocean-going passenger vessels, and, to a rapidly increasing extent, of cargo vessels and smaller craft." The 1916 edition of Brown's Signalling noted that "Any book dealing with signalling in general is incomplete without a reference to wireless telegraphy which, for mercantile signalling, offers so many advantages over other methods of signalling" in its The Quenched Spark System section, which featured a shipboard installation offered by Siemens. The General Information chapter of Percy S. Harris' 1917 book, The Maintenance of Wireless Telegraph Apparatus, covered the basics for operating a Marconi shipboard radio installation, in part noting that "Nothing is more irritating than to find, when the point of a pencil suddenly breaks, that there are no sharpened pencils in reserve."

In 1905, the distinctive Morse code character string ...---... (SOS) was adopted by

Germany for signifying distress, as reported in German Regulations for the Control of Spark Telegraphy, from the May 5, 1905 issue of The Electrician. (A German-language account of the adoption of the April 1, 1905 regulations appeared in the April 27, 1905 issue of Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift: Regelung der Funkentelegraphie im Deutschen Reich). In 1906, SOS was adopted at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Convention as the official international standard for distress calls, although Marconi operators in particular were slow to conform -- G. E. Turnbull's Distress Signalling, from the 1913 edition of the annual The Yearbook of Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony, noted that the Marconi companies had adopted "C.Q.D." as a distress signal in 1904, only to have it supplanted by the international ratification of "SOS" two years later. Turnbull reports that even after this some of the old-time Marconi operators continued to use C.Q.D. for a time, although "The change of the call letter is, however, a sentimental regret, and 'C.Q.D.' is being gradually forgotten." However, in 1909 not all the Marconi operators had made the switch, reflected by the title of Alfred M. Caddell's article about sinking of the Republic, C Q D, which appeared in the April, 1924 issue of Radio Broadcast magazine. The February, 1909 issue of Modern Electrics printed a transcript of radio communication related to this event in Operator Binns' Wireless Log. And a review by Baltic Captain J. B. Ranson of the twelve long hours it took to find the Republic, The Triumph of Wireless from the February 6, 1909 issue of The Outlook, included Ranson's opinion that, due to recent scientific advances -- especially radio communication -- "the passenger on a well-equipped transatlantic liner is safer than he can be anywhere else in the

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world." Radio greatly reduced the terrible isolation of ships during emergencies, and was quickly responsible for saving thousands of lives. Notable Achievements of Wireless, from the September, 1910 Modern Electrics, reviewed early cases where radio had provided maritime assistance, beginning with the January, 1909 sinking of the Republic. Radio Broadcast later ran two articles about SOS emergencies which had occurred in the 1910s, written by George F. Worts under the heading "Adventures of a Wireless Free-Lance". My First SOS--A Farce Comedy was humorous, while A Thrill that Came Thrice in a Night-time reviewed a series of events which saw both rescue and tragedy. Some Stirring Wireless Rescues, a chapter from Francis A. Collins' 1912 The Wireless Man, reviewed a number of incidents which had occurred over the previous three years, while noting that radio had changed things so much that an "up-to-date Robinson Crusoe", instead of facing years of isolation after a shipwreck, would now be able to radio for help, then listen to the latest stock market quotations while awaiting rescue. However, radio did not eliminate all the fatalities, as American Marconi's J. Andrew White, in the July, 1915 The World's Advance, reported the dedication of A Memorial Fountain to Wireless Operators, which commemorated ten operators who had lost their lives at sea. A February 1, 1916 pamphlet issued by the Department of Commerce, Important Events in Radiotelegraphy, included an extensive section, Wireless as a Safeguard to Life at Sea, reviewing radio's use in seagoing emergencies and rescues. One of most dramatic sea disasters was the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic on the morning of April 15, 1912. The Titanic -- along with the Carpathia, which picked up the survivors -- was staffed by Marconi Wireless operators, and Marconi shore stations along the Canadian, Newfoundland, and U.S. coasts handled most of the communication as the Carpathia slowly made its way to New York City. In addition, many inland stations tried to get information about the disaster, which in this unregulated era resulted in extensive interference and confusion. Included in all this was the American Marconi equipped facility, MHI, located atop the New York Wanamaker department store, where David Sarnoff was station manager. Sarnoff would later vastly exaggerate his importance, in progressively embellished retellings, including completely false claims that he was first in the United States to hear of the disaster, and that President Taft silenced other stations so that Sarnoff could become the sole link for gathering information. However, the operators at the New York Wanamaker station did spend long hours listening for reports and survivor lists. A collection of extracts about the Titanic comes from the Boston American and recountings by David Sarnoff: The Titanic and the New York Wanamaker Station. Marconi management also sent messages to the operators aboard the Carpathia, telling them to limit what they were publicly reporting, until their accounts could be sold to the newspapers. These activities, plus a complaint that the operators aboard the Carpathia were unresponsive to Navy vessels sent by U.S. President Taft, were covered by the New York Herald: Marconi Company and Titanic Disaster Communication. Amateur radio operators were blamed for much of the chaos experienced immediately after the Titanic sank, but it has never really been clear how many

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of the problems were actually their fault. In 1922, in The Book of Radio (Titanic extract), Charles William Taussig wrote about the next evening after the Titanic sank, as amateur operators, voluntarily responding to the emergency, scrupulously maintained complete radio silence in the New York City area, in order to avoid interfering with the survivor lists being transmitted by the Salem. One area where radio's revolutionary effect on ocean-going communication was readily apparent was when shipboard newspapers started to include daily news summaries. As early as 1899 Guglielmo Marconi used onboard reception in order to prepare a shipboard newspaper, as reported in A Wireless Telegraphy Newspaper, from the November 22, 1899 Electrical Review. Regular nightly summary news transmissions by Marconi shore stations followed, beginning in June, 1904 -- their introduction was reported in Mid-Sea Wireless Telegraph News, from the May, 1904 The Electrical Age. Thanks to radio, the late 1906 issues of the S. S. Hamburg's onboard newspaper, The Atlantic Daily News, featured news reports "received by Special Marconigrams", and passengers were also notified that they could send telegrams to nearby ships and shore stations.

"Until the dawn of this century ships great and small sailed for distant ports and, once they had passed over the horizon, were lost to the world until weeks or months later when they were again sighted on shore. Once out of sight of land those who went down to the sea in ships belonged to another world--a world of stark loneliness and utter silence. Ships burned or foundered in storms with not so much as a whisper reaching land to tell their fate. The crew of a sinking or burning ship fought their battle for life, silently and alone. Wireless telegraphy with its magic powers was to wrest from the sea its ancient terror of silence and to give speech to ships which had been mute since the dawn of navigation."--Karl Baarslag, SOS to the Rescue, 1935.

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3. News and Entertainment by Telephone (1876-1925)

UNITED STATES EARLY RADIO HISTORY

THOMAS H. WHITE

s e c t i o n

3

News and Entertainment by Telephone (1876-1925)

● Next Section: Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922)

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While the telegraph was mainly limited to transmitting Morse Code and printed messages, the invention of the telephone made distant audio communication possible. And although the telephone was mostly used for private conversations, there was also experimentation with providing home entertainment. In 1893 a particularly sophisticated system, the Telefon Hirmondó, began operation in Budapest, Hungary -- one of its off-shoots, the Telephone Herald of Newark, New Jersey, did not meet with the same financial success.

In 1946, William Peck Banning wrote that "historians of the future may conclude that if there was any 'father' of broadcasting, perhaps it was the telephone itself". After the invention of the telegraph, numerous inventors worked to transmit audio along wires, initially with limited success. The first to finally achieve quality sound reproduction was Alexander Graham Bell -- Bell's Articulating Telephone from the 1876 edition of the annual Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers introduced the invention to British readers. (This review noted that "one cannot but be struck at the extreme simplicity" of Bell's invention, and eventually home telephones became easy enough to use so that a four-year-old could operate one, as reported in "Children Cry For It" from the March, 1908 Telephony.) The development of the telephone in the 1870s and 1880s included adapting it to distribute entertainment and news. In the January, 1908 issue of Telephony, C. E. McCluer reviewed some of his early experiences, including hearing experimental musical concerts in 1876, which were transmitted along commercial telegraph lines for the entertainment of the operators on the wire, as recounted in Telephonic Reminiscences. At the 1881 Paris International Electrical Exhibition, Clément Ader demonstrated the transmission of music from local theaters using telephone lines. Ader's use of dual lines also introduced the phenomenon of stereo listening -- at the time referred to as "binauriclar auduition" -- reviewed by The Telephone at the Paris Opera, which appeared in the December 31, 1881 issue of Scientific American. Edward Bellamy's influential 1888

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3. News and Entertainment by Telephone (1876-1925)

utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (home music extract), included a future where, via telephone lines, individual homes had access to music 24-hours a day. A couple years later, an American Telephone and Telegraph Company executive, in Extension and Improvement of Telephone Service from the September 20, 1890 The Electrical World, reviewed efforts to establish a mealtime music service, noting that while there were problems with the sound quality, they were hopeful that "When we have overcome this difficulty we shall be prepared to furnish music on tap." While most were intrigued by this possibility, not everyone was favorably impressed, and in the same issue a reviewer warned of the potential intrusiveness of the idea, fearing "a vista of dreadful possibilities" that might "make incipient deafness bliss", in Music on Tap. Although most of these early entertainment and news efforts were experimental or one-time-only events, a few on-going services were established, mostly in Europe. The first permanent telephone-based entertainment service appears to have been organized in Paris in 1890, which used coin-operated receivers to listen to programs that mainly originated from local theaters -- The Theatrephone, a short notice in the June 21, 1890 Electrical Review, announced this new service. A first-hand account appeared in the August 29, 1891 issue of the same magazine, with The Theatrophone in Paris reporting that the innovation was "certainly more amusing than the weighing machines and pull-testers that so overcrowd our waiting-rooms everywhere". However, the most influential telephone-based service would be the Telefon Hirmondó, set up by inventor Tivadar Puskás in Budapest, Hungary, which began operation on February 15, 1893, a month before Puskás died at the age of 49. Two early reviews of this innovation appeared in The Electrical World: Telephonic News Distribution in the March 18, 1893 issue, followed by Telephone Newspaper on November 4, 1893. Two years later, a detailed review of its operation, The Telephone Newspaper, ran in the September 6, 1895 The Electrical Engineer, with the author noting that the service, featuring continuous news reports, plus entertainment, including original fiction sometimes read by the authors themselves, was considered "almost indispensable" in the capital, although "the idea had encountered considerable ridicule" at first. In contrast, in an early attack on the electronic media by the written press, the September 28, 1895 issue of Harper's Weekly opined that "If all this really happens at Pesth, and not in the moon" then "Pesth must be the finest place for illiterate, blind, bedridden and incurably lazy people in the world" and "it would not appear, however, that a telephone newspaper is of value as a time-saving device". Five years later, Thomas S. Denison's The Telephone Newspaper, from the April, 1901 edition of World's Work, reported in detail on a personal visit to the Telefon Hirmondó's offices. Frederick A. Talbot's article about Budapest's "newspaper of the future", A Telephone Newspaper, appeared in the August 8, 1903 issue of The Living Age, and in 1908 W. B. Forster Bovill wrote about a first-hand encounter with the service in a hotel in Hungary and the Hungarians: Telephon Hirmondo extract. Over the years, the existence of the Telefon Hirmondó was constantly being rediscovered. Why I Believe in Government Radio--Hungary's "Telephone Newspaper", from

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3. News and Entertainment by Telephone (1876-1925)

the October, 1922, Popular Science Monthly reviewed Robert B. Howell's impressions of the now 28-year-old service. In 1895, another telephone-based system was established, in London, England. A technical overview of The Electrophone, by J. Wright, appeared in the September 10, 1897 The Electrical Engineer, which noted that "one can sit comfortably at home in all weathers and listen to the latest comedy, opera, or tragedy, as the case may be, by the payment of a purely nominal rental". The service soon claimed Britain's Queen Victoria as a listener, according to The Queen and the Electrophone, from the May 26, 1899 The Electrician. In the October 5, 1901 Electrical Review, Electrophone in England reported that "the popularity of the electrophone is increasing", with a decrease of the subscription charge from $50 to $12 per year. The August 5, 1898 The Electrical World reported that the company was in the process of installing receivers at "the principal hospitals free of charge, beyond the cost of installation". And two decades later, the same free service was provided to some jolly chaps photographed recuperating in a London hospital, as reported in British Wounded Hear London's Favorites via Telephone, which appeared in the August, 1917 The Electrical Experimenter. In early 1923, there were reportedly around 2,000 Electrophone subscribers in the London area, and Entertainment by Wireless: The Future of the Electrophone from the January 10, 1923 London Times speculated about the effect the introduction of organized radio broadcasting would have on the service. Although a company director was reported to be optimistic, in truth the Electrophone service was doomed, and two years later its thirty-year run came to a close. Not that it would be unmissed -- years later a nostalgic review in the May 9, 1957 London Times, Theatre-Going By Telephone, remembered that "There was something very satisfying about listening to a live broadcast from a real theatre, by actors and actresses playing to and having contact with their own audiences" which radio and television broadcasting could not match. And in the mid-1920s a new service arose in numerous British towns, "wireless relay exchanges", where subscribers could listen to radio broadcasts, received at a central location, over telephone lines, avoiding the need to purchase an expensive radio receiver. When the Telefon Hirmondó was reviewed by W. G. Fitz-Gerald in A Telephone Newspaper in the June 22, 1907 Scientific American, its editor noted that the service had been in operation for 14 years, and "I have often marveled why a country like America with its amazing enterprise and development has not produced a 'Telefon-Hirmondo' of its own". However, telephone-based news and entertainment services did not prove economically viable in the United States. In the July 5, 1890 Electrical Review, Wanted, a Theatrophone had suggested adopting the Paris system in the U.S., including its five-minute news reports, predicting that "We should imagine that a similar venture would meet with great success in New York, especially with the addition of the news message service, as the craving of Americans for 'news' is known to be insatiable." A short notice in the March 23, 1907 issue of Electrical Review, The "Tellevent", announced the formation of a Detroit company to "supply subscribers at their homes with the latest happenings of the world, with special music,

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3. News and Entertainment by Telephone (1876-1925)

performances at theatres, concerts and churches", but it is not clear if this service ever went into operation. In his 1904 book, "Flame, Electricity and the Camera", George Iles noted the absence of audio services in the U.S., and suggested this was due to the impossibility of making a permanent record, thus "This is why the ticker, which prints the news in thousands of American offices and clubs, has never been ousted by the Budapest plan of a continuous news service by telephone." The most ambitious U.S. attempt to duplicate the Budapest service took place in 1911-1912, with the establishment of the Telephone Herald in Newark, New Jersey. A short announcement in the October 30, 1909 Electrical Review and Western Electrician, The New Telephone Newspaper, teased that "pretty soon we'll be able to flop over in bed mornings, turn on a telephone-like arrangement and listen to a summary of news from all over the world without getting up out of bed". In the September 9, 1910 New York Times, News Bulletins By 'Phone reviewed a demonstation of the proposed service given by company president Manley M. Gillam. On October 22, 1911, the Times further reported in Your Newspaper by 'Phone on the pending introduction of the service, and three days later the newspaper reviewed the first day of operations, in 500 Get the News by Wire at Once. The Telephone Newspaper--New Experiment in America, by Arthur F. Colton in the March 30, 1912 issue of Telephony, covered the hopeful introduction of the Telephone Herald, while Broadcasting in 1912, written by G. C. B. Rowe, which appeared in the June, 1925 issue of Radio News, reviews more fully its unfortunately short life. In 1912, the family of Roger Garis, then a schoolboy, subscribed to the Telephone Herald service -- he later remembered the "great thrill to pick up the small receiver and hear a voice telling about world events" which "was such a novelty that I could scarcely wait to get home from school and listen to it". Roger Garis' father, Howard Garis, was a writer, and one day Roger Garis was startled and excited to hear one of his father's "Uncle Wiggily" stories being read over the Telephone Herald -- the events are recounted in an extract from My Father was Uncle Wiggily. The elder Garis went on to write a series of original children's stories for reading over the Telephone Herald, forty of which were later collected into two books published in 1912, beginning with Three Little Trippertrots--Adventure Number One. It would be the next decade before individual radio stations began to match the full range of programs which had been available to the Telephone Herald subscribers. George E. Webb was associated with a variety of innovative telephone projects, beginning with the Tel-musici of Wilmington, Delaware, a pay-per-play phonograph service, where, as reported in Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines from the December 18, 1909 Telephony, home and commercial subscribers called a central office to request tunes played back over their phone lines. Webb went on to develop an improved loudspeaker called the Magnaphone, which he envisioned would be used for a wide variety of applications. A short notice in the September 21, 1912 Electrical Review and Western Electrician, Phonographic Music Transmitted by Telephone, announced that a recorded music service had been inaugurated by The New York Magnaphone and Music Company, while a review of the new

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service, Music and News on Tap as Bellamy Foretold Long Ago, from the September 15, 1912 New York Times, asked "Does it strike you as desirable to have the world brought to your ear, with no more effort on your part than the turning of a switch and the drawing up of a comfortable chair?" Edward Lyell Fox's Bring the "Talkies" to Your Home, from the August, 1913 Technical World Magazine, enumerated a range of potential applications, from basic public address systems for train stations and baseball stadiums, to a multi-channel sound system for movie theaters, and even as a remote speaker for audio sent over telephone lines from a central location for movies viewed at home. "Magnaphone" in New York Makes Pictures Talk, by Dr. L. K. Hirshberg, reported in the June, 1913 Modern Electrics on a demonstration of talking movies using the device, while a review of the Magnaphone in the January, 1913 The World's Work, The Talking Ticker, emphasized the possibilities of telephone-distributed news and entertainment, declaring that "There is a talking ticker now, a machine that will entertain and instruct you for twelve hours on a stretch with the gist of the day's political speeches, baseball scores, election returns, and any other news that seems important." But this apparently was another case where the technology once again fell short of commercial success, as the January 22, 1913 New York Times Public Notice--Magnaphone reported that the New York Magnaphone and Music Company was canceling a contact for running underground lines for its music and information service. While program services such as the Théâtrophone, Telefon Hirmondó, Telephone Herald, and Electrophone operated on daily schedules, on occasion the standard phone system was also used for distributing entertainment, news, and advertising. Scattered reports included:

● The April 19, 1884 issue of Scientific American featured a reprint from the New Haven, Connecticut Register, which reviewed an innovative system of providing continuous time signals to telephone subscribers. Moreover, as Time by Telephone explained, the special signals could be selectively blocked for persons not paying for the service by "an attachment called the confuser".

● Opera by Telephone, from the June 14, 1884 Scientific American reviewed entertainment transmitted to the King and Queeen of Portugal.

● Music Over the Telephone, from the September 6, 1884 Electrical Review, reported a concert given to surrounding exchanges in Dallas, Texas.

● Telephone News and Comment from the June 3, 1897 Electrical Review, which included a short notice about activities in Mobile, Alabama, including "'phone parties", where "a number of subscribers are all connected in one circuit, and can fire away as if all in one room".

● Church Services by Telephone, from the July 26, 1902 Electrical World and Engineer, which reviewed activities in Washington, Indiana.

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● William Maver, Jr's Widening Applications of the Telephone, from the February, 1907

Cassier's Magazine, which noted in some rural areas it was the practice for the local phone company to set up "general calls" for such things as "musicales" and regular evening transmissions of time, weather, news, and market reports.

● The Telephone in Opera and Church Service Transmission, by C. E. Fairbanks, which appeared in the September 10, 1910 issue of Telephony, provided a short history of previous activities dating back to 1878, plus an overview of current possibilities.

● In the February, 1918 Telephone Engineer, Indiana Company Gives News Service reported on the Greenfield, Indiana's telephone company's new "Telephone Announcement Service", which phoned weather forecasts, market reports and the correct time to outlying rural customers -- along with some commercial announcements. The magazine suggested that "This form of advertising will help the local business which some glittering display advertisement is now pulling to the cities."

● Church Service by Telephone During "Flu" Ban, which reviewed activities in Muncie, Indiana, from Telephony for January 4, 1919.

Setups for the widespread dissemination of election results by the Chicago Telephone Company were reported in both Telephoning Election Returns, from the November 21, 1894 Electrical Review, and, eighteen years later, Distributing National Election Returns by Telephone, by M. D. Atwater in the November 9, 1912 Telephony. The telephone also began to be used for newsgathering. The "Electrophone", from the November 21, 1903 issue of Western Electrician, reported that the London Daily Mail had used long-distance telephone reception to speed the text of an out-of-town speech into print. Meanwhile, the Press Associations, long the users of telegraph lines to distribute news items to their member newspapers, also started to expand into telephone distribution, according to News By Telephone from the June 20, 1914 The Literary Digest. There were even some early reports of the telephone being used for direct marketing, for example, an article in the September 12, 1903 Western Electrician, Advertising by Telephone, reported that a Fairmont, Minnesota store found telephone soliciting much more effective than "sending clerks or errand boys" to inform potential clients about buying opportunities. Canvassing by Telephone, from the December 10, 1910 Electrical Review and Western Electrician, reported about an electric power company's practice of calling potential customers at home, noting that "Regarding time of calling it is suggested that between 8 and 9 is preferable, owing to the fact that the head of the house is generally in at that time and a sufficient length of time has elapsed after the evening meal." But, happy as the companies might be about this innovation, some of the targets of their calls were not as pleased,

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according to Housekeeper Objects to Telephone Advertising, from the February 20, 1909 Telephony, as one subscriber complained that, because of telephoned sales pitches, "My telephone is far more of a nuisance to me than it is a convenience." The telephone was also employed in the political sphere, used for "get out the vote" calls according to Telephone Help Election Day from the June, 1908 Telephony, which suggested that this approach should be adopted by "all up-to-date political managers who want to reach the people in the right way and at the right time". Recorded political speeches were also played for prospective voters, as noted by Campaign Speeches by Telephone from the October 3, 1908 Telephony. In spite of the varied attempts to set up telephone-based news and entertainment services, none achieved long-term success in the United States. The major problem was weak signals, for until the mid-1910s there were only very limited means for quality amplification. In the May, 1916 The Electrical Experimenter, Hugo Gernsback's What to Invent--Tele-music predicted that "An 'industry' rivaling the moving picture business can be created when some genius perfects a means supplying telephone subscribers with all kinds of music". Actually, at the time this article appeared, most of the needed technical advances were already in place, for AT&T engineers, lead by Dr. Harold Arnold, had recently taken Lee DeForest's crude Audion amplifier and perfected it into a much more effective device, making possible more sensitive microphones, quality line amplification, and better loudspeakers, that finally made the establishment of home entertainment distributed by telephone-lines practical. In view of these advances, in the April, 1919 Electrical Experimenter Gernsback returned to the topic of entertainment by telephone distribution, predicting in Grand Opera in Your Home that individuals would now welcome "spending 50 cents or even a dollar for the privilege, and at that he would think he was getting it cheap because he, with his entire family, would hear the music in his own home without having to travel to and from the opera". But, ironically, the same vacuum-tube advances that made telephone-based services practical also doomed them, because an additional development, vacuum-tube radio transmitters, also made radio broadcasting practical, with the added benefit that programs could be more widely distributed at minimal cost. Meanwhile, Well Clay, blissfully ignorant of the radio broadcasting boom already beginning to gain momentum, mused in the July 9, 1921 edition of his weekly Telephony column, Sundry Snapshots Along the Trail, about the possibility of using telephone lines to distribute concerts to regional audiences. In later years, there were a few cases where telephones lines were used to distribute radio programs to subscribers. A prime example of this sort of hybrid system was developed in Fredonia, Kansas, reviewed by J. A. Gustafson in Kansas Company Uses Radio as a Developer of Revenue from the December 16, 1922 Telephony, and Radio Service Given Over the Telephone, by Thomas F. Gilliams, which appeared in the March, 1925 Radio News -- at the time of the latter article, the system was also being used to originate local programming, such as church services, avoiding the expense of having to build and operate a radio station. An article by Grayson L. Kirk in the May, 1923 Radio Broadcast reviewed a local telephone company's system in Dundee, Michigan, designed as an entertainment utility

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for Supplying Broadcasts Like Gas or Electricity. This review wondered "Who will say how many Dundees, all over the country, will be adopting this system of municipal radio within the next few years?", but the answer would be "not very many", at least in the United States, although scattered audio transmission systems would be continue to be used throughout Europe.

"Those who have read Mr. Bellamy's story, 'Looking Backward,' will remember the concerts continually going on day and night, with telephone connections to every house, so that everyone can listen to the very best obtainable music at will. But few persons are aware that a somewhat similar use of the telephone is actually in operation at Buda-Pesth in the form of a telephonic newspaper. At certain fixed hours throughout the day a good reader is employed to send definite classes of news along the wires which are laid to subscribers' houses and offices, so each person is able to hear the particular items he desires, without the delay of its being printed and circulated in successive editions of a newspaper. It is stated that the news is supplied to subscribers in this way at little more than the cost of a daily newspaper, and that it is a complete success."--Herbert T. Wade, Young Folks Treasury: Wonders of Science and Invention, 1909.

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United States Early Radio History

UNITED STATES EARLY RADIO HISTORY

Articles and extracts about early radio and related technologies, concentrating on the United States in the period from 1897 to

1927

Thomas H. White

LATEST ADDITIONS (July 9, 2006) • Three articles in Personal Communication by Wireless, two in Early Radio Industry Development, one in Pioneering U.S. Radio Activities, three in Arc-Transmitter Development, one each in Expanded Audion and Vacuum-tube Development and Fakes, Frauds, and Cranks .

An assortment of highlights -- plus a few lowlifes -- about early U.S. radio history. Over time more articles will be added, to cover additional topics and expand on the existing ones. (This webpage was begun September 30, 1996, and was located at www.ipass.net/~whitetho/index.html until March 11, 2003).

Sections

1. Period Overview (1896-1927) - General reviews of the individuals, activities and technical advances which characterized this era.

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United States Early Radio History

2. The Electric Telegraph (1860-1914) - The electric telegraph revolutionized long-distance

communication, replacing earlier semaphore communication lines. In addition to its primary use for point-to-point messages, other applications were developed, including printing telegraphs ("tickers") used for distributing stock quotes and news reports.

3. News and Entertainment by Telephone (1876-1925) - While the telegraph was mainly limited to transmitting Morse Code and printed messages, the invention of the telephone made distant audio communication possible. And although the telephone was mostly used for private conversations, there was also experimentation with providing home entertainment. In 1893 a particularly sophisticated system, the Telefon Hirmondó, began operation in Budapest, Hungary -- one of its off-shoots, the Telephone Herald of Newark, New Jersey, did not meet with the same financial success.

4. Personal Communication by Wireless (1879-1922) - After Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the existence of radio waves, some were enchanted by the idea that this remarkable scientific advance could be used for personal, mobile communication. But it would take decades before the technology would catch up with the idea.

5. Radio at Sea (1891-1916) - The first major use of radio was for navigation, where it greatly reduced the isolation of ships, saving thousands of lives, even though for the first couple of decades radio was generally limited to Morse Code transmissions. In particular, the 1912 sinking of the Titanic highlighted the value of radio to ocean vessels.

6. Early Radio Industry Development (1897-1914) - As with most innovations, radio began with a series of incremental scientific discoveries and technical refinements, which eventually led to the development of commercial applications. But profits were slow in coming, and for many years the largest U.S. radio firms were better known for their fraudulent stock selling practices than for their financial viability.

7. Pioneering U.S. Radio Activities (1897-1917) - Marconi's demonstration of a practical system for generating and receiving long-range radio signals sparked interest worldwide. It also resulted in numerous competing experimenters and companies throughout the industrialized world, including a number of important figures in the United States, led by Reginald Fessenden and Lee DeForest.

8. Alternator-Transmitter Development (1891-1920) - Radio signals were originally produced by spark transmitters, which were noisy and inefficient. So experimenters worked to develop "continuous-wave" -- also known as "undamped" -- transmitters, whose signals went out on a single frequency, and which could also transmit full-audio signals. One approach used to generate continuous-wave signals was high-speed electrical alternators. By 1919, international control of the Alexanderson alternator-transmitter was considered so important that it triggered

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United States Early Radio History

the formation of the Radio Corporation of America.

9. Arc-Transmitter Development (1904-1921) - A more compact -- although not quite as refined -- method for generating continuous-wave radio signals was the arc-transmitter, initially developed by Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen. Because arc-transmitters were less complicated than alternator-transmitters, a majority of the early experimental audio transmissions would use this device.

10. Audion and Vacuum-tube Receiver Development (1907-1916) - Lee DeForest invented a three-element vacuum-tube detector which he called an Audion, but initially it was so crude and unreliable that it was little more than a curiosity. After a lull of a few years, more capable scientists and engineers, led by AT&T's Dr. Harold Arnold, improved vacuum-tubes into robust and powerful amplifiers, which would revolutionize radio reception.

11. Pre-War Vacuum-tube Transmitter Development (1914-1917) - AT&T initially developed vacuum-tubes as amplifiers for long-distance telephone lines. However, this was only the beginning of the device's versatility, as various scientists and inventors would develop numerous innovations, including efficient continuous-wave transmitters, which would eventually replace the earlier spark, arc, and alternator varieties.

12. Pioneering Amateurs (1900-1917) - Radio captured the imagination of thousands of ordinary persons who wanted to experiment with this amazing new technology. Until late 1912 there was no licencing or regulation of radio transmitters in the United States, so amateurs -- known informally as "hams" -- were free to set up stations wherever they wished. But with the adoption of licencing, amateur operators faced a crisis, as most were now restricted to transmitting on a wavelength of 200 meters (1500 kilohertz), which had a limited sending range. They successfully organized to overcome this limitation, only to face a second hurdle in April, 1917, when the U.S. government shut down all amateur stations, as the country entered World War One.

13. Radio During World War One (1914-1919) - Civilian radio activities were suspended during the war, as the radio industry was taken over by the government. Numerous military applications were developed, including direct communication with airplanes. The war also exposed thousands of service personnel to the on-going advances in radio technology, and even saw a few experiments with broadcasting entertainment to the troops.

14. Expanded Audion and Vacuum-tube Development (1917-1924) - The wartime consolidation of the radio industry under government control led to important advances in radio equipment engineering and manufacturing, especially vacuum-tube technology. Still, some would look toward the day when vacuum-tubes would be supplanted by something more efficient and compact, although this was another development which would take decades to be realized.

15. Amateur Radio After World War One (1919-1924) - Although there was concern that amateur

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United States Early Radio History

radio stations would not be allowed to return to the airwaves after the war, in 1919 the wartime restrictions were ended. And the next few years would see tremendous strides, as amateurs adopted vacuum-tube technology and began to explore transmitting on shortwave frequencies, which resulted in significant increases in range and reliability.

16. Broadcasting After World War One (1918-1921) - Although still unfocused, scattered broadcasting activities, taking advantage of the improvements in vacuum-tube equipment, expanded when the radio industry returned to civilian control.

17. Big Business and Radio (1915-1922) - Once the radio industry finally became profitable, major corporations -- including the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, General Electric, and Westinghouse -- moved into the field. Meanwhile, in 1919, due to pressure from the U.S. government, American Marconi's assets were sold to General Electric, which used them to form the Radio Corporation of America.

18. Broadcasting Becomes Widespread (1922-1923) - Led by Westinghouse's 1920 and 1921 establishment of four well-financed stations -- located in or near Pittsburgh, Boston, Chicago and New York City -- there was a growing sense of excitement as broadcasting activities became more organized. In December, 1921, the Department of Commerce issued regulations formally establishing a broadcast service. Then, in early 1922, a "broadcasting boom" occurred, as a sometimes chaotic mix of stations, sponsored by a wide range of businesses, organizations and individuals, sprang up, numbering over 500 by the end of the year.

19. The Development of Radio Networks (1919-1926) - The introduction of vacuum-tube amplification for telephone lines allowed AT&T to experiment with sending speeches to distant audiences that listened over loudspeakers. The next step would be to use the lines to interconnect radio stations, and in December, 1921 a memo written by two AT&T engineers, J. F. Bratney and H. C. Lauderback, outlined the establishment of a national radio network, financially supported by advertising. General Electric, Westinghouse and RCA responded by forming their own radio network, however, unable to match AT&T's progress, in 1926 they bought out AT&T's network operations, which were reorganized to form the National Broadcasting Company.

20. Financing Radio Broadcasting (1898-1927) - Soon after Marconi's groundbreaking demonstrations, there was speculation about transmitting radio signals to paying customers. However, there was no practical way to limit broadcasts to specific receivers, so for a couple decades broadcasting activities were largely limited to experiments, plus a limited number of public service transmissions by government stations. During the 1922 "broadcasting boom", most programming was commercial-free, and entertainers, caught up in the excitement of this revolutionary new invention, performed for free. Meanwhile, a few people wondered how to pay for all this. In early 1922, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company began promoting the controversial idea of using advertising to finance programming. Initially AT&T claimed that its patent rights gave it a monopoly over U.S. radio advertising, but a 1923 industry settlement paved the way for other stations to begin to sell time. And eventually advertising-supported

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United States Early Radio History

private stations became the standard for U.S. broadcasting stations.

21. Fakes, Frauds, and Cranks (1866-1922) - Unfortunately, some "misunderstood geniuses" are actually crazy, or dishonest, or both.

22. Word Origins - Reviews of the history of the words "radio", "broadcast" and "ham".

23. Early Government Regulation (1903-1946) - Documents covering early international and national control of radio.

❍ 1903 Berlin Conference ❍ 1904 "Roosevelt Board" ❍ 1906 Berlin Convention ❍ 1910 Ship Act (Amended in 1912) ❍ 1912 London Convention and 1912 Radio Act ❍ Selected Radio Service Bulletin Announcements (1915-1923) ❍ Early Government Station Lists (1906-1946) ❍ Radio Regulation by the Department of Commerce (1911-1925)

24. Original Articles - Writings about United States radio history, emphasizing the early AM

broadcast band (mediumwave). ❍ Mystique of the Three-Letter Callsigns ❍ Three-Letter Roll Call ❍ K/W Call Letters in the United States ❍ United States Callsign Policies ❍ U.S. Special Land Stations: Overview ❍ U.S. Special Land Stations: 1913-1921 Recap ❍ Building the Broadcast Band ❍ United States Pioneer Broadcast Service Stations ❍ U.S. Pioneer Broadcast Service Stations: Actions Through June, 1922 ❍ United States Temporary Broadcast Station Grants: 1922-1928 ❍ Early Commerce Department Records: Examples ❍ Kilohertz-to-Meters Conversion Charts ❍ Washington D.C. AM Station History ❍ Extraterrestrial DX Circa 1924: "Will We Talk to Mars in August?" ❍ The International Radio Week Tests ❍ "Battle of the Century": The WJY Story

Search within EarlyRadioHistory.us:

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United States Early Radio History

E-mail: whitetho@ipass.netDavid Sarnoff, 1964: "The computer will become the hub of a vast network of remote data stations and information banks feeding into the machine at a transmission rate of a billion or more bits of information a second. Laser channels will vastly increase both data capacity and the speeds with which it will be transmitted. Eventually, a global communications network handling voice, data and facsimile will instantly link man to machine--or machine to machine--by land, air, underwater, and space circuits. [The computer] will affect man's ways of thinking, his means of education, his relationship to his physical and social environment, and it will alter his ways of living... [Before the end of this century, these forces] will coalesce into what unquestionably will become the greatest adventure of the human mind."--from David Sarnoff by Eugene Lyons, 1966.

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Some Possibilities of Electricity (1892)

In the following article extract, William Crookes optimistically reviews the potential of longrange radio signaling, a very advanced idea when this article appeared, because at the time no one could transmit and receive the signals farther than a few hundred meters. The two main experimenters reviewed are Heinrich Hertz of Germany, and Oliver Lodge of Britain. But there is also an allusion to an earlier, unnamed individual, as Crookes notes that "some years ago I assisted at experiments where messages were transmitted from one part of a house to another without an intervening wire by almost the identical means here described". This third experimenter was later identified as British Professor David E. Hughes, who had performed the experiments beginning in 1879. Because of the distances involved, it is very likely that Hughes' transmissions were the result of radio waves. Unfortunately, he was discouraged from following up on his initial work -- thus it fell to Hertz to conclusively prove the existence of electro-magnetic radiation in 1887. This article also speculated about other areas of electrical research, including the suggestion that "Another point at which the practical electrician should aim is nothing less than the control of the weather", and wondering, with respect to England, "Shall we ever be able, not to reduce our rainfall in quantity, but to concentrate it on a smaller number of days, so as to be freed from a perennial drizzle?"

Fortnightly Review, William Crookes, February 1, 1892:

SOME POSSIBILITIES OF ELECTRICITY.pages 174-176: Whether vibrations of the ether, longer than those which affect us as light, may not be constantly at work around us, we have, until lately, never seriously inquired. But the researches of Lodge in England and of Hertz in Germany give us an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays, from wave-lengths of thousands of miles down to a few feet. Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world--one which it is hard to conceive should contain no possibilities of transmitting and receiving intelligence. Rays of light will not pierce through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a London fog. But the electrical vibrations of a yard or more in wave-length of which I have spoken will easily pierce such mediums, which to them will be transparent. Here, then, is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our present costly appliances. Granted a few reasonable postulates, the whole thing comes well within the realms of possible fulfilment. At the present time experimentalists are able to generate electrical waves of any desired wave-length from a few feet upwards, and to keep up a succession of such waves radiating into space in all directions. Possible, too, with some of these rays, if not with all, to refract them through suitably-shaped bodies acting as lenses, and so direct a sheaf of rays in any given direction ; enormous lens-shaped masses of pitch and similar bodies have been used for this purpose. Also an experimentalist at a distance can receive some, if not all, of these rays on a properly-constituted instrument, and by concerted signals messages in the Morse code can thus pass from one operator to another. What, therefore, remains to be discovered is--firstly, simpler and more certain means of generating electrical rays of any desired wave-length, from the shortest, say of a few feet in length, which will easily pass through buildings and fogs, to those long waves whose lengths are measured by tens, hundreds, and thousands of miles; secondly,

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Some Possibilities of Electricity (1892)

more delicate receivers which will respond to wave-lengths between certain defined limits and be silent to all others; thirdly, means of darting the sheaf of rays in any desired direction, whether by lenses or reflectors, by the help of which the sensitiveness of the receiver (apparently the most difficult of the problems to be solved) would not need to be so delicate as when the rays to be picked up are simply radiating into space in all directions, and fading away according to the law of inverse squares. Any two friends living within the radius of sensibility of their receiving instruments, having first decided on their special wave length and attuned their respective instruments to mutual receptivity, could thus communicate as long and as often as they pleased by timing the impulses to produce long and short intervals on the ordinary Morse code. At first sight an objection to this plan would be its want of secrecy. Assuming that the correspondents were a mile apart the transmitter would send out the waves in all directions, filling a sphere a mile in radius, and it would therefore be possible for any one living within a mile of the sender to receive the communication. This could be got over in two ways. If the exact position of both sending and receiving instruments were accurately known, the rays could be concentrated with more or less exactness on the receiver. If, however, the sender and receiver were moving about, so that the lens device could not be adopted, the correspondents must attune their instruments to a definite wavelength, say, for example, 50 yards. I assume here that the progress of discovery would give instruments capable of adjustment by turning a screw or altering the length of a wire, so as to become receptive of wavelengths of any preconcerted length. Thus, when adjusted to 50 yards, the transmitter might emit, and the receiver respond to, rays varying between 45 and 55 yards, and be silent to all others. Considering that there would be the whole range of waves to choose from, varying from a few feet to several thousand miles, there would be sufficient secrecy ; for curiosity the most inveterate would surely recoil from the task of passing in review all the millions of possible wave-lengths on the remote chance of ultimately hitting on the particular wave-length employed by his friends whose correspondence he wished to tap. By "coding" the message even this remote chance of surreptitious straying could be obviated. This is no mere dream of a visionary philosopher. All the requisites needed to bring it within the grasp of daily life are well within the possibilities of discovery, and are so reasonable and so clearly in the path of researches which are now being actively prosecuted in every capital of Europe that we may any day expect to hear that they have emerged from the realms of speculation into those of sober fact. Even now, indeed, telegraphing without wires is possible within a restricted radius of a few hundred yards, and some years ago I assisted at experiments where messages were transmitted from one part of a house to another without an intervening wire by almost the identical means here described.

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Researches of Prof. D. E. Hughes (1899)

A History of Wireless Telegraphy, J.J Fahie, 1899, pages 305-316:

APPENDIX D. RESEARCHES OF PROF. D. E. HUGHES, F.R.S., IN ELECTRIC WAVES AND THEIR APPLICATION TO WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY, 1879-1886. It may be desirable to place briefly on record the circumstances under which the following remarkable communication was written. While revising the last sheets of this work, it occurred to the author to ask Sir William Crookes for some particulars of the experiments to which he alluded in his 'Fortnightly' article, some passages from which are quoted on pp. 201-203. On April 22, 1899, Sir William replied as follows:--

DEAR MR FAHIE,--The experiments referred to at page 176 of my 'Fortnightly' article as having taken place "some years ago" were tried by Prof. Hughes when experimenting with the microphone. I have not ceased since then urging on him to publish an account of his experiments. I do not feel justified in saying more about them, but if you were to write to him, telling him what I say, it might induce him to publish. It is a pity that a man who was so far ahead of all other workers in the field of wireless telegraphy should lose all the credit due to his great ingenuity and prevision.--Believe me, very truly yours,

WILLIAM CROOKES.

On receipt of this letter I wrote to Prof. Hughes. In reply he said:--

"Your letter of 26th instant has brought upon me a flood of old souvenirs in relation to my past experiments on aërial telegraphy. They were completely unknown to the general public, and I feared that the few distinguished men who saw them had forgotten them, or at least had forgotten how the results shown them were produced. . . . "At this late date I do not wish to set up any claim to priority, as I have never published a word on the subject; and it would be unfair to later workers in the same field to spring an unforeseen claimant to the experiments which they have certainly made without any knowledge of my work."

On second (and my readers will say, wiser) thoughts, Prof. Hughes sent me the following letter, in the eliciting of which I consider myself especially fortunate and privileged:--

40 LAGHAM STREET, W., April 29, 1899. DEAR SIR,--In reply to yours of the 26th inst., in which you say that Sir William Crookes has told you that he saw some experiments of mine on aërial telegraphy in about December 1879, of which he thinks I ought to have published an account, and of which you ask for some information, I beg to reply with a few leading experiments that I made on this subject from 1879 up to 1886:-- In 1879, being engaged upon experiments with my microphone, together with my induction balance, I remarked that at some times I could not get a perfect balance in the induction balance, through apparent want of insulation in the coils; but investigation showed me that the real cause was some loose contact or microphonic joint excited in some portion of the circuit. I then applied the microphone, and found that it gave a current or sound in the telephone receiver, no matter if the microphone was placed direct in the circuit or placed independently at several feet distance from the coils, through which an intermittent current was passing. After numerous experiments, I found that the effect was entirely caused by the extra current, produced in the primary coil of the induction balance. Further researches proved that an interrupted current in any coil gave out at each interruption such intense extra currents that the whole atmosphere in the room (or in several rooms distant) would have a momentary invisible charge, which became evident if a microphonic joint was used as a receiver with a telephone. This led me to experiment upon the best form of a receiver for these invisible electric waves, which evidently permeated great distances, and through all apparent obstacles, such as walls, &c. I found that all microphonic contacts or joints were extremely sensitive. Those formed of a hard carbon such as coke, or a combination of a piece of coke resting upon a bright steel contact, were very sensitive and self-restoring; whilst a loose contact between metals was equally sensitive, but would cohere, or remain in full contact, after the passage of an electric wave. The sensitiveness of these microphonic contacts in metals has since been rediscovered by Mons. Ed Branly of Paris, and by Prof. Oliver Lodge, in England, by whom the name of "coherer" has been given to this organ of reception; but, as we wish this organ to make a momentary contact and not cohere permanently, the name seems to me ill-suited for the instrument. The most sensitive and perfect receiver that I have yet made does not cohere permanently, but recovers its original state instantly, and

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Researches of Prof. D. E. Hughes (1899)

therefore requires no tapping or mechanical aid to the separation of the contacts after momentarily being brought into close union. I soon found that, whilst an invisible spark would produce a thermo-electric current in the microphonic contacts (sufficient to be heard in the telephone in its circuit), it was far better and more powerful to use a feeble voltaic cell in the receiving circuit, the microphonic joint then acting as a relay by diminishing the resistance at the contact, under the influence of the electric wave received through the atmosphere. I will not describe the numerous forms of the transmitter and receiver that I made in 1879, all of which I wrote down in several volumes of manuscripts in 1879 (but these have never been published), and most of which can be seen here at my residence at any time; but I will confine myself now to a few salient points. I found that very sudden electric impulses, whether given out to the atmosphere through the extra current from a coil or from a frictional electric machine, equally affected the microphonic joint, the effect depending more on the sudden high potential effect than on any prolonged action. Thus, a spark obtained by rubbing a piece of sealing-wax was equally effective as a discharge from a Leyden jar of the same potential.1 The rubbed sealing-wax and charged Leyden jar had no effect until they were discharged by a spark, and it was evident that this spark, however feeble, acted upon the whole surrounding atmosphere in the form of waves or invisible rays, the laws of which I could not at the time determine. Hertz, however, by a series of original and masterly experiments, proved in 1887-89 that they were real waves similar to light, but of a lower frequency, though of the same velocity. In 1879, whilst making these experiments on aërial transmission, I had two different problems to solve: 1st, What was the true nature of these electrical aërial waves, which seemed, whilst not visible, to spurn all idea of insulation, and to penetrate all space to a distance undetermined. 2nd, To discover the best receiver that could act upon a telephone or telegraph instrument, so as to be able to utilise (when required) these waves for the transmission of messages. The second problem came easy to me when I found that the microphone, which I had previously discovered in 1877-78, had alone the power of rendering these invisible waves evident, either in a telephone or a galvanometer, and up to the present time I do not know of anything approaching the sensitiveness of a microphonic joint as a receiver. Branly's tube, now used by Marconi, was described in my first paper to the Royal Society (May 8, 1878) as the microphone tube, filled with loose filings of zinc and silver; and Prof. Lodge's coherer is an ordinary steel microphone, used for a different purpose from that in which I first described it.2 During the long-continued experiments on this subject, between 1879 and 1886, many curious phenomena came out which would be too long to describe. I found that the effect of the extra current in a coil was not increased by having an iron core as an electro-magnet--the extra current was less rapid, and therefore less effective. A similar effect of a delay was produced by Leyden-jar discharges. The material of the contact-breaker of the primary current had also a great effect. Thus, if the current was broken between two or one piece of carbon, no effect could be perceived of aërial waves, even at short distances of a few feet. The extra current from a small coil without iron was as powerful as an intense spark from a secondary coil, and at that time my experiments seemed to be confined to the use of a single coil of my induction balance, charged by six Daniell cells. With higher battery power the extra current invariably destroyed the insulation of the coils. In December 1879 I invited several persons to see the results then obtained. Amongst others who called on me and saw my results were-- Dec. 1879.--Mr W. H. Preece, F.R.S.; Sir William Crookes, F.R.S.; Sir W. Roberts-Austen, F.R.S.; Prof. W. Grylls Adams, F.R.S.; Mr W. Grove. Feb. 20, 1880.--Mr Spottiswoode, Pres. R.S.; Prof. Huxley, F.R.S.; Sir George Gabriel Stokes, F.R.S. Nov. 7, 1888.--Prof. Dewar, F.R.S.; Mr Lennox, Royal Institution. They all saw experiments upon aërial transmission, as already described, by means of the extra current produced from a small coil and received upon a semi-metallic microphone, the results being heard upon a telephone in connection with the receiving microphone. The transmitter and receiver were in different rooms, about 60 feet apart. After trying successfully all distances allowed in my residence in Portland Street, my usual method was to put the transmitter in operation and walk up and down Great Portland Street with the receiver in my hand, with the telephone to the ear. The sounds seemed to slightly increase for a distance of 60 yards, then gradually diminish, until at 500 yards I could no longer with certainty hear the transmitted signals. What struck me as remarkable was that, opposite certain houses, I could hear better, whilst at others the signals could hardly be perceived. Hertz's discovery of nodal points in reflected waves (in 1887-89) has explained to me what was then considered a mystery. At Mr A. Stroh's telegraph instrument manufactory Mr Stroh and myself could hear perfectly the currents transmitted from the third storey to the basement, but I could not detect clear signals at my residence about a mile distant. The innumerable gas and water pipes intervening seemed to absorb or weaken too much the feeble transmitted extra currents from a small coil. The President of the Royal Society, Mr Spottiswoode, together with the two hon. secretaries, Prof. Huxley and Prof. G. Stokes, called upon me on February 20, 1880, to see my experiments upon aërial transmission of signals. The experiments shown were most successful, and at first they seemed astonished at the results; but towards the close of three hours' experiments Prof. Stokes said that all the results could be explained by known electro-magnetic induction effects, and therefore he could not accept my view of actual aërial electric waves unknown up to that time, but thought I had quite enough original matter to form a paper on the subject to be read at the Royal Society. I was so discouraged at being unable to convince them of the truth of these aërial electric waves that I actually refused to write a paper on the subject until I was better prepared to demonstrate the existence of these waves; and I continued my experiments for some years, in hopes of arriving at a perfect scientific demonstration of the existence of aërial electric waves produced by a spark from the extra currents in coils, or from frictional electricity, or from secondary coils. The triumphant demonstration of these waves was reserved to Prof. Hertz, who by his masterly researches upon the subject in 1887-89 completely demonstrated not only their existence but their identity

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Researches of Prof. D. E. Hughes (1899)

with ordinary light, in having the power of being reflected and refracted, &c., with nodal points, by means of which the length of the waves could be measured. Hertz's experiments were far more conclusive than mine, although he used a much less effective receiver than the microphone or coherer. I then felt it was now too late to bring forward my previous experiments; and through not publishing my results and means employed, I have been forced to see others remake the discoveries I had previously made as to the sensitiveness of the microphonic contact and its useful employment as a receiver for electric aërial waves. Amongst the earliest workers in the field of aërial transmission I would draw attention to the experiments of Prof. Henry, who describes in his work, published by the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., vol. i. p. 203 (date unknown, probably about 1850), how he magnetised a needle in a coil at 30 feet distance, and magnetised a needle by a discharge of lightning at eight miles' distance.3 Marconi has lately demonstrated that by the use of the Hertzian waves and Branly's coherer he has been enabled to transmit and receive aërial electric waves to a greater distance than previously ever dreamed of by the numerous discoverers and inventors who have worked silently in this field. His efforts at demonstration merit the success he has received; and if (as I have lately read) he has discovered the means of concentrating these waves on a single desired point without diminishing their power, then the world will be right in placing his name on the highest pinnacle in relation to aërial electric telegraphy.--Sincerely yours,

D. E. HUGHES, J. J. FAHIE, Esq., Claremont Hill, St Helier's, Jersey.

On the publication of this letter in the 'Electrician' (May 5, 1899), Mr John Munro called on Prof. Hughes, and was accorded the privilege of inspecting his apparatus, mostly self-made and of the simplest materials, and his note-books, filled with experiments in ink or pencil, dated or dateless, and some marked "extraordinary," "important," and so on. An interesting account of this interview was afterwards published by Mr Munro,4 from which I make a few extracts, as they help to illustrate and supplement the Professor's own account. After satisfying himself as to the cause of the trouble in his induction-balance experiments as stated above (p. 296), Prof. Hughes joined a single cell (fig. 1) in circuit with a clockwork interrupter I, and the primary coil C of the induction balance. This "transmitter" was connected by a wire W, several feet in length, to the "receiver," which consisted of a telephone T in circuit with a microphone M. With such an arrangement the "extra spark" of the transmitter was always heard in the telephone. These sounds were found to vary with the conditions of the experiment: thus, with an electromotive force of 1/50 volt the sound was stronger than with several cells; it was also louder and clearer when the contact

points of the interrupter were of metal--not metal to carbon, or carbon to carbon. Again, an iron core in the coil C, though productive of a stronger spark, rather diminished than increased the corresponding sound in the telephone. Indeed, the spark from the Faraday electro-magnet of the Royal Institution, excited by a large Grove battery, had little effect, and even a dynamo at work beside the receiver gave a very poor result.

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Researches of Prof. D. E. Hughes (1899)

Prof. Hughes tried many experiments to satisfy himself that his receiver (his microphone and telephone) was influenced by the extra spark solely, and not by the ordinary electro-magnetic induction. He inserted coils in the transmitting and receiving circuits, placing them parallel, and at right angles to each other--that is, in positions favourable and unfavourable to such induction--but without modifying the effect. He also reduced the number of turns of wire on the coil C, and even removed it altogether, connecting the battery and interrupter by only three inches of wire, and still heard the sounds as distinctly as before. That electro-static induction had no part in the phenomenon was shown by inserting charged conductors of large surface (for example metal discs) in the two circuits and shifting their positions with respect to each other without producing any effect on the receiver. Having concluded from these and numerous other observations that the results were conductive in principle rather than inductive, and were due to electrical impulses or waves set in motion by the sparks at the interrupter and filling all the surrounding space, Prof. Hughes set himself to find the most sensitive form of microphone to receive the waves. Contacts of metal were found to be apt to stick together, or "cohere," as we now say. A microphone which is both sensitive and self-restoring or non-cohering is made with a carbon contact resting lightly on bright steel, as shown in fig. 2, where C is a carbon pencil touching a needle N, and S an adjustable spring of brass by which the pressure of the contact can be regulated by means of the disc D. An extremely sensitive but easily deranged form of microphone is shown in fig. 3, where S is a steel hook, and C a fine copper wire with a loop on the end which has been oxidised and smoked in the flame of a spirit-lamp. The carbonised loop and steel hook are placed in a small bottle B for safety. Another form of microphone which the Professor tried was a tube containing metal filings, which forestalls the Branly tube, but as the coherence of the filings

was a disadvantage he abandoned it. Contacts of iron and mercury were sensitive, but very troublesome; while contacts of iron and steel cohered, but were sensitive, and kept well when immersed in a mixture of petroleum and vaseline, which, though an insulator, does not bar the electric waves. Some of these microphone arrangements were found to be very sensitive to small charges of electricity---far more so than the gold-leaf electroscope and the quadrant electrometer. Even a metal filing on a stick of sealing-wax carried enough electricity from a Leyden jar to affect the microphone and give a sound in the telephone, while it had no effect on the electroscope or the electrometer.

With such delicate receivers Prof. Hughes discarded the connecting wire W in fig. 1, thus separating the receiver from the transmitter, and producing the germ of a wireless telegraph. His first experiment of this kind was made between October 15 and 24, 1879, the transmitter being in one room and the receiver in an adjoining room, but a wire from the receiver limited the air gap to about 6 feet. Fig. 4, which is roughly copied from the Professor's own diagram, shows the arrangement, where W is the wire, B the battery, I the interrupter, C the coil, T the telephone, M the microphone, and E, E' the earth (gas-pipes). In another experiment, made about the middle of November 1879, he connected a fender to the interrupter "to act as a radiator," and afterwards, instead of the fender, he used wires (answering to the "wings" of Hertz) on both transmitting and receiving apparatus, the wires being stiffened with laths to bold them in place.

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Researches of Prof. D. E. Hughes (1899)

The use of an "earth" connection led him to try the effect of joining the telephone to a gas-pipe of lead, and the microphone to a water-pipe of iron, as shown in fig. 5. The result was an improved sound in the telephone, and he concluded that the different metals formed a weak "earth battery," from which a permanent current ran through the circuit. On this supposition he reasoned that the electric waves influencing the microphone, and perhaps changing its resistance, would rapidly alter the strength of this current, and so account for the heightened effects in the telephone. Acting on this idea, he included an E.M.F. in the receiving circuit. A single cell was more than enough, and had to be reduced to as little as 1/25 of a volt in order not to permanently break down the contact resistance of the microphone.

"Thus," says Mr Munro, "Prof. Hughes had step by step put together all the principal elements of the wireless telegraph as we know it to-day, and although he was groping in the dark before the light of Hertz arose, it is little short of magical that in a few months, even weeks, and by using the simplest means, he thus forestalled the great Marconi advance by nearly twenty years!" In the fifty years (just completed) of a brilliant professorial career at Cambridge, Sir George Stokes has given, times out of number, sound advice and helpful suggestions to those who have sought him; but in this case, as events show, the great weight of his opinion has kept back the clock for many years. With proper encouragement in 1879-80 Prof. Hughes would have followed up his clues, and, with his extraordinary keenness in research, there can be no doubt that he would have anticipated Hertz in the complete discovery of electric waves, and Marconi in the application of them to wireless telegraphy, and so have altered considerably the course of scientific history. As a recent commentator pithily says: "Hughes's experiments of 1879 were virtually a discovery of Hertzian waves before Hertz, of the coherer before Branly, and of wireless telegraphy before Marconi and others." The writer goes on to say, "Prof. Hughes has a great reputation already, but these latter experiments will add enormously to it, and place him among the foremost electricians of all time"5--praise which, knowing the learned professor as I do, I consider none too great. _________________ 1 Prof. Lodge subsequently and independently observed this fact, and illustrates it beautifully is his 'Work of Hertz,' pp. 27, 28.--J. J. F. 2 Prof. Hughes is rightly regarded as the real discoverer of the electrical behaviour of a bad joint or loose contact, the study of which in his hands has given us the microphone; but as in the case of Hertzian-wave effects before Hertz, so, long before Hughes, "mere phenomena of loose contact," as Sir George Stokes called them, must have often manifested themselves in the working of electrical apparatus. For an interesting example see Arthur Schuster's paper read before the British Association in 1874 (or abstract, 'Telegraphic Journal,' vol. ii. p. 289), where the effects are described as a new discovery in electricity, and disguised under the title of the paper, "On Unilateral Conductivity." Schuster suspected the cause--" Two wires screwed together may not touch each other, but be separated by a thin layer of air "--but he missed its real significance. The phenomenon was a kind of bye-product, cropped up while he was engaged on other work, and so was not pursued far enough.--J. J. F. 3 The 'Polytechnic Review,' March 25, 1843, says: "Professor Henry communicated to the American Society that he had succeeded in magnetising needles by the secondary current in a wire more than 220 feet distant from the wire through which the primary current, excited by a single spark from an electrical machine, was passing." Indeed Prof. Henry noted many cases of what we now call Hertzian-wave effects, but what he and every one else in those days thought were only extraordinary cases of induction. Many experimenters after Henry must have observed similar effects. See for example 'Telegraphic Journal,' February 15, 1876, p. 61, on "The 'Etheric' Force"; and the 'Electrician,' vol. xliii. p. 204.--J. J. F. 4 'Electrical Review,' June 2, 1899. 5 The Globe, May 12, 1899. Prof. Hughes, full of honours, on January 22, 1900, aged sixty-nine. See, amongst other obituary notices, the 'Times,' January 24, and the 'Electrician,' January 26.

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Obituary: David Edward Hughes (1900)

The Electrician (London), January 26, 1900, pages 457-458:

OBITUARY.

DAVID EDWARD HUGHES. It is with profound sorrow that we have to announce the death, on Monday evening last, of Prof. D. E. Hughes. His death, at the age of 69 years, deprives the world of one of its most accomplished electricians, the electrical profession of one of its most honoured and respected members, and a world-wide circle of admirers of a genial and well-beloved friend. It can truly be recorded that David Hughes lived without making a single enemy, and died mourned by all whose good fortune it has been to come within the cheery circle of his friendship. We mourn his loss not only as a well-esteemed personal friend, but also as a compatriot to whose versatility and genius his native country has been astoundingly blind, while all the countries of the civilised world have showered honours upon his head. David Edward Hughes was born in London on May 16, 1881. When but seven years of age he emigrated with his parents to the United States, where he developed such musical ability that he attracted the attention of Herr Hast, an eminent German pianist in America, who procured for him at a very early age the professorship of music in the college of Bardstown, Kentucky. Simultaneously with his musical studies Hughes appears to have developed a remarkable fondness for physical science and mechanics, and his studies in these branches of knowledge justified his appointment, at the early age of 19, to the chair of natural philosophy in the same college as that in which he held the professorship of music. Here, in the intervals between his educational duties, Prof. Hughes turned his inventive ability and knowledge of physical science to the development and improvement of electrical instruments, notably those for telegraphic purposes. The first important invention published to the world at this time was his world-renowned type-printing telegraph, an invention which was speedily taken up in the United States as a formidable competitor to the Morse system monopolised by the American Telegraph Co. A patent for this instrument was taken out in the United States in 1855, and in less than two years a number of small telegraph companies, including the Western Union--which was at that time in its early stages of development--had united to form one large corporation, the present Western Union Telegraph Co., to carry on the business of telegraphy on the Hughes system. In that same year Prof. Hughes returned to England for the purpose of introducing the instrument to the then existing Electric Telegraph Co., which controlled the telegraphic business in this

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Obituary: David Edward Hughes (1900)

country. Failing, however, in this endeavour, Prof. Hughes was compelled to carry his invention across the Channel to France, where it met with a much more enthusiastic reception at the hands of the French Government, who agreed to give the instrument a year of practical trial on the French land lines, and if found satisfactory it was to be finally adopted. Aided by his experience already acquired in America, Prof. Hughes was able to make the experimental trial a thorough and complete success. The instrument was adopted in France, and indeed throughout Europe, and honours showered thickly upon the head of the inventor. Napoleon III created Prof. Hughes a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour; and scarcely more than two years later he received from the King of Italy the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazare. In 1863 the type-printer came in for recognition in this country at the hands of the United Kingdom Telegraph Co., but it cannot be said that either the English companies or the English Government recognised to so full an extent as has been done abroad the merits of this remarkable invention. In 1883, owing to the success of the instrument in Russia after six months' trial, Prof. Hughes was created a Commander of the Order of St. Anne; and in 1867 he installed his instruments on the Prussian land lines, and in Austria. He received the Order of the Iron Crown from the King of Austria, while the Sultan of Turkey bestowed on him the Grand Cross of the Medjidie. In 1867 the Paris Exhibition awarded him one of the ten gold medals designed to reward the very highest achievements in science at that time. We may add that Prof. Hughes also received the Noble Order of St. Michael for the success of his instruments in Bavaria and Wurtemburg; while later, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain acknowledged his genius by equally marked honours. It has been erroneously supposed that the unfortunate failure of the Government of Great Britain adequately to recognise the genius of Prof. Hughes has been connected in some way with the comparatively small part played by his type printing telegraph in this country. That, however, affords no justification for the lamentable procrastination of the Government in this respect. We have repeatedly called attention to the singular meritoriousness of Prof. Hughes' many researches in practical and theoretical science, from the point of view of a national recognition and honour; and although unfortunately it is now too late for Prof. Hughes himself to be gladdened by the receipt of such recognition from his own country, we trust that the nation which has failed to do him justice during his life will perceive a clear call to raise a suitable memorial to him now that he is dead. With this end in view, we may continue to enumerate the benefactions bestowed by Prof. Hughes upon the world through the medium of his inventions and researches. Quite setting aside his type-printing instrument, he has accomplished far more than would be sufficient to justify a national memorial. Take, for example, his invention of the microphone, an instrument which is the very foundation of our modern system of commercial telephony. True, others before him had succeeded in transmitting sounds electrically over a distance, but it was not until Hughes made a free present to the world of the simple yet marvellously-ingenious carbon microphone, that practical telephony became a possibility. Whether in the invention of the instrument itself, or in the generous presentation of it freely to the world, he claims our admiration and honour. Space does not here permit us to do more than enumerate some of Prof. Hughes' contributions to electrical science. Our readers are familiar with the long succession of researches he made in the domain of the experimental theory of magnetism. His Papers on this subject were read before many scientific and technical societies, and brought him not only the Fellowship of the Royal Society, but medals and similar honours from numerous lesser institutions. In 1886 he filled the presidential chair of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

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Obituary: David Edward Hughes (1900)

As another example of the fundamental character of Prof. Hughes' researches in regard to modern scientific development, it is not too much to say that he discovered the essential principle of wireless telegraphy. Unfortunately, the discovery was not published at a sufficiently early date, for it was only on May 5th last that the first public announcement of this fact was made, in an article contributed by Prof. Hughes himself to The Electrician. This article abundantly proved his claim to have been the first to transmit actual signals over a considerable distance by means of electrically-generated ether waves; which is, in fact, the basis and essence of wireless telegraphy on the Marconi system. The compass of a mere biographical sketch in this journal does not admit of bringing out in any degree of prominence the versatility and surpassing genius of Prof. Hughes. But when the history of electrical science, discovery, and invention during the latter half of the nineteenth century shall have been written, the name of Prof. D. E. Hughes will be conspicuous among those whose labours have contributed to form the subject matter of its pages.

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Wireless Notes--Hughes Equipment (1922)

The Electrician (London), March 31, 1922, page 396:

Wireless Notes. In a letter to the "Times," Mr. A. A. Campbell Swinton states that, in addition to DAVID HUGHES' NOTEBOOKS, containing an account of his experiments in wireless telegraphy in 1879, recently bequeathed to the British Museum, the Museum has even more recently acquired a further set of these notebooks, containing Hughes' own illustrated account of his invention of the microphone. Still more interesting, he states, is the fact that a search, suggested by himself to Colonel H. G. Lyons, of the Science Museum, made amongst the contents of a room full of Hughes' personal effects that for the last twenty years have been stored in a furniture repository in London, has revealed the existence of a number of electrical instruments, coniprising the original first microphones invented by Hughes, and the actual apparatus with which he made his early wireless experiments, all obviously constructed with his own hands. The several instruments can easily be identified by the illustrated descriptions in the notebooks. The collection is on view in the Western Hall of the Science Museum, South Kensington.

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World's First Wireless Outfit Found in London Tenement (1922)

In the photograph, Hughes' simple receiver is on the left, and his transmitter on the right. Also, contrary to what this article states, Hughes was not born in the United States--he was actually born in London, although his family moved to the U.S. when he was seven.

Popular Science Monthly, August, 1922, page 57:

World's First Wireless Outfit Found in London Tenement

THE crude but sensitive instruments with which David Hughes first discovered wireless waves

have been unearthed in a London, England, tenement and transferred to a place of honor in the South Kensington Museum. Hughes experimented with electric waves long before Marconi, but the latter gained the distinction of being the discoverer because he was the first to recognize them as ether waves. The newly found instruments consist of a spring wound device that sent out electric impulses at regular intervals, and a carbon microphone used by Hughes as the detector. History tells us that during an experiment in 1879 Hughes started the transmitter and then walked slowly away from his laboratory with the receiver in his hand, noting how far the sounds could be detected. At times he was able to hear them 500 feet distant. Although Hughes was an extremely able scientist, he lived and worked in a frugal manner. Most of his instruments were made up of odds and ends, such as pins, needles, scraps of wire, and pieces of metal utensils. Yet even with these he was able to produce delicate mechanisms that were the forerunners of those in operation today. The carbon grain transmitter was first studied by Hughes

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World's First Wireless Outfit Found in London Tenement (1922)

and a widely used electrical device known as an induction balance was invented by him. Later he published a theory of magnetism that brought him distinction. Hughes was born in America, where he lived during his early years; but after inventing a printing telegraph he moved to England and the Continent. There he tried for many years to have the machine approved by foreign telegraph firms. Finally, after being accepted by the French government, it was adopted by all the leading companies and brought wealth to the inventor.

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The Collins Wireless Telephone (1902)

Scientific American, July 19, 1902, pages 37-38:

THE COLLINS WIRELESS TELEPHONE.BY A. FREDERICK COLLINS.

There are at least five different methods by which articulate speech may be transmitted electrically without connecting wires between two given points. The first and oldest of these is by conduction through land and water. In this system four conductors are earthed, two at the transmitting and two at the receiving end. In this way a portion of the current, passing through the transmitting circuit, is shunted by means of the earth between the instruments and acts upon the receiver, since this path offers the least resistance. As early as 1825 James Bowen Lindsay operated a system of wireless signals by this method, but by substituting a telephone transmitter for a telegraphic key and a telephone receiver for the galvanometer speech may be as easily sent as a signal. This is usually the first method suggested to the inventor seeking to transmit articulate speech without wires, but a very few quantitative tests will show that the limitations appear almost before its commercial value begins. The second and most beautiful form of wireless telegraphy is due to the effects of mutual induction or the magnetic lines of force exerted by one coil of wire on another placed in the same field of force by mutual induction. This is the ideal system, since no earth connection either at the receiver or transmitter is necessary to effect transmission, but the action is due entirely to the electric whirls or vortices set up in the ether. In this case the effective distance to which speech may be sent is limited by the number of turns of wire on the coil; their distance apart and the mutual induction will then depend upon the current flowing in the primary. Like the former system, the limits are soon reached. The radiophone and speaking telephone are two forms employing a beam of light to transmit telephonic messages. A pencil of light is allowed to fall on a mirror fastened to the diaphragm of a telephone transmitter, and by means of lenses the light is focused on a selenium cell at a distance of two or three hundred feet. In series with the selenium cell is a telephone receiver and a battery. When the sound waves of the voice impinge on the diaphragm of the transmitter, its vibrations cause the light to be displaced and its intensity on the selenium cell varied. Now selenium possesses the property of transmitting an electric current with twice the conductivity value when in the light that it possesses in the dark, so that there is a wide divergence of conductivity assured when the constantly varying beam of light falls upon it, and thus articulate speech is reproduced. The fourth system is that employing Hertzian waves, but as the enormously high-frequency oscillations produced by the disruptive discharge of a high potential current is much too rapid to make itself manifest in a telephone receiver, the oscillation circuit which emits the waves must be damped down by the addition of capacity in the form of Leyden jars or condensers and its relation to inductance sustained by supplementing the capacity with coils of wire until the telephone receiver will respond to a vibration of electric oscillations. This system of wireless telephony offers the most interesting experimental field of investigation, but its functions are so complicated that a very limited distance has yet been obtained with it. In making some tests in 1899 I found a method by which the disadvantages of the very rapid oscillations set up by a disruptive discharge in free air, as the spark of a Ruhmkorff coil produces, and without resorting to the loading of the

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The Collins Wireless Telephone (1902)

oscillating circuit with artificial capacities and inductances. This was accomplished by permitting the discharge to take place in the earth instead of the air. To render this process clearer, let us employ, not only as a mere analogue, but as a similar proposition, the fact that electric oscillations emit electric waves, just as an electrically charged vibrating atom sends forth waves which are likewise of electromagnetic origin formed by the polarization of the ether. Even alternating currents of comparatively low frequency of a few thousand per second will emit long electrical waves in space, as Guarini has shown in his experiments in wireless transmission between Antwerp and Brussels. The length of the waves depends on the periodicity of the oscillations, the oscillations on the inductance, capacity and resistance of the circuit, and these in turn on the constants of the ether.

The constants of the ether are its elasticity and its density. The elasticity of the ether is not known absolutely, but is measured by its reciprocal or dielectric constant, which is the ether modified by its relations with gross matter, and is called its specific inductive capacity. Ether, when in close proximity with gross matter, apparently assumes a greater density than in vacuo or free air, however paradoxical it may seem; it is now well known that it is not the conductor or wire joining an electrical circuit which conducts the electricity, but the tube of ether including the wire. The atoms of which the earth is composed are likewise permeated with the ether to a much greater extent than the atoms of gases forming the air. To this condition Tesla has given the name of bound ether. Similarly as mediums of greater densities transmit sound waves to greater distances than mediums of lesser densities, so the bound ether of the earth will propagate electric waves of proper length to greater distances than those of the ether-bound air. As an illustration, in the case of sound waves, if a bell is struck in free air it can be heard at a distance of a mile, it could be heard at a distance of twelve miles if struck under water, for water has a density twelve times that of air; now, when a rapidly alternating current of high potential is discharged into the earth and there allowed to restore the equilibrium, electric waves are emitted and propagated through the earth; the length of the waves is determined by the frequency of alternation and the distance of propagation will depend upon the density of the

medium. These waves are, of course, normally radiated in every direction, but it has been found possible to reflect them and so make them unidirectional within certain limits. Fig. 1 shows photographically the wireless telephone transmitter the author devised for field work. Fig. 2 is a diagrammatic drawing of the system which has been patented in the United States and Great Britain. In the patent specifications a telegraph key is substituted for a telephone transmitter, as the system is interchangeable and may be used either for wireless telephony or telegraphy with some minor changes and additions. Referring to Fig. 2, A is a transmitter and B the receiver. The primary coil is shown at 1 and is in series with the battery, 2, and the key, 3. One terminal of the secondary winding, 4, is connected with a special form of transmitter, 6, and this to a large capacity, 7. The opposite terminal of the induction coil is earthed at 8, and bridged across the terminals of the secondary is the condenser; 10 is a "variator," which will be again referred to. The receiver is quite simple and consists essentially of a transformer coil, 1, a telephone receiver, 2, and a battery, 3; the condenser, 4, of large and equal capacity to that employed in the transmitter, and 5 the earthed terminal. The action of the instruments is as follows: When the key, 3, closes the primary circuit the current is automatically varied by a special device, 10, which takes the place of the ordinary interrupter; this produces alternations in the secondary coil, 4, giving rise to high potentials at the terminals, 7 and 8. This potential difference is, however, modified by the transmitter, 6. The surging of the alternating currents through the circuit formed by 7 and 8, emits waves principally at 8, and these traveling with the speed of all other electromagnetic waves reach the earth plate, 4, and, finding an ether path of greater

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The Collins Wireless Telephone (1902)

density surrounding the circuit, 4 and 5, it traverses that circuit in preference to passing onward through the earth, since the former offers the least resistance. This sets up alternating currents in the transformer coil, 1, and these are impressed on the telephone receiver, 2. The capacity areas, 4 and 7, should be large and of special construction to secure the best effects. The capacities, 4 and 7, are not elevated, and the larger the capacities the greater the distance over which articulate speech may he carried without wires. Both the transmitter and receiver are mounted on tripods providing the operators with testing apparatus almost as portable as a camera. The tests, from the incipiency of the idea of wireless telephony, have been made at Narbeth, Pa., where the conditions were all that could be desired. In 1899, speech was transmitted by this system a distance of 200 feet; in 1900 a mile was covered, when with the equipment shown in the engravings articulate speech was transmitted across the Delaware River at Philadelphia, and in 1902 with the instruments placed on hills separated by a railroad, valleys, wooded lands and numerous streams a distance of three miles was attained. The results have shown the possible commercial value of this system of wireless telephony, which is soon to be perfected for actual use.

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

The Technical World, March, 1905, page 71:

Wireless Telephony

ELSEWHERE in this issue will be found a description of the various wireless telephone systems

which have been proposed, together with a brief history of the general subject, by A. Frederick Collins. The first suggestion of a wireless system was by A. G. Bell in 1880. Professor Bell conceived the idea--after the discovery of the variation in resistance of the selenium cell according to the variation in light thrown upon it--that this principle might be used to reproduce spoken words, and such proved to be the case. The speaking arc is another very interesting experiment described; but, as both of these methods depend upon an uninterrupted visual line and more or less accurate alignment of apparatus, it is hardly possible that they can attain much practical importance or be operated over very great distances. In a recent article Mr. Tesla states that "within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song, or play of a musical instrument conveyed from any other region of the globe." Aside, however, from this prophecy, wireless telephony offers an interesting field for research and experiment, although after 25 years much still remains to be done to place it on a sound commercial footing.

Pages 1-8:

W i r e l e s s T e l e p h o n y

By A. Frederick Collins

Author of "Wireless Telegraphy, Its History, Theory, and Practice"

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

THE

transmission of intelligence by use of the electric current has reached, in its broadest sense, its final stage of development.

Intercommunication by means of an electrical disturbance set up for the purpose of propagating energy representing the alphabetic code or articulate speech, may be divided into four general classes -- namely -- Telegraphy with wires, Telephony with wires, Telegraphy without wires, and Telephony without wires. These principal classes, again, it is evident, may be subdivided into many branches; but there can be no further evolution in the art of sending and receiving messages by electrical methods, where instruments are interposed between those who are to be brought into mental relationship with one another. This is not to say that each of the fore-named systems approximates in its present state anything like perfection, for all are more or less crude in practice if not in theory; but any improvements that may be made in the future must differ from present attainments in degree and not in kind. Hence the raison d'être of the numerous arrangements for wire; and when wireless telegraphy made its spectacular debut a few years ago, there seemed to the casual observer no good and valid reason why speech propagation and reception without wires should not be considered as already at hand. To the investigator, however, it was soon revealed that history was repeating itself, and that wireless systems of telegraphy and telephony were as different in all their phases as were their predecessors which

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

utilized the connecting wire. A brief analysis of these differences that mark so clearly the dividing line between the four great classes enumerated, will assist materially to an understanding of the fundamental principles of wireless telephony.

Evolution of Electrical Communication

When Morse took up the study of telegraphy, a working knowledge of the laws of electricity had not as yet been very accurately deduced. Induced and alternating currents had been explained by Henry and Faraday, but their usefulness remained to be indicated. It was well known, however, that a direct current traversing a wire was capable of energizing an electro-magnet; and from this fact Morse conceived the idea of the relay--the device that made telegraphy a commercial factor. Although nearly half a century elapsed before Bell made his successful essay to produce a speaking telephone, electricity had not made so much progress as might have been expected. Reis had attempted to construct a telephone by utilizing a rapidly intermittent current, and these futile trials led Bell to believe that such a method was impracticable. Experimenting with steel reeds vibrating over magnets, he produced currents of varying strength--termed "undulatory currents" in virtue of their wavelike characteristics--and this formed the basic principle of the telephone. In Marconi's wireless telegraphy, any kind of low-voltage current may be transformed into one of high potential and frequency; but in this system the oscillations of the transmitter emit their energy in the form of a train of waves with long intervals of time between them, and these oscillations, therefore, are not at all adapted to the transmission of voice undulations.

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

Methods of Speech Transmission

There are several methods whereby articulate speech can be transformed into electric current waves, which may, in turn, be propagated by the ether through air, earth, or water. The first of these methods consists in the use of a battery and a telephone transmitter connected in series with terminals embedded in the earth or immersed in water. When the undulatory current flows through the circuit thus formed, the larger portion of its energy is dissipated, flowing out in curved stream lines, owing to the great cross-section of the earth, and extending to considerable distances. Now, if a complementary equipment consisting of a telephone receiver is likewise placed in contact with the earth by having its terminals similarly grounded, when the energy impinges upon these the current then flows through the receiver, and speech may be accurately reproduced. A second method, ideal in its simplicity, is accomplished by electro-magnetic induction. Everyone knows that when a current flows through the primary of an induction coil, alternating currents are set up in the secondary coil by what is called "induction;" but not everyone knows that the coils may be widely separated before the limits of the inductive influence will be reached. If, for instance, a telephone transmitter and a source of electromotive force approximating 25 volts are included in the circuit of a coil of wire having, say, 25 turns and a diameter of feet, and if a telephone receiver is included in a coil of wire having 60 turns and a diameter of 3 feet, words spoken into the transmitter can be distinctly heard in the receiver when the two instruments are separated a distance of 100 feet--providing, of course, that the coils have their planes parallel with each other. This is the "inductivity method;" and like the one previously described, it is operated by a low-voltage direct current.

The Bell Photophone or Radiophone

The invention of the telephone receiver led to many interesting experiments and to many curious discoveries. Prof. Alexander Graham Bell, in working with his new telephone, devised an apparatus for telephoning on a beam of light. This instrument, which he named the "photophone" or "radiophone," involved the use of selenium, a substance possessing the very remarkable property, under the action of light, of varying in electrical resistivity and its reciprocal, when fused in between two connecting wires of platinum or silver. This apparatus is shown in the diagram, Fig. 1. The transmitter used by Bell was not electrical--for the transmitter, as we know it, had not been invented. Bell's transmitter comprised the mouthpiece 1, a shell 2 supporting a thin metal diaphragm 3, and, attached to the latter, a small concave mirror 4. A plane mirror 5, a convex condensing lens 6, and a projecting lens 7, all of which were suitably mounted on a frame, completed the

apparatus for transforming the air vibrations produced by the voice into light variations of the projected beam.

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

The receiver was formed of a parabolic mirror 8 of large diameter, in the focus of which a selenium cell 9 was adjusted. The terminals of the conducting wires or electrodes of the cell led through insulated bushings in the reflector, to the back, where they were connected in series with a battery 10 and a telephone receiver 11. When the radiophone is in operation, the successive transformations take place in the following manner:--The light from the sun is reflected by the plane mirror 5 to the condensing lens 6, where its rays are focused on the concave mirror 4. From the latter, the light is reflected to the lens 7, whence it is propagated through the intervening space to the large parabolic reflector 8, whereby its diffused waves are collected and concentrated to a pencil point on the selenium cell 9. It is evident that any changes in the intensity of the light will alter the electrical resistance of the selenium cell, consequently causing variations in the current from the battery 10, and finally affecting the telephone 11. When words are spoken into the transmitter, this is precisely what takes place, for the movements of the diaphragm of the transmitter cause the concave mirror to vibrate in unison with it, and every change is thus indicated at the receiving end in virtue of these fluctuations.

The Ruhmer System

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

While the distance to which Bell was able to propagate the light variations representing the human voice, was not more than a few hundred feet, recent improvements in the system by Herr Ernest Ruhmer have resulted in the transmission of speech a distance of several miles. This was made possible through the remarkable advance of electro-physics during the past few years. Prof. H. T. Simon ascertained that an ordinary arc-light could be made to reproduce articulate speech more clearly and distinctly than any phonograph, by superimposing a feeble alternating current upon a heavy direct current. The diagram, Fig. 2, illustrates one form of the method by which this may be accomplished. An ordinary telephone transmitter 1 and battery 2 are connected in series with the primary of a small induction coil 3; the secondary coil 4 leads through the condensers 5 5, to the opposite carbons 6 6 forming the electrodes for the arc-light 7; the latter is produced by a direct 50-volt current from a generator or--which is still better--a storage battery. When the speaking arc or "arcophone" is operated, the voice causes the air waves to vary the resistance of the transmitter 1 in the usual manner; the current from the battery 2, thus varied, energizes the primary coil 3, setting up alternating currents in the secondary coil 4. The condensers 5 5 produce no appreciable effect on the wave form of the current, which is superimposed upon the current from the generator flowing through the circuit formed of the carbons 6 6, the arc-light 7, and the generator 8. The object of the condensers, however, is to prevent the direct current from backing up into the transmitter and burning it out. The superimposed current, however feeble, varies the resistance of the arc, and this produces a change in its temperature, which gives rise in turn to sound waves.

Another important function of the speaking arc is connected with the fact that there is also a variation of the intensity of the light which it emits. It is this by-product, as it were, of the speaking arc, that Ruhmer employs in his photo-electric telephone--a device which in all other respects is based upon the original Bell photophone. In Ruhmer's system, the speaking arc is placed in the focus of a parabolic reflector, whence its rays are

directed to the distant receiver. When the two are in perfect alignment, a voice into the one will be distinctly audible in the other. The arrangement then takes the form shown diagrammatically in Fig. 3. With the description already given of the speaking arc and the selenium cell, the details of operation will be readily understood.

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

The Collins System

The writer, in endeavoring to bring about the advent of a commercial wireless telephone which would not be interfered with by fogs or other atmospheric conditions and which would not require either alignment or a direct visual line,

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

investigated the several schemes of dispersion, inductivity, and electro-magnetic wave methods. The last-mentioned method is the most interesting, since it partakes of the nature of the wireless telegraph as well as of the wire telephone, yet it will do that which is not possible with either of the latter--namely, it will transmit articulate speech wirelessly. In the beginning of this article, it was pointed out that electric waves, when emitted by a high-frequency and high-potential oscillation equalized through a spark-gap, were periodic, as indicated in the diagram, Fig. 4, the current strength decreasing in geometrical progression like the vibrations of a straight steel spring. In

wireless telephony an undulatory oscillation is required, and this may be obtained by loading the radiating circuit with large inductances and capacities whose coefficients possess the properties of slowing down each oscillation until a more or less perfect sine wave results, as indicated in Fig. 5. When this point is reached, the striking effect of the oscillatory discharge on the ether is greatly weakened, but at short distances the telephone will respond audibly without the usual coherer intervening. Some of the most recent work by the writer, however, has shown that a liquid detector made by immersing a platinum point and a platinum plate in an alkaline solution increases the volume of sound to an appreciable extent. The first series of tests with this type of apparatus was made at Rockland Lake, N. Y., a distance of a mile; while, under very favorable conditions, articulate speech has been transmitted and received over a distance of three miles and a-half. Successful tests have also been carried out between the ferryboats John C. McCullough and Ridgewood plying between New York and Jersey City.

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Wireless Telephony (1905)

The equipment of vessels with wireless telephone apparatus will tend to obviate the danger from collisions in harbors; while telephone communication between docks and vessels will facilitate transportation, thus saving time and money as well as insuring the safety of passengers and crews. The development of this latest phase of applied electrical science is another onward step in the march of human progress.

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Military Automobile for Wireless Telegraphy (1901)

Western Electrician, July 27, 1901, page 51:

Military Automobile for Wireless Telegraphy.

In the accompanying illustration is shown a portable outfit for wireless telegraphy, designed by Mr. Marconi and especially adapted for military requirements. It is an outgrowth of experience in the South African war and is described by an English correspondent of the Scientific American, to which journal the Western Electrician is indebted for the particulars here given. For some time past Marconi has been experimenting with cylinders to act as receivers in lieu of the high wire or antenna. These cylinders have been proved to be more efficacious for the transmission of messages over short distances, than the ordinary apparatus. When the electric currents are excited, the waves at first oscillate very rapidly and violently, but in a few moments the vibrations die down, or become damped, in much the

same way as the wire of a piano decreases its vibrations after a note has been struck. It is imperative that these vibrations should be sustained as much as possible, in order to travel over a long distance, and to insure this end there must be a great capacity in the sending instruments. The effect of the cylinder is to render greater capacity than the ordinary aerial wire, and consequently to secure more sustained vibrations. The automobile shown in the illustration is the Thorncroft steam-motor car, or lorry, which is now so much used in England for heavy road traffic. The car has a capacity for about five tons, and can attain a

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Military Automobile for Wireless Telegraphy (1901)

speed of from 12 to 14 miles an hour with a full load. The rear part of the lorry is fitted up as an operating room, containing instruments and electric batteries. Upon the roof of the car the long cylinder is placed. In the picture the cylinder is shown raised ready for use, but when not required it is laid down flat upon the roof, out of the way. The cylinder is about 25 feet in height. It is constructed of metal and thoroughly insulated. The points from which the currents are transmitted into, and received from, space may be observed at the top of the cylinder, and wires connect them with the instruments below. One special recommendation of this migratory installation is that communication can be maintained while the vehicle is traveling. The maximum distance over which messages can be dispatched and received by means of this installation is 20 miles at present, which is generally sufficient for military purposes. Marconi, however, is still continuing his experiments with a view to increasing this distance. The cylinder is said to perform exactly the same functions as the aerial wire, even in connection with the tuned or synchronized messages. Although Marconi is still continuing his investigations with the cylinders, his principal experiments are still concerned with the perfection of the original system. Although Marconi has found the cylinders to be specially valuable for the transmission of messages over short distances, up to about 30 miles, it has not been found so successful in the case of long distances.

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Wireless Telegraphy from an Automobile (1902)

The Cosmopolitan, May, 1902, page 120:

Wireless Telegraphy from an Automobile.

Mr. Marconi, as a guest of the Automobile Club of America at its annual banquet in the Waldorf-Astoria on March 7th, told a story that interested his hearers. "I have," he said, "a heavy steam motor-car

selected for the purpose of experimenting with the possibilities of wireless telegraphy in military manoeuvers. The car was fitted with my apparatus at Thorneycrofts in England, and I found that while touring the country I could talk with my base at a distance of thirty miles. This was the limit I found possible, and I believe the auto-car, equipped with wireless apparatus, will be of practical military service. The system is a handy thing for automobiles in general. I had a breakdown in England and was able to send a wireless message to my base asking that dinner he kept hot. On another trip I thought two English policemen were after me and I was able to notify friends to be ready to bail me out if the bobbies should catch up with me."

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Wireless Telegraphy (1902)

The Cosmopolitan, Charles Mulford Robinson, June, 1902:

Wireless telegraphy, which has been considered only in its larger and commercial aspects, promises, as its use is made steadily easier, to result in complications domestic. The petition of a company for permission to set in the streets of Paris poles for wireless telegraph service, with the idea that "the man in the street" can use it and that its waves can be brought into any household, is a suggestion of illimitable possibilities. From the technical reports, if a layman can presume to interpret them, it appears that wireless telegraphy depends in large part on what are called "Hertzian waves." Whence the name is derived can only be guessed, but a certain wireless telegraphy that is dependent on Hertzian waves is as familiar as love and as old as the Garden of Eden. We all have been operators in our time, receivers and senders of messages; and as to crossing the Atlantic, the "Mayflower" Pilgrims had not been on shore an hour before Hertzian waves from Europe broke on the rock-bound coast and went speeding back

over the water. One is tempted to fancy, then, that the scientists are laughing in their sleeves--and Marconi is young, and therefore romantic. The older and commoner term for this spark of wireless telegraphy was simply "sparking"--a term that is well understood. If there really is a new method of

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Wireless Telegraphy (1902)

intercourse between persons invisible to each other and without apparent means of communication--if it isn't all a joke--then, obviously, the difficulties of chaperonage are going to be tremendously increased. The sky-scrapers furnish admirable towers. The young man on the twentieth floor of a Broadway building will be subjected, not only to the charms of the stenographer at his elbow, but to those of the stenographers in the upper stories of all the high buildings round about, and in other cities. It is not chaperonage alone that will be difficult, but the getting of any work out of the office force. How are you going to tell when the distracting Hertzian waves are passing in and out, and how are you going to stop them if you know? The cleverness that devises a medium of communication which it is not clever enough to make discoverable until the communication has passed is just a bit too clever. The old-fashioned spark telegraphy could be disrupted by the non-conductor of an unsympathetic chaperon; but this new use of Hertzian waves--if it be new--presents difficulties.

CHARLES MULFORD ROBINSON.

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Wireless Telegraphy (1902)

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Kiss Me By Wireless (The Original Radio Song) (1922)

Kiss Me By Wireless

There's a wireless station down in my heart, And it calls in my dreams all night long; It is operating just for you and me, And it's spanning the hills and the sea. Your message I love the best, The call to happiness. Chorus Send each caress to me by wireless, Its tenderness you can to me express; I love to call you dear, Across the atmosphere. I hear your voice, It thrills me through and through. My lonely heart sighs for you, just for you! Oh, radio-phone the answer "Yes!" Kiss me by wireless. There's a pulsating current, Runs 'round my heart, It's attuned with your own sweetheart mine; Though you're far away, We're never apart For the radio station's my heart. So on the air impress, Our new found happiness. (repeat chorus)

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Syntonic Wireless Telegraphy--Ayrton Prediction (1901)

William Edward Ayrton was born in 1847, and died seven years after this article appeared, long before his prediction about personal communication by radio came true.

Electrical Review, June 29, 1901, page 820:

Syntonic Wireless Telegraphy. [Ayrton prediction] After the reading of Mr. Marconi's paper, which was published in full in the ELECTRICAL REVIEW for June 15 and 22, before the Society of Arts, in London, Professor W. E. Ayrton being in the chair, the following discussion took place... The chairman: Although still far away, he thought they were gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, of a time when if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a loud, electromagnetic voice, heard by him who had the electromagnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. "Where are you?" he would say. A small reply would come, "I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Pacific." Or, perhaps, in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Let them think of what that meant, of the calling which went on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole; not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wanted to hear and absolutely silent to him who did not, it was almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland of the heated imagination cultivated by the Psychical Society, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws. On seeing the young faces of so many present he was filled with green envy that they, and not he, might very likely live to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.

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Wireless Telephony (1902)

The Electrician (London), August 1, 1902:

WIRELESS TELEPHONY. As we have frequently announced in our pages, a number of scientists scattered all over the civilised world are eagerly seeking the solution to the problem of wireless telephony. The achievements of Mr. MARCONI and other workers in the field of wireless telegraphy have naturally suggested that, if Morse signals can be transmitted by ether waves, it ought to be practicable to use these waves for the wireless transmission of speech. From time to time, indeed, the report is circulated in the daily Press that some one or other investigator has actually succeeded in transmitting speech across several miles of space. Further inquiry, however, usually elicits the information that the method adopted does not correspond to the Hertzian method employed in wireless telegraphy. In fact, the wireless telephony of these scientists is in no real sense an extension or adaptation of Hertzian telegraphy. It follows quite a different line of research, depending upon entirely different principles. Thus, on Tuesday, the Berlin correspondent of the Standard described the wireless telephony experiments recently carried out by Herr RUHMER, over a distance of 4½ English miles, between an accumulator boat moored off a small islet near Babelsberg and Karsberg, in the Grunewald. Loud and clear speaking is reported to have been heard. The method which Herr RUHMER adopts is essentially optical, and consists in the action upon an electro-optically sensitive body, or "electric eye," of a beam of electric or other powerful light projected from the sending to the transmitting station. The prototype of this method was the so-called photophone, which Prof. GRAHAM BELL invented years ago, in early telephone days. It is stated that in Prof. RUHMER'S experiments a parabolic reflector, only 35 cm. in diameter, has been used, no reflector being employed at the receiving end. Success, however, has encouraged him to extend the range of his researches, and he will shortly repeat the experiments between stations 20 to 25 miles apart, using a reflector of much larger size at each station. We wish him every success; for, in spite of its obvious limitations, this optical method of wireless telephony has its uses, and it certainly is an improvement upon the ordinary heliograph. In military and, possibly, also in naval service work, it may find a field of application; and it is even conceivable that it might be used, in calm waters, between two distant ships or between ship and shore. For island lighthouses, also, it might afford a ready means of communication with the mainland. One of the chief merits of the method is that it can be carried on simultaneously between several pairs of stations within the same area without the possibility of messages interfering or going astray. There are, however, obvious limitations to the use of this method; principally, we may notice, that a clear and uninterrupted straight line, for the passage of the beam of light, must be maintained between the two stations, and the atmosphere must be free of rain or fog. Moreover, the cost of maintaining two powerful beams of artificial light between stations would be prohibitive for the purposes of ordinary commercial messages, and sunlight, of course, could not be relied upon always. Another method of electrically transmitting speech across space is that employed by Sir WILLIAM PREECE. In this method the speech is transmitted across the intervening space between two parallel aerial wires, one of which acts as a transmitter upon the other as a receiver. A battery and a microphone in the circuit of the transmitting wire, and a telephone in the receiving wire, suffice to complete the simple equipment. But this is scarcely wireless telephony, the amount of aerial wire used being often much greater than the distance over which messages are transmitted. Nevertheless, for routes which

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Wireless Telephony (1902)

cannot readily be spanned by an ordinary wire or cable this method is found to be serviceable and effective. We may note, in passing, that Sir WILLIAM PREECE, who has largely experimented on this system, has never conclusively settled the question as to whether it operates by electromagnetic induction or by the stray return currents through the earth. A very simple re-arrangement of the aerial wires would, in favourable weather, completely settle this interesting point. We trust he will adopt our suggestion at the next opportunity. Neither of the foregoing methods of wireless telephony bears any real relationship to Marconi telegraphy. Unfortunately, the efforts of scientists to evolve a Hertzian system of wireless telephony, corresponding to Marconi telegraphy, have hitherto been futile. The difficulties are great; some of them appear almost insuperable. Imaginative persons have pictured a state of civilisation in which promiscuous conversation could always be carried on by means of pocket wireless telephones. Prof. AYRTON, for instance, has given us the pathetic picture of a man of those days, who, when unable any longer to call up a colleague in some far-distant country, would then "know that his friend was dead." Wireless telephony will have to make prodigious strides before we can rise to that degree of certitude; even, with the ordinary telephone exchange, it is by no means a safe assumption that a man is dead because he does not answer our call. Peradventure he sleepeth, or is on a journey; but more likely the exchange is not attentive. We publish, as illustrations to one of our articles this week, photographs of the London Wall exchange of the National Telephone Co., taken shortly after the disastrous fire by which this exchange was reduced to a complete wreck. The havoc which was wrought by this calamity, in the deprivation of hundreds of business men of an accustomed and almost imperatively necessary means of communication, is eloquent testimony to the immense advantage which would result from the invention of a wireless telephone system, such as Prof. AYRTON and others have described in language so imaginative. Yet we are compelled to admit that these things belong to fairyland and the world of dreams; not to the matter-of-fact everyday world in which we live. Nothing in existing lines, of research, whether with Hertzian waves or otherwise, gives the slightest warrant for the inference that urban and inter-urban telephony will ever be carried on without the aid of conducting wires. It is, of course, quite true, and as trite as it is true, that we cannot claim to be able to perceive the limits of possible future scientific inventions. But that is not the point. A generation ago no one could foresee the telephone; less than three generations ago the electric telegraph was no more than the idle dream which wireless telephony is to-day. A future generation, therefore, may conceivably accomplish as much in wireless telephony as is dreamed of to-day by visionaries. But if it does, it will be by means of discoveries hitherto not even suspected, and by methods not even the germ of which can be detected in the wireless telegraphy of to-day.

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A Triumph, but Still a Terror (1906)

New York Times, December 17, 1906, page 10:

A Triumph

but Still a Terror.

There is something almost terrifying in the news from Germany that attempts at telephoning without wires have already attained such success that a scientist as eminent and sober-minded as Prof. SLABY, well known for his achievements in wireless telegraphy, announces the approach of the time when a man will be able to speak without any conducting wire to a friend in any part at the world. Already conversations

have been thus carried on over a distance of twenty-four miles, and only the perfection of the apparatus used seems necessary for extending the system till the professor's prophecy is fulfilled. The telegraph, marvelous as our grandfathers thought it, is now a mere matter of course--an important but dull utility. We can still exclaim a little over the telephone, but only when we hear a familiar voice from some such absurd distance as Chicago or St. Louis. Wireless telegraphy remains a wonder, but already it is a familiar wonder, and we are quite ready to believe any assertion of its possibilities. Wireless telephony is another matter--as different from wireless telegraphy as the telephone is from the telegraph--for again the "operator" will be not a specially trained person doing things that common people can't, but anybody who can talk! That brings the miracle closer home and adds vastly to its impressiveness. But the telephone is a nuisance as well as a convenience and a blessing without which, it seems now, life would be almost impossible and business quite so. When we ourselves "call up," of course it is all right, but when others do it the rightness is often rather deeply veiled, and we resent not a few of the demands upon our time. And yet everybody "answers the 'phone," interrupting almost any occupation to do it. How will it be when we're told, not that somebody's "on the wire," but that somebody's "on the air," and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere? It will be a good while, however, before even the telephone reaches around the earth, and wireless telegraphy has as yet sent barely more than expiring, inexpressive whispers across the narrower seas. Wireless telephony has more difficulties to conquer than those of all three of its predecessors put together, and it will not be a thing of to-morrow or next day. Old-fashioned as they are, the postal departments of the several countries will be doing business for some years to come, and most of us will be rather gray-headed before anybody rings us up from China, either with or without a wire.

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Recent Developments in Wireless Telegraphy (1907)

In this extract, DeForest while noting that the crystal detector marked an important advance in simplifying radio reception, dismissed the popular idea that portable personal telephones might soon be available, although he was optimistic that some sort of radio-telephone service would eventually be developed. Decades later, the silicon crystal detector would be refined into the transistor, which would finally make lightweight portable telephones practical.

Journal of the Franklin Institute, June, 1907:

ELECTRICAL SECTION.(Stated Meeting held Thursday, February 21, 1907.)

_______

Recent Developments in Wireless TelegraphyDR. LEE DE FOREST.

_______page 464: Another class of oscillation detectors utilizes the peculiar electrothermic qualities of crystalline or pseudo-crystalline substances, notably silicon and psilomelane. Silicon may be used without a local battery. The unequal heating effect produced by the oscillation at the junction between silicon and a copper electrode gives rise to feeble local currents which can operate the telephone receiver, to produce an audible signal. This class of receivers is certainly the simplest and least costly imaginable, and marks an approach towards that Utopian state of affairs so much heralded by the popular press when each of us will carry a responder in his vest pocket, a telephone on his head and with steel-rod umbrella in his hand, and lead soles upon his shoes, shall be within telephone reach of every other unfortunate similarly equipped!

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The Collins Wireless Telephone (1908)

In this extract from the full article, Arthur Frederick Collins' wireless telephone is somewhat prematurely heralded as the perfect adjunct for automobile travelers, for it would be many decades before this type of phone actually became readily available to the general public. Collins eventually ran into legal problems and would spend a year in prison for stock manipulation -- see John D. Jenkins' A. Frederick Collins ... Genius or Fraud? for more details.

Modern Electrics, August, 1908:

The Collins Wireless Telephone.BY WILLIAM DUBILIER,Assistant to Mr. Collins.

page 151: [I]n fact, wireless telephony will enter a field entirely its own, in addition to being an aggressive competitor of the present telegraph and telephone system on land. It will enter a new field by making it possible to telephone from automobiles to the garage when help is needed. There are thousands of automobiles in the United States, and, while touring the country in a powerful car is a delightful pastime, a breakdown several miles from a garage or other repair shop is not conducive to pleasure. Often some member of the party finds it his lot to walk to a house for supplies, while the rest of the party, patiently or otherwise, usually the latter, await his return. Mr. Collins proposes to eliminate this decidedly adverse feature of automobiling by employing the wireless telephone. Consequently every garage or shop will be equipped with the wireless telephone, as they are now with the tire pump and ignition plugs, and this latter day telephone will always be set up ready for use. Likewise, every auto will be provided with a portable wireless telephone. Then in the event of the inevitable accident the 'phone can be taken out, set up ready for use and communication established with the nearest garage, and an auto with men and needful mechanism sent post-haste to the scene to repair it.

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Wireless Telephone Wizardry (1910)

Technical World Magazine, May, 1910, pages 257-264:

W I R E L E S S T E L E P H O N E W I Z A R D R Y

B y

W I N S T O N R. F A R W E L L

WIRELESS telephony is being developed at a

rate that makes the plain citizen who aspires to be informed concerning the progress of the world hustle to keep up with the state of the art. Already A. Frederick Collins, the pioneer worker along this line has developed three distinct systems of wireless telephones, each adapted to a certain sphere of usefulness, each practicable and reliable, and goodness knows how many more he may turn out before the ink on these pages is dry. The things that can be done with one or the other of these three systems would stagger the credulity of any but a people who by long familiarity with scientific marvels have become hardened thereto. It is now possible to talk without the use of wires with persons in distant parts of a building or in adjacent buildings regardless of the number and thickness of walls and floors intervening. One may take a wireless telephone on an automobile, a motor boat, a yacht, an airship or a submarine, into a caisson, a tunnel or a mine and be able to converse with others at any given point or points on the surface as freely and as plainly as one can now talk over a local telephone with nearby points. It is even possible to combine the ordinary telephone with the wireless. Thus a telephone subscriber in Creston, Iowa, for instance, who wanted to talk with some one on board the Deutschland in mid-Atlantic need not be deterred by the fact that there was no wireless station at Creston. All he would have to do would be to call up Chicago on the long distance wire. Chicago would give the connection with the New York wire and the New York office would connect with the wireless station. The wireless operator, after calling the Deutschland by wireless, would connect the long distance wire from Creston with the wireless transmitter and the voice that had already traveled fourteen hundred miles overland by wire would project itself through the ether to the listening ear on shipboard on the lonely Atlantic.

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Wireless Telephone Wizardry (1910)

In fact there seems to be few, if any, situations to which the wireless telephone is not adapted. In addition to the familiar daily use of the telephone the wireless will open up many new fields that cannot be occupied with pole and wire. Harbor craft, tugs and ferryboats can get into instantaneous communication with offices on shore and receive orders or changes in instructions while out on the water. When vessels are equipped with wireless telephones the pilot will be able to call up the pilot on another craft that persists in getting in his way and tell the offender privately what he thinks of him, his conduct and his ancestors instead of bawling his opinions out at an open window at the risk of having his license revoked by some horrified steamboat inspector. And when some badly rattled navigator betrays symptoms of intending to try to pass on both sides of another vessel at the same time the wireless telephone may be the means of saving both lives and property. The wireless telephone is the first notable improvement in marine signalling since the introduction of the steam whistle. Fogs, darkness and storms have no effect on the wireless telephone. And out in the country where subscribers are too few to warrant the installation of a wire system the wireless 'phone will afford a cheap and certain means of communication. In the ordinary, every-day business of life the wireless 'phone has advantages over the more familiar system. When a message is transmitted over a wire a certain amount of electricity is required to charge the wire before any words can be spoken. Under these conditions, however clear and distinct the words may be uttered, the longer the line the greater will be the distortion of the undulatory current until the words become so inarticulate they cannot be understood. But with the wireless, if the waves representing the voice are pure when they are emitted through the aerial wire they will carry clear and distinct the greatest distance the instrument is capable of propelling them. This is because the message is sent through ether, a medium which does not require to be electrically charged and

which consequently does not distort the wave forms representing the voice. It would seem, therefore, that the wireless is the natural way for the transmission of messages while the wire line is the artificial way. Another advantage the wireless 'phone has over the ordinary system is in calling. Instead of asking an operator at central to get a certain number for him the lucky possessor of a wireless 'phone can ring up his man instantaneously and talk directly with him. By means of disks with numbers on the edge, something like those used for the combinations of safes, the caller can tune his 'phone with a certain number in much the same way that the subscribers to the automatic telephone system in Chicago and elsewhere call a number through electrical selectors. By turning the disk to a certain number the particular 'phone wanted will respond, and no other. Finally, the wireless is cheaper to install and, maintain, for there is no costly copper wire and cedar poles to buy and set up and replace every time there is a little storm. Now, do not get excited and conjure up visions of the Western Union Telegraph and Bell Telephone Company being driven into bankruptcy by the triumphal competition of the wireless 'phone while the stockholders therein haunt the bread line and the municipal lodging house, for nothing of the kind likely to happen. At least, that is what Collins says. Being deliberate in speech Mr. Collins has time to edit his remarks as he goes along. The result is an estimate of his numerous inventions that has the ring of sound common sense. Here it is.

"It is not at all likely that the wireless telephone will take the place of the ordinary telephone--at least, in my lifetime, and I am only forty-one and a good life-insurance risk. You may remember the more enthusiastic prophets predicted when the Bell telephone was first brought out that it would put the telegraph companies out of business. Instead of that the demands upon the telegraph companies have enormously increased, while at the same time the telephone system has grown to vast proportions. Both combined have failed to prevent the volume of first class mail from doubling every few years. "From these premises I draw the comforting conclusion that the world is progressing so rapidly that it needs all the means of communication that can possibly be provided. That is what has encouraged me to devote ten years of my life to the development of the wireless telephone. I do not expect even to affect the telephone system, but I feel confident of helping out by doing many things the ordinary telephone cannot do, for you see I can telephone without wires where it is impossible to telephone with wires."

One of the places where the wireless telephone will be particularly valuable will be in mines. Now, any one who wants

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Wireless Telephone Wizardry (1910)

telephone connection with the underground workings of a mine has only to string a wire down the shaft. But if there should be a fire or an explosion or if anything else should go wrong the frail wire would be cut off at the very time when the need of it was greatest. But portable conductivity wireless sets could be carried around anywhere by gangs of workmen. All they would need to do would be to drive an iron peg into the earth or rocks to make a ground contact and they would be in communication with the surface regardless of cave-ins, explosions, gas, flames or any other contingency. Many a life could be saved in mine disasters if the survivors only could communicate with the rescuing parties to direct their search. This conductivity wireless system has been tested up to a distance of three and a half miles and worked perfectly. It has been installed in a number of Western mines. This ability to talk through miles of rock and earth rather staggers the credulity even of the layman who has brought himself to believe in the wireless telegraph. It may be all right to send an electric impulse through the unobstructed air, but rocks and earth are so much more substantial that it would seem to be quite a different matter to pass any sort of impulse through them. But the explanation is very simple. Morse used the earth for the return circuit in the first form of electric communication given to the world. In other words, it has been known since the first practical application of electricity that the earth was a good electric conductor. In fact there are electric currents in the earth independent of any sent there by man. All Collins had to do, therefore, was to find a way to utilize the conductor already at hand. The task was not easy, but the application of the discovery is. Ground plates on the same general principle as those used in the ordinary telegraph are buried in moist earth at the surface station. A current, either direct or alternating, is sent through these base plates into the earth where it spreads in elliptic lines of force, like magnetic lines between the poles of a magnet, until they reach the receiving plate down in the mine at any depth or distance.

Simpler yet is the inductivity method, which is limited to a few hundred feet, but which makes an ideal means of communication in office, factory, dwelling or warehouse. The apparatus consists, in addition to the usual transmitter and receiver, of a large primary coil of wire wrapped in insulating cloth until it looks like one of those hoops that children play with. At the receiving 'phone is a secondary coil of similar appearance. On speaking into the transmitter with a battery in series with the primary coil, an undulatory current rotating through the wire will set up a magnetic flow in concentric rings which keep spreading until they come in contact with the secondary coil. A more elaborate development of the inductivity apparatus is contained in a portable wooden case of about the size of an ordinary dress suit case. Within its distance limits the inductivity wireless, therefore, is about as convenient a means of communication as can be imagined. Inventor Collins, however, is building his largest hopes on the third, or electric wave system. Whereas in the conductivity system energy decreases as the cube of the distance, in the electric wave system the energy decreases only as the square of the distance. It should be borne in mind that wireless telephony is quite a different thing from wireless telegraphy; for in the latter an electric impulse of any character may be utilized as a signal, whereas in telephoning an alternating current having the same phase, amplitude and frequency at

both sending and receiving stations is required. Thus electric waves produced by the disruptive discharge, which decrease very rapidly, dying out entirely in the very small fraction of a second, can not take the place of the long, smooth sine wave currents used in telephoning. Beginning in 1899 Mr. Collins was able to telephone by the electric wave system no more than two hundred feet. A year later he had increased the distance to a mile; and by 1902 he was able to talk a distance of three miles. After a few more years he was able to talk from Newark to Philadelphia, a distance of eighty-one miles. Now he has reached a point where he expects to talk from New York to Chicago. The day may come when it will be possible to talk across the Atlantic, something more than twice the distance between these two cities.

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Wireless Telephone Wizardry (1910)

One of the newest features developed, for which patents have just been issued, is a process by which the difficulty of tuning is overcome. By means of the new apparatus one circuit can be tuned with another automatically, thus rendering it possible for any telephone to call any other without any risk of interference by an outside party. This particular type of wireless telephone was one of the features of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition at Seattle last summer; where it won the gold medal, the highest award. Added interest is lent by the fact that plans are under consideration to equip all vessels in the United States navy with wireless telephones. So far as outward appearances go the Collins electric wave wireless telephone resembles the ordinary telephone only in having the usual transmitter and receiver. The rest is strange. One of the most weirdly spectacular features of telharmonic music produced by that wonderful electrical musical instrument invented by a Massachusetts doctor a few years ago, was the possibility of delivering music and light at the same time through the same arc lamp. The Collins wireless telephone is suggestive of telharmonic music in the fact that you talk through an arc light. This arc lamp, however, is fundamentally different from the ordinary kind as seen on the street. The latter may do to deliver music in plain air at short range; but when it comes to transmitting the human voice, which is rarely musical, long distances through ether, which is fifteen trillion times lighter than air, so light in fact that a ball of it the size of the earth weighs only two hundred and fifty pounds, at the rate of one hundred and sixty-eight thousand miles a second, something very special in the line of arc lamps is required. In the Collins "revolving oscillation arc lamp" the carbons are disks instead of pencils, and they revolve at very high speeds in opposite directions. This is to prevent them from burning unevenly as ordinary carbons do, which would throw the circuits out of resonance and make talking impossible, and also to produce a longer arc than is possible with ordinary carbons. The carbons are enclosed in a casing which is supported between the poles of an electro-magnet. Through the ends of the poles of this magnet and at right angles to them are polar projections of soft iron threaded and screwed through the extremities of the magnet at right angles to the arc, thus permitting the magnetic field to be varied within wide limits. The coils of the magnet are used as a portion of the primary circuit of the transmitter, serving the purpose of choke coils to prevent the oscillations from backing up into the high tension direct current generator. The current is also very different from that used in the ordinary arc light, for it is received as a direct current of five hundred volts by a direct connected motor generator set and stepped up to five thousand volts before it is used to energize the lamp. Other apparatus consists of an inductance transformer by means of which the telephone transmitter is tuned. In outward appearance it is a cylinder about two feet long, consisting of a solid core wound with wire surrounded by a spiral ring. On the base is a little track on which a carriage runs on which are three small grooved pulleys that are held in contact with the spiral ring. When the ring is revolved it causes the carriage to travel back and forth, thus increasing or decreasing the inductance, in order to get the closed oscillating circuit in resonance with the open radiating circuit. The tuning auto transformer used in the aerial wire circuit is another large wire-wound core with a screw mounted on top with a wheel at the end. By turning the wheel the contact spring is made to travel back and forth. The variable condenser consists of a number of semi-circular fixed plates of metal insulated in a cylinder filled with oil with a series of movable plates meshed with, but insulated by the oil from, the stationary set. A handle attached to the rod permits any variation of capacity within the limits of the condenser. The receptor includes a thermo-electric detector, the principal features of which are two exceedingly fine wires of and forming a couple. Under the junction of these wires is placed a resistance wire which is heated by the currents surging in the aerial system. This detector is exceedingly sensitive. As the electricians put it, it is sensitive to the five-thousandth of an erg, which means in plain English that it is sensitive enough to pick up all the varying inflections of the human voice. The highest degree of tuning is obtained by a thermo-galvanometer, which consists of a single loop of silver wire suspended between the poles of a permanent magnet. The lower ends of the loop are connected with a bismuth-antimony thermo-couple which is heated by a fine filament of high specific resistance, through which the oscillating current passes. One end of the heater is connected with the frame of the instrument. The heat generated falls on the thermo-junction and the resulting electro-motive force applied to the ends of the silver loop causes it to turn in the magnet field.

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Wireless Telephone Wizardry (1910)

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Another Wireless Installation in the Stock Selling Campaign (1910)

Telephony, February 12, 1910, page 206:

Another Wireless Installation in the Stock Selling Campaign. Advertisements have been appearing in the Columbus, Ohio papers to the effect that the Collins wireless telephone would be installed on the fifth floor of the new First National Bank Bldg. by the Collins Wireless Telephone Company and the public was invited to drop in and see the operations of the wonderful instrument. It was reported that it was a plan to sell stock in the company.

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The Wireless Telephone (1908)

"The Aerogram" was a publication issued by the United Wireless Telegraph Company, and as such might have been used to give investors accurate information about growth opportunities for the company. However, because United Wireless was being run mainly as a stock promotion scheme, more often the magazine merely drummed up enthusiasm for stock sales, by getting potential investors excited about developments where the company actually had no real plans. Much of the speculation in this article about the future possibilities for audio radio communication and broadcasting appear to reflect the ideas of United Wireless' former scientific director Lee DeForest, who had been forced out of the company in late 1906. (The photograph of the navy officer actually is from an installation by the Radio Telephone and Telegraph Company, the new company which DeForest formed after his expulsion.) In spite of the talk about potential innovations, and the claim that "The United Wireless Telegraph Company is developing and protecting by patents, three distinct wireless telephones", the company actually did not do any significant developmental work in wireless telephony before it went bankrupt in 1912.

The Aerogram, November, 1908, pages 139-141:

THE WIRELESS TELEPHONE

By R. Burt

(Copyright 1908 by The Aerogram Publishing Company) When one realizes the actuality of telephoning without wires, and the mind turns to what it may mean in the future, about all that it is possible to immediately express, is a "gasp." It is almost beyond comprehension and the thinking of it, at first, is a mental jumble, that can only be brought to orderly understanding by comparative figures, obtained from sources that can be partially-appreciated by reason of daily association. Most people imagine they know all about the telephone because they use it frequently and because it appears to be so simple. They have little to do with its actual operation, therefore they do not appreciate the immensity of the telephone systems, all of which have been developed during the past 32 years. The following figures will aid the imagination in an attempt to estimate what the "wireless" 'phone will mean when at some future time all telephoning is done without the use of wires:

Total amount of capital of telephone companies (Bell and Independent), operating in the United States, about . . . $2,000,000,000Two of the larger "Bell" Companies have over $200,000,000 capital each and nineteen companies have from $10,000,000 to $50,000,000 each.Total number of Bell exchanges . . . 4,889Miles of wire on poles and in buildings (Bell) . . . 2,754,571

The field on land is not nearly covered at present by the wire telephone systems and without the advent of wireless telephony it is reasonable to expect that the business of the wire companies would double in the next ten years. The wireless phone, by reason of eliminating the enormous cost of maintaining the poles and wires, should eventually not only usurp the business of the wire 'phone on land, but greatly extend its present utility and profits. The wireless telephone will also cover the seas, lakes and waterways, supplementing the wireless telegraph over short distances and will be installed on all the smaller craft. Inhabitants of islands in the lakes and rivers and along the coasts will be available as subscribers and have the advantage of a telephone system, where they now have no adequate means of rapid communication whatsoever. The Bell Telephone has been most profitable from an investor's standpoint, inasmuch as those who obtained an interest in it, during the early period of its development, and retained their interest, have been made comfortably wealthy by their small investment. A $100 investment made thirty years ago, has paid $201,000 in dividends. Bell Telephone stock advanced in twelve months, after it had proven its commercial value, from a few dollars a share to $3,200 per share. The question naturally arises "How will it be possible for so many wireless 'phones to be operated in a city like New York?" It is impossible to say just now. If the inventors of the wire telephone apparatus and its pioneers could have known twenty-

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The Wireless Telephone (1908)

Miles of wire underground (Bell) . . . 3,241,471Miles of wire under water (Bell) . . . 11,690Total miles of wire (Bell) . . . 6,007,732Total circuits (Bell) . . . 1,384,175Total stations (Bell) . . . 2,727,289Total employees (Bell) . . . 90,324Total number of instruments in use (Bell) . . . 7,107,386Total number of messages per year (Bell) . . . 5,305,900,000Average daily calls per subscriber (Bell) . . . 6"Independent" companies in the United States . . . 9,000Number of instruments in use (Independent) . . . 3,500,000Number of messages annually (Independent) . . . 3,700,000,000Number of telephone shareholders in the United States . . . 550,000Increase in business per year . . . 15% to 20%Total yearly income, Bell and Independent, about . . . $450,000,000

five years ago how to accomplish, with the wire telephone, what is being done in "wire telephony" to-day, do you for one moment suppose they could have expended the years of labor they have in overcoming the many difficulties and obstacles, that they have had to contend with? There really should be no more difficulties to overcome, in extending the use of the wireless 'phone, than there were in developing the wire telephone. Also, it should be remembered, that engineers working the wireless 'phone have benefited considerably by the knowledge gained from the experience and difficulties encountered and surmounted by the engineers in the extension of the wire telephones. The questions still unanswered in one's mind are,--How is it done? How can it be possible? Will not the hundreds of thousands of messages sent out into the ether get "mixed," without the wires to guide or retain them along a well-defined course? The mind does go agroping, and it is not surprising. But, after grasping the following figures regarding the ether waves, by which a wireless message is transmitted and received, it would seem, that with so great a "flexibility" and with a more intimate knowledge of the ether currents and their actions, some means will be devised of overcoming the possibility of "mixed" talk. Ether, which is everywhere, vibrates normally at 650,000,000 vibrations per second; the action of some rays of light increases the normal vibration up to 850,000,000 per second. These ether vibrations transmit an electric charge from one particle to another with such rapidity, that the wave travels at the rate of 186,000 miles per second or a distance equaling seven and one-half times the distance around the world. Therefore, a wireless message with sufficiently far-reaching force, would envelop the world and also lap over halfway round again in one-tenth of a second. Every electrical discharge from lightning exerts an electrical force sufficiently powerful enough to send a wireless wave throughout the entire world, and every discharge of electricity in commercial use also emits a "wireless wave." It is also probable that all chemical action releases a minute wireless wave and so on until, as a matter of fact, there are already millions of wireless waves mingling and intermingling in and over New York City at the present time. Yet, a wireless wave message transmitted from a point a thousand miles away, rushes into this maelstrom and "finds" the station for which it is intended and records the intelligence it brings. There are already more than a hundred wireless stations, on shore and on boats, transmitting messages, everyone of which

at the same time must pass the antenna wires of a wireless station in New York. A visit to one of the four "United" stations in New York City will show the operator calmly taking down the message intended for that station. He is operating and pays no attention to the other messages coming down over the same wire to his receiver, for he has tuning devices and other mechanical instruments, which disclose to him only the one message intended for his particular station. Isn't it wonderful? Just think a minute! It is only necessary for the wireless telegraph and the wireless telephone to be developed and fully extended, to entirely dispense with the unsightly and costly wires.

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The Wireless Telephone (1908)

Let's look a little further into the future, and see the time when the wireless 'phone will be in general use. It will be used in business and private affairs just as the wire 'phone is in use to-day. In such use one subscriber, to talk to another will have to call "central" or will probably be connected by an "automatic central." The wireless message sent from one central station, in a special tone or to be more exact having a special electrical "resistance," may be received in every home, within the range of station, by every subscriber having a receiver corresponding to the electrical resistance of the sending station. By this means it will be possible to send news, stock quotations, lectures, monologues, music, merchants bargain announcements, etc., etc., broadcast for whomsoever may subscribe for that service. The man of moderate means may have Grand Opera music and the best of entertainment always at his elbow for such members of his family as may care to listen--or each member of the family can choose the form of entertainment which their fancy, at the time, may dictate. Will not this be a Godsend as a means of making peace with the neighbor who objects to the phonograph, which will find its way to the scrap-heap with the advent of the wireless telephone. Yes! This is all a dream now, but, if a reader could join Rip Van Winkle's brigade and wake up twenty years hence, he would probably find it a dream come true. We have much to learn and there are still some people who scoff at the future possibilities of all scientific discoveries. What has been done towards developing and perfecting the wireless telephone? For one thing, voices and music have been transmitted distinctly for a distance of a hundred miles or more. Some of the most prominent Governments of the world already have some of their battleships equipped with the device and report fairly satisfactory service. The United States Atlantic Fleet, now on its voyage around the world, has the wireless 'phones installed for use in connection with giving and receiving orders, reports, etc., from the flagships to the other vessels. The United Wireless Telegraph Company is developing and protecting by patents, three distinct wireless telephones, in order to protect its interests in the development of wireless communication. They report progress to the extent of transmitting voices and music for 30 miles over the land and 100 miles over the sea. These 'phones are part of the assets of the United Company and the strong organization of that company will extend the telephone as well as the telegraph. With its telegraph already established and commercially successful, the day should not be far distant when its 'phone will be brought into commercial service and used as an adjunct to its wireless telegraph equipment. But remember! The wireless telephone is in its early infancy and that there is a considerable difference and lapse of time between "having," a wireless telephone that merely operates, and having an established wireless telephone system that produces a net profit revenue from actual commercial use. The wireless telegraph has gone through many vicissitudes, in order to gain its present position. Many wireless telegraph companies have been started and much wireless stock has been sold to the public. Only one wireless telegraph company has thus far succeeded. The bright future and enormous possibilities of the wireless 'phone may attract many promoters and many investors. Many companies may be formed and the printing presses be kept busy printing certificates to be issued and representing hundreds of thousands of shares of stock. All is not gold that glitters. One should be most careful in making an investment and should not risk money too carelessly, neither should one allow enthusiasm to blind one's judgment. The wireless telephone will win fortunes for many, but may also prove a pitfall to some. Do not invest recklessly; do not jump at the first offering made by stocksellers; investigate; be cautious.

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Another Wireless Telephone (1911)

Modern Electrics, October, 1911, page 408:

ANOTHER WIRELESS TELEPHONE. An Englishman, Matthews, is preparing for extensive experiments with his system of wireless telephony. He proposes to use man lifting kites to talk a distance of 25 miles between Chepstow and Cardiff, England. His outfit is said to be contained within a small box and consists principally of a battery, a motor, and a transformer, the whole weighing but twelve pounds. The cost is stated to be about $50 by the inventor. While the electricians are quite skeptic as to the value of the invention, the inventor displays the characteristic assurance of success.

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Electric Auto as Wireless Station (1911)

Technical World Magazine, July, 1911, page 545:

E L E C T R I C A U T O A S W I R E L E S S S T A T I O N

B y C H A R L E S G L E A S O N

AN interesting experiment in wireless telegraphy was tried

recently in Los Angeles when an electric automobile was used to supply power for flashing messages from a portable wireless station. The little car was run up the steep grade of Lookout Mountain in the outskirts of the city and a thirty-foot steel mast was speedily erected and rigged with the necessary guys and wires. Then the operator took his place at the keyboard and sent out a call which brought responses from amateur stations in various parts of the city and from Point Loma station more than one hundred miles away. These answers were disregarded, however, as operator Ryan was trying for the United Wireless station in the center of the city, which answered within a short time. Then the following message directed to Mayor Alexander of Los Angeles was flashed: "Have pleasure of sending you the first message ever transmitted by portable wireless station using electric automobile via United Wireless from Lookout Mountain." This feat is of more than passing interest as it demonstrated the possibility of rapid communication by wireless from an electric motor equipped with portable mast, etc. The experiment was planned and carried out by Mr. W. B. Kerrick, an electric engineer, who wished to clinch his argument that you could run most anywhere in an electric car and still keep in touch with home by wireless.

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Wireless Telephone for Everybody (1912)

Technical World Magazine, April, 1912, pages 329-331:

W I R E L E S S T E L E P H O N E F O R E V E R Y B O D Y

B y

W I L L I A M T. P R O S S E R

A WIRELESS telephone outfit in a suit-case--or in any other convenient carrying receptacle--complete, and requiring only connection at any ordinary electric-light socket

to make it capable of operating over a distance of fifty miles, is the latest product of invention in this wonderful field. To William Dubilier, a California youth of twenty-two years, belongs credit for perfecting an instrument to such a degree of nicety that it is of readily portable bulk and yet of high efficiency. With a range of something like three hundred keys and escaping many of the problems of interference, such an instrument can accomplish wonders for the individual user. Wherever sufficient current is available for lights, there the little wireless set may be put readily to work for communication over areas of trackless forest, desert or sea. That it will be the means of saving lives, when nothing else will avail is at once apparent. That it will be invaluable in new country, ahead of the wires or the regular wireless installations, in military activities and in all times and places when ordinary means of message-sending are interrupted or unestablished is easily recognizable. Young Dubilier, inventor and electrical engineer, has made a specialty of the wireless telephone and his success in this specialty has attracted wide attention. Most of his experiments have been carried on in Seattle. He is a product of Cooper Institute, New York, where he studied while supporting himself by hard work. So he deserves, every bit, the harvest he is reaping now. His achievement is the result of scientific method and close application through a long period of experimentation and, despite his youth he has won a veritable triumph. The Dubilier instruments are not noticeably different in principle from the wireless telephone devices of the past, but they are compact. Instead of great coils of wire and oscillators as big as a dining-room table, the Dubilier apparatus is reduced to marvelously small dimensions, while any commercial lighting circuit gives all the power that is necessary. Mr. Dubilier is not particularly keen in exploiting his invention, his explanation being as compact as his instruments. He merely says that the electric light current passing through the new type of oscillator is rendered into electrical waves to the number of 100,000 a second, and that these affect instruments attuned to the same key within a wide radius. Simple, isn't it?

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Wireless Telephone for Everybody (1912)

"Influential men believe in my invention as much as I do, and we plan to build a factory and manufacture my machines upon a large scale," said Mr. Dubilier in Seattle recently. "This will be, I believe, the first wireless telephone factory ever opened in America--or the world, for that matter. The machines are not costly to turn out, and we will be able to supply them so cheaply in large lots that they may be used extensively in cities, much more cheaply in rural communities than the present wire systems, for marine and coastwise work, and for special uses such as by forest rangers on the great reservations of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Coast. "The machines will be of particular advantage in sparsely settled districts, as in the gold-camps of Alaska. Prospectors within a radius of thirty or forty miles of civilization, for instance, will be enabled by the use of one of these light sets to keep in continual touch with what is going on, and undoubtedly many lives will be saved by the practical application of the device." Wireless, and especially the wireless telephone, has been what might almost be called an obsession with young Dubilier ever since he was old enough to know anything about the subject at all. Born in New York in 1888 he received his early education in the public schools. His parents were not able to keep him in school through the high school course, and he left high school to secure employment. He saved his money, and later, by doing odd jobs through the course, gave himself the benefit of three years study of electrical engineering. It was in 1904 that he began his own experimenting with the wireless telephone, and after many disappointments and discouragements he perfected one of the first pieces of apparatus of that kind. Graduating from his technical course at the eighteen he became an inspector for the Western Electric Company in New York. But wireless continued to fascinate him, and he determined to take a course in the Cooper Institute. The hours of the institute were from 9:30 until 3:30. Hurrying each day from the lecture-room to a telegraph office he delivered messages from 4 o'clock in the afternoon until midnight. After his course was over he became chief electrician of a wireless concern, and then technical director of another. All the time he was experimenting with his own telephone, and he invented a number of minor wireless instruments. He is the author of the "Wireless Telephony" chapter in Prof. H. L. Twining's book on wireless, one of the few works of the kind in existence. His lectures on wireless attracted favorable comment. With some of the best known experts in the country his technical testimony has been sought by the law courts.

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Wireless Telephone for Everybody (1912)

It was just a few months ago that he completed the telephone apparatus that is his great work so far. Sensitive and delicate, it yet seems to be practical in every respect. A cabinet ten inches each way, and six inches deep will hold the mechanism. Most of the experiments with the new device have been carried on at Seattle and between Seattle and Tacoma, a distance of thirty-five miles. Conversation carries that far as clearly as on the ordinary telephone. As some of the ships of the United States navy are equipped with wireless telephones Mr. Dubilier has an excellent opportunity to compare the merits of his invention with that used by the navy department, as the Puget Sound navy yard is located about sixteen miles from Seattle. J. B. Annis, first class electrician, United States signal corps, sent this message to the inventor after one of the tests: "A good deal plainer than the telephone we use here." Which would seem to augur well for the invention. Mr. Dubilier believes he can still further perfect his receiving and transmitting devices with their control system so that much more than three hundred telephones--representing that many different attunements--can be used at the same time without interfering with each other. However, even that number is a long step forward. If Mr. Dubilier does nothing more for wireless telephony, the aerial talk-transmitting systems of the future will owe him a notable debt of gratitude. And he is only twenty-two.

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The Voice From the Air (1913)

In 1900, Reginald Fessenden transmitted his voice about a mile (1.5 kilometers) using a "high frequency spark" transmitter. But because of a high level of audio distortion, Fessenden moved on to other designs, eventually developing an alternator-transmitter, which produced much better audio quality. In later years other experimenters tried to develop improved high-frequency spark transmitters--Victor Laughter himself wrote an article about William Dubilier's efforts along these lines in the June, 1911 Modern Electrics. (A second article on Dubilier appeared in the January, 1912 issue--this time followed two months later by a letter from Laughter, complaining that Dubilier was now claiming credit for a transmitter design actually developed by Laughter). And in spite of the optimism Laughter expressed in this article about the future of his system, no high-frequency spark system for audio transmissions was ever developed to the point that it was successfully put into commercial service.

Technical World Magazine, September, 1913, pages 84-85:

T H E V O I C E F R O M T H E A I R

By

E D W A R D J. M c C O R M A C K

WILL wireless revolutionize the telephone industry? Is the science of man about to perfect an invention that will make the millions upon millions invested by the telephone companies come to naught?

It looks as if in time we might actually be independent of telephone companies. The remarkable results that are being obtained in experiments with the wireless telephone form the basis for this statement. From the wireless station at Nauen, Germany, an operator communicated with Vienna. In Memphis, Tennessee, Victor Laughter, an amateur, & a device of his own, can talk for a distance of twenty-five miles. In this article, direct and to the point, Edward J. McCormack tells of Laughter's remarkable work.--Editor's Note.

After ten long years of experimental work Victor Laughter, who until a few months ago was hardly known in the world of things scientific, has given his wireless telephone a public trial. Upon the roof of an office building in Memphis, Tennessee, he established his laboratory. In that building there are men who will tell you that the young Southerner is "a fiend for work". Day in and day out, he would work twenty hours at a stretch over some intricate mechanism. And now he is abundantly rewarded. In the wee small hours when belated clubmen, cab drivers, chauffeurs, and others of the nocturnal tribe were wending their way homeward, there would come from the top of the big skyscraper a crackling sound that was as distinct and virile as the snap of a machine gun. Greenish flames seemed to fairly sizzle from the ends of aerials being worked by the man of the wireless. Then there came an evening when Laughter called in the newspapermen. Upon a table in his office rested the mechanism that represented a small fortune as well as a decade of years of labor. "Boys," he said, "I have done it!" And then he went on to say that others had talked without wires, but that his was the invention destined to revolutionize the business. "I can talk two miles or twenty-five miles with just as much ease," he declared. "As soon as I get in my new aerials I am going to talk fifty. The other fellows talk four and five minutes over the phones--I am going to talk an hour tonight and let you judge for yourselves!" The Laughter device can talk into any wireless receiving apparatus. So the party journeyed four miles out to the home of a Master Vance Thompson, a young wireless enthusiast. There Thompson gave them headgears and they sat down and waited. There was a pause of a few minutes. The slight buzzing of the static in the ear bells was all that could be heard. Then out of the stillness of the night there came a strange sound. It was a strain of music--a far-away, ethereal melody. Laughter had introduced his new invention with a graphophone record doing the talking. The wireless, despite the static, worked so perfectly that the scraping of the needle and the other mechanical sounds incidental to the playing of a cheap talking machine could be heard as distinctly as if it were in the next room. The static began to pop again. It drowned out the music. Then the rhythmic strains of the waltz came back soft, swingingly tuneful, and yet weirdly strange. The waltz died away. "Hello, Hello, Old Man!" It seemed very wonderful. Here was a human voice apparently coming from nowhere over nothing. Then Laughter played the "Yankee Girl" and "The Blue Danube". He read a chapter from the Bible, told a story from Maupassant, and finally said "Good Night". Laughter will offer his invention to the Government. He is not selling stock. A syndicate of Memphis capitalists have taken him in charge and declare that his invention will not be put on the market until he has so reduced the cost of the apparatus that two hundred dollars will cover everything. Later he hopes to get the cost down to fifty dollars. The peculiarity of Laughter's device consists in a steel cylinder about seven inches in diameter. He has patented this apparatus, which he calls his "oscillator". "All that I care to say about it is that I am getting a frequency of one hundred thousand breaks per second out of it," was his rather terse explanation. His system can be used with any wireless by taking only a few minutes for adjustments. It has been found to possess many advantages.

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The Voice From the Air (1913)

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The Wireless 'Phone Will Get You (1916)

The Electrical Experimenter, January, 1916, page 487:

THE WIRELESS 'PHONE WILL GET YOU. Many a man in the spring of the weather and of youth has stood on his doorstep and longed to be able to shout his thoughts to all the world. Many have felt this, but few have ever thought they could do it. Wireless telephony has made such a scheme within the range of the possibilities. If your wife is cross, or your enemy is hot on your trail, or the partner wants to tell you that note falls due to-morrow, don't think you can go to San Francisco or China and get away from her or them. Gadzooks: You can't--the wireless 'phone will get you.

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Wireless Etiquette (The wireless as leash) (1999)

Wireless Etiquette: A Guide to the Changing World of Instant Communication, Peter Laufer, 1999, pages 39-40: The wireless as leash One of the strange sociological manifestations of mobile telephone technology is that once friends and colleagues know you carry a mobile phone, they expect to be able to get in touch with you whenever they wish and often feel insulted if you are not responsive to their rings.

"I used to date a girl who would get noticeably upset when she couldn't reach me right away on my wireless," is the lament from one frustrated boyfriend. "This was a problem. I did not buy the phone to be on a wireless leash, though she seemed to think of it that way."

When calling wireless phones it's prudent to take into account that the friend or business associate we're calling might be in the bathroom, driving in dangerous traffic, in a crucial meeting, walking--hands full of groceries--or just ignoring the phone in favor of a gorgeous sunset. If the person on the other end of the connection is using GSM technology, there is another factor to take into account before you dial: what time it is where that phone is about to ring. GSM allows a phone company subscriber to use a mobile phone all over the world without changing phone numbers. That means you could be dialing a number you think is local because it shares your area code, but the phone rings half a world and a dozen time zones away, waking your poor jet-lagged friend from a deep sleep in a faraway hotel. If you do make that mistake one thing is certain to occur next no matter how hard you try to avoid it. After you apologize, you will invariably say, "What time is it there?" followed by a query about the weather. Another courtesy worth extending to those you call on a wireless phone is a brief, not lengthy, conversation. In most parts of the world the calling party pays for any calls to wireless phones. That means that the mobile user is not concerned with the length of the received call because no extra charges are incurred by answering the mobile phone. But in the United States and Canada, the mobile phone users generally pay for the air time whether they make or receive the call. Consequently, it is decent etiquette to keep your calls brief unless you're told not to worry about the charges.

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Navy Department: Communication by Wireless Telephone (1916)

In 1907, Lee DeForest convinced the U.S. Navy to purchase a quantity of arc-transmitter radiotelephone sets for use on its ships, but the sets had barely worked. It was only with the later development of vacuum-tube transmitters that radiotelephony became practical.

Annual Reports of the Navy Department for the Fiscal Year 1916, Josephus Daniels:

REPORT

OF THE

SECRETARY OF THE NAVY.

NAVY DEPARTMENT, December 1, 1916.

NAVAL RADIO SERVICE: Pages 29-30:

COMMUNICATION BY WIRELESS TELEPHONE. The Naval Radio Service was mobilized for tests on May 6, 7, and 8, 1916, when, in conjunction with the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., the Navy Department was connected by telephone and telegraph with all navy yards and radio stations in the United States. The result of such tests was so satisfactory that the department proposes to arrange for continuous direct long-distance service by telephone and telegraph circuits between the department and the principal navy yards on the Atlantic coast. Shortly before 4 p. m. of Saturday, May 6, there congregated in the office of the Secretary of the Navy a number of officers of the various departments, in addition to representatives and officials of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., to witness the opening of the mobilization. After opening remarks by the vice president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., to which the Secretary replied, and a short address by the chief engineer of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., communication was at once established by wireless telephone between the Secretary and the captain of the battleship New Hampshire, then at anchor off Fortress Monroe. The Secretary then gave orders to the ship for the next day's movements, this being the first occasion that a ship of the Navy was ever operated direct from the department by wireless telephone. Many receivers were fitted so that the guests present could hear the conversation. Thus was brought to reality the prediction made to the Secretary some time previously that the time would come when he could sit at his office desk and converse with the captain of a ship at sea. This demonstration was followed by talking to various naval stations, widely separated, by long-distance land line. The circuit used between the Secretary and the New Hampshire, at anchor off Hampton Roads, consisted of land-line communication to Radio, Va., and wireless from there to the New Hampshire. The return circuit was by wireless to the Norfolk naval radio station and thence by land line to Washington. On the following day, May 7, communication by wireless telephone was again carried out with the

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Navy Department: Communication by Wireless Telephone (1916)

New Hampshire cruising between Hampton Roads and the southern drill grounds, and the communication was extended to include Mare Island. The commandant in his office at Mare Island conversed for some time with the captain of the New Hampshire. This was done by land line from Mare Island to Radio, Va., and thence by wireless telephone to the New Hampshire; returning, wireless telephone from the New Hampshire to Norfolk naval radio station, and thence by land line to Mare Island via the department. This wonderful achievement is but an earnest of further wonders which the future may develop in this art.

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Wireless 'Phone for Hotel Plan (1917)

The Electrical Experimenter, March, 1917, page 790:

WIRELESS 'PHONE FOR HOTEL PLAN. Guests at the Hotel Oakland, of Oakland, Cal., may be able to talk by wireless telephone with friends on incoming steamers, if present plans under consideration by the hotel management are carried out. Following the precedent by many hotels on the Atlantic coast, of installing wireless telegraphic sets for the benefit of guests, the management some time ago took up the feasibility of having a similar service installed in the Hotel Oakland, to be operated in conjunction with the ocean liners. Recent negotiations by the federal government with certain interests who have been developing the wireless telephone for direct communication over the air route, together with experiments which Uncle Sam has been conducting with radio-telephonic systems, has led to the decision on the part of the manager, Mr. Carl Sword, to consider the practicability of having a wireless telephone establisht in the hotel. The plan includes a co-operation among hotel managers all along the Pacific Coast for the purpose. A regular service for the transmission of important inter-hotel business, advance reservations by guests over the air, and a thousand other uses could be found for the convenience. The plan was suggested at the national meeting of the Hotel Men's Association held last year, but no active steps were taken. Under the plan, as outlined at the present time, the various hotel managers of the coast would form a wireless association which would install apparatus.

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Future Development of Radio Telephony (1918)

Radio Telephony, Alfred N. Goldsmith, 1918, pages 241-242 :

(d) FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF RADIO TELEPHONY. Now that the need for radio telephony is well recognized, we may confidently expect a very rapid development. Once a public demand is created, the technical advances required to satisfy that need must shortly follow. Some interesting possibilities as to universal communication may be considered. So far as portable transmitters are concerned, it is unlikely for some time to come that a man will be able to carry a radiophone set capable of communicating more than a few miles. Some new motive force, the apparatus for producing which has a very small weight per kilowatt delivered, must first be discovered. So far as reception is concerned, however, very sensitive and light receiving apparatus, capable of receiving messages from hundreds (or even thousands) of miles is imaginable. So that it should become ultimately possible to keep in immediate touch with the traveling individual regardless of his motion or temporary location. A great field of usefulness is thus opened to development. The linking of the wire telephone and radiophone systems of a country will go far toward making it possible for travelers to keep in touch with their homes and business at all times, and for the people of one nation to know the people of far distant nations in a close and intimate fashion. By the use of a deferred or night radiophone service (analogous to the day letter or night letter of the wire telegraph companies), reasonably inexpensive communication of this type should become feasible since such service might be rendered at times of light load and would tend to maintain the steady usefulness of the station. As is well known, stations are most efficiently operated when the load is nearly always full and constant. Plant efficiency requires, therefore, that some sort of premium be put on utilization of the plant facilities at times of normally light load. In conclusion, it may be stated that it is certain that radio telephony, properly fostered by the Governments of the world, must become ever more useful to humanity. From ship and shore stations, from aeroplane and ground, from trains and depots, over forests and deserts, across oceans and continents will pass the spoken word of man. We may justly paraphrase President Elliot's splendid eulogy of another type of communication. His words apply with multiplied force to the radiophone of the future. We may rightly term this instrument for speeding the voice of man across space as:---

CARRIER OF NEWS AND KNOWLEDGE.INSTRUMENT OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY.

PROTECTOR OF LIFE AT SEA._____________

MESSENGER OF SYMPATHY AND LOVE.

SERVANT OF PARTED FRIENDS.CONSOLER OF THE LONELY.

_____________

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Future Development of Radio Telephony (1918)

BOND OF THE SCATTERED FAMILY.ENLARGER OF THE COMMON LIFE.

_____________

PROMOTER OF MUTUAL ACQUAINTANCE.OF PEACE AND GOOD WILL AMONG MEN AND NATIONS.

.

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The Auto Radiophone (1919)

Radio Amateur News, August, 1919, pages 58-59:

THE AUTO RADIOPHONEBy A. H. GREBE

Expert Radio Constructor

THE present stage of radio

telephone development has placed this form of communication on such a highly practicable plane that its rapid adoption for many useful purposes is only a matter of a very little time. On aircraft it is now considered indispensable and because of the extreme simplicity of operation it will be used in many places on land over spaces which cannot be economically spanned by wires. Having experimented considerably with vacuum tube radio telephones during the past few years, and being impressed by the adaptability of this type of radio communication to small antennae, the writer desired to make some tests with a radio telephone equipment installed in a motor car. At first it was decided to use a flat loop as the radiating member, but this was abandoned in favor of a four-wire flat top antenna, used in conjunction with the frame and body of the car as a

counterpiece. It was found best to depend on efficient radiation of the transmitted energy and sufficiently amplified incoming signals, than to sacrifice radiated energy in favor of the advantages of the loop for receiving. The antenna system was constructed along portable lines, the supporting masts being fitted with socket joints for assembly and attachment to the car frame. When not in use the entire antenna system was slung under the running board on hooks provided for this purpose. The antenna wire was the same as used on aircraft and the non-kinking characteristics of braided wire made it more suitable than other kinds. The transmitter consisted of a panel and cabinet assembly which included the vacuum tube mounting, chock coils, oscillating circuits and modulating system. Meters were provided for indicating the filament current, modulator and oscillator tube space currents and the radiated energy. The oscillating circuit was so arranged as to be controlled by means of a tickler coupling and the dial for indicating the position of this coil was provided on the panel. Filament current was obtained from a storage battery located back of the seat, and this battery supplied the current for operating a small dynamotor, as well as the vacuum tubes in the receiver. The microphone transmitter was mounted on a convenient handle and arranged with a plug which was inserted thru the front of the panel. Another plug and jack was provided for connecting a hand telegraph key for buzzer modulation. A switch control on the panel enabled the changing of wavelengths; it was found that a wavelength of 150 meters gave the best results.

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The Auto Radiophone (1919)

The receiver consisted of a variometer type of regenerative receiver with two stages of audio frequency amplification and for this particular purpose was altered so that the antenna was directly cut in the grid circuit of the detector tube. This was necessary owing to the fact that the receiver was designed for use with the usual amateur antenna, and the wavelength obtained with the car was therefore below the requirement. The three stages of tubes were operated by a telephone plug, which controlled the filament and transformer circuits. Signals from ship stations and land stations within one hundred and fifty miles radius were copied without any difficulty. An interesting feature of reception occurred when other motor cars were operating nearby. The discharges at the spark plugs were very plainly heard upon the approach of a car and continued until the latter had gone a considerable distance. This same feature caused considerable difficulty in receiving on the motor car radio station itself and was not entirely over come by shielding the ignition wires. Owing to the fact that all the tests were conducted on a laboratory basis, it is not possible at this time to furnish data regarding the distances covered but it is probably sufficient to say that the tests have shown that the auto-radio-phone is entirely practical and the near future should bring extensive developments along these lines and we may soon hear an "SOS": "Send an emergency service car to car No. 999-999 three miles east of "Suburbanville."

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The Auto Radiophone (1919)

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The Auto Radiophone (1919)

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Pocket Wireless Soon, Predicts Marconi Official (1919)

Electrical Experimenter, August, 1919, page 372:

POCKET WIRELESS SOON, PREDICTS MARCONI OFFICIAL. Godfrey Issacs says the English Marconi company, of which he is managing director, expects to have a commercial service of wireless telephones in operation in New York and London early next year. The company hopes to make arrangements with New York and London telephone companies so that eventually the British and American wireless 'phone subscribers will be able to sit at their desks and "Hello, London" or "Hello, New York." Isaacs foresees the day, not far distant, when pocket wireless telephones will be in wide use. A business man's secretary, walking along the street, Isaacs says, will hear a bell ring in his pocket, will put a receiver to his ear and hear "his master's voice" give him instructions, probably from an airplane hundreds of miles away. The Daily Mail says that the British government probably will compel all commercial airplanes and airships to carry wireless telephone or telegraph equipment. Larger machines of both types may be compelled to carry both.

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Talking by Wireless as You Travel by Train or Motor (1920)

Before the rise of broadcasting, it appeared that the most promising use for radiotelephony would be for personal mobile communication. But although carphones would see a limited development over the next half-century, it wouldn't be until the 1980s that they started to become common. Special thanks to Donna L. Halper for providing a copy of the original article.

Boston Sunday Post, Woman's Section, November 7, 1920:

Talking by Wireless as You Travel by Train or Motor

It is now possible for a business man to talk with his office from a moving vehicle. While touring in his automobile or riding on a train for instance he can communicate by word of mouth with his secretary. The apparatus necessary to do this marvellous thing can be carried in a small dress suit case. Prof. Harold J. Power, wireless wizard and directing genius of the American Radio and Research Corporation, keeps in touch with his office while enjoying recreation in his automobile. Today he tells Sunday Post readers how he does it and discusses the problems to be overcome in developing the radiophone for practical general use.

By John T Brady Professor Harold J. Power was speeding toward Winchester in his automobile. I was seated in his office at Medford. Miles separated us--he was traveling along the highway at 25 miles an hour--yet we had no difficulty in talking by radiophone. It was a unique method of making an appointment for an interview--the most novel experience in my decade of newspaper work.

And here is how it happened. Rising to a height of 304 feet on the side of College Hill at Tufts is a sky-piercing skeleton of steel. The casual

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Talking by Wireless as You Travel by Train or Motor (1920)

inquirer is told that this is a wireless aerial, but it is more. It is the ladder up which Harold J. Power has climbed to fame as a radio-engineer. The sun was slipping behind College Hill and the shadow of' the big steel mast was rapidly lengthening--in other words, it was late in the afternoon when I stepped into the main office of the American Radio and Research Corporation at Medford, seeking an interview with the general manager of the plant, Professor Harold J. Power, called "H. J." by everybody from the office boy up. "Professor Power is on his way to the Country Club at Winchester in his automobile," said his polite secretary, Mr. Barrow. "Would it be possible to have a talk with him in the morning?" I inquired, disappointed. "You can talk with him now by radiophone if you'd care to try the experiment," replied Mr. Barrow. "You don't mean it's possible to phone to him while he is speeding along the highway," I said incredulously. "Certainly," replied Mr. Barrow smiling. "Our motto here is 'nothing is impossible, though some things are impractical.' "

Start Talk at "Zero Hour"

"Here put on this head-piece," he directed, handing me a telephone set such as switchboard operators use with receivers for both ears and a mouthpiece that rested on my chest. As I donned the head-piece he laid his watch on the desk in front of me. "Nice of him to display such confidence in my honesty," I thought, estimating the timepiece to be a valuable one. The time was 3:59. "Precisely at 4 o'clock, speak into the transmitter naturally and distinctly, just as you would into an ordinary telephone," he explained. "What shall I say?" I inquired. "Well, that sounds funny coming from a newspaper man." he said with a laugh. "I never expected to catch a reporter at a loss for words. Say anything you like. Perhaps you can make an appointment with Mr. Power for an interview tomorrow or next day." While a minute elapsed very slowly Mr. Barrow was busy. He placed a mahogany box about 10 inches square on one end of the desk and connected to it wires running to a series of small storage batteries and a generator in one corner of the room. Another wire running out the window of the office to the wireless aerial that I could see in the distance was connected with the box and the stage was all set for the novel experiment. It was 4 o'clock. "Go ahead, speak and don't shout," said Mr. Barrow. "Hello! Hello! Is this Professor Power?" I asked.

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Talking by Wireless as You Travel by Train or Motor (1920)

Mr. Barrow pulled a little lever on the side of the box at my elbow.

How It Is Done "Now, listen." he said. The answer to my query, sent out on the wings of the wind through the agency of electrons--smaller than atoms--flying about in a real Aladdin's lamp, came clear as a bell in the still of the evening. "Yes! Yes! This is Power. Who is this calling?" "Mr. Brady of the Boston Sunday Post staff. I should like to interview you tomorrow," I said, when Mr. Barrow had again manipulated the switch on his mystery box. "All right. Make arrangements with Barrow as to the time." was the reply. "Ask him where he is now?" suggested Mr. Barrow. "Where are you now?" I asked. "Just skirting Mystic Lake," was the answer. "Tell Barrow to tune up again at 5 o'clock. I'll be listening. Good-by." I had arranged for an interview by wireless telephone. Every word that Professor [Power] had uttered was deposited in my ears softly and distinctly. Even the modulations of his voice were distinguishable, and I feel sure he heard and understood everything I had said. With the exception that I could not talk back to Professor Power until Mr. Barrow had thrown a switch, and that we could not talk and listen at the same time, the conversation was no different from that over an ordinary telephone. By using double aerials we might have overcome this inconvenience, according to my young friend, Stanley Day of Saugus, a promising 16-year-old in the wireless field, with whom I later discussed my experience.

Giving Morgan a Concert

There has been much in the headlines lately about sending music by wireless. "Jimmy" Power did that back in 1916. On March 18 of that year he held a concert in a little building at the foot of the wireless tower at Tufts College for the entertainment of a traveller on the high seas. The traveller was J. Pierpont Morgan of New York, who was on his way home from a mission to England in connection with the financing of the World war. He was on board the American line steamer Philadelphia. Professor Power, then professor of radio engineering at Tufts, was formerly a wireless operator on Mr. Morgan's private yacht, the Corsair, and he decided to give his former employer a surprise. When the big liner was about 75 miles off Cape Cod a call was sent to her by wireless asking that Mr. Morgan be informed of what was to be undertaken. Going to the ship's wireless room, the millionaire was handed a receiving set, and for the next three hours, from 8 to 11 o'clock, he listened to a concert such as no other mortal had ever heard under similar circumstances. "What are the problems to be overcome in making the wireless telephone practical for general use?" I inquired when I met Professor Power the next day. "Perfection of a good signalling device and the problem of selectivity." he said. "At present the person making a call by wireless telephone has no way of signaling the person he desires to talk with. The party called must be listening for the message. That explains why a definite time for conversing by radiophone must be fixed beforehand.

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Talking by Wireless as You Travel by Train or Motor (1920)

"This obstacle in the development of the radiophone will be overcome by the perfection of a ringing device or a light signal such as is now used the ordinary telephone systems for attracting the attention of the operator at the switchboard in the central station.

Selectivity Problem to Be Solved

"The problem of selectivity will be harder to solve." said Professor Power as he drew several criss-cross lines on a sheet of paper with his pencil. "A radiophone system would be very popular in a country town, as everybody can hear what everybody else is saying simply by properly tuning their receiving apparatus," said Professor Power, laughing. "These lines illustrate radiophone messages going through the air in all directions." he said, holding up the drawing he had made. "The problem is to make them selective, that is, to prevent Tom, Dick and Harry who has a receiving set from listening in on any conversation that sounds interesting." "Like love talk," I suggested. "Yes." he said, smiling. "Lovers ought to learn a code if they intend using the radiophone to exchange 'sweet nothings.' " "Don't they use a code of their own now?" I asked. "Yes," he replied, "but it is one that is universally understood."

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Radiophoning To and From "L" Trains (1922)

Science and Invention, March 1922, page 1043:

Radiophoning To and From "L" Trains

IF the present plans of the Chicago Elevated Railroad do not

miscarry, the patient straphangers will gladly pay the present fare of 8 cents without any murmur, and be willing to donate an extra dime or two for the privilege of riding on the elevated. The elevated system is figuring on installing a radio system on its cars and furnishing its passengers with songs, music, and even grand opera, on their way to and from work. Pretty soon it will be a privilege to work; not only will the passenger be entertained, but it will be possible for you to call your home while in transit and suggest what kind of meat you want for dinner. The first trial of the radio was made on a Chicago, North Shore & Milwaukee electric line recently. A dozen pretty girls from the offices of the line danced with the road officials to the strains of music transmitted from the radio station on top of the City Hall. They were also able to carry on conversation, i. e., talk to as well as hear, the chief of the fire alarm system in Chicago, and every test proved eminently successful. One of the accompanying photos shows the girls, on the Chicago elevated train enjoying a dance to the music being sent from the radio transmitting station in Chicago. Another photograph shows a passenger talking from the moving train to his home in the city via radiophone, while the third photo shows how the antenna wires are mounted on insulators along either side of the roofs of the "L" train. The radiophone transmitting set used in this test was equipt with vacuum tubes for producing the necessary high frequency oscillatory current suitable for charging the antenna, together with a high voltage d. c. dynamo, the current from which is acted upon by the vacuum tubes in the production, as well as the voice modulation of the high frequency oscillations.

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The Radio Girls of Roselawn--extracts (1922)

The Radio Girls of Roselawn, Margaret Penrose, 1922, page 24: "It has been rather windy. I suppose it must be rough out in the ocean. Oh, Amy!" Jess suddenly exclaimed, "if I get my radio rigged why can't we communicate with the Marigold when it is at sea?" "I don't know just why you can't. But I guess the wireless rigging on the yacht isn't like this radio thing you are going to set up. They use some sort of telegraph alphabet." "I know," declared Jessie with conviction. "I'll tell Darry to put in a regular sending set--like the one I hope to have, if father will let me. And we can have our two sets tuned so that we can hear each other speak." "My goodness! You don't mean it is as easy as all that?" cried Amy. "Didn't you read that magazine article?" demanded her chum. "And didn't the man say that, pretty soon, we could carry receiving and sending sets in our pockets--maybe--and stop right on the street and send or receive any news we wanted to?" "No, I sha'n't," declared Amy. "Pockets spoil the set of even a sports skirt. Where you going now?"

Pages 55-56: "I guess, after all, Mrs. Grimsby has it partly right. Human beings cannot easily command the elements which Nature controls." "Seems to me we are disproving that right now in this radio business," cried Jessie. "And it is going to be wonderful--just wonderful--before long. They say moving pictures will be transmitted by radio; and there will be machines so that people can speak directly back and forth, and you'll have a picture before you of the person you are speaking to." She began to laugh again. "You know what Amy says? She says she always powders her nose before she goes to the telephone. You never know who you may have to speak to! So she is ready for the new invention." "Just the same, I am rather timid about the lightning, Jessie," her mother said.

Pages 58-59: "I tell you what," said Amy as, with their paddles, the girls wended their way down to the little boathouse and landing. "Won't it be great if they ever get pocket radios?" "Pocket radios!" exclaimed Jessie. "I mean what the man said in the magazine article we read in the first place. Don't you remember? About carrying some kind of a condensed receiving set in one's pocket--a receiving and a broadcasting set, too." "Oh! But that is a dream." "I don't know," rejoined Amy, who had become a thorough radio convert by this time. "It is not so far in advance, perhaps. I see one man has invented an umbrella aerial-receiving thing--what-you-may-call-it." "An umbrella!" gasped Jessie. "Honest. He opens it and points the ferrule in the direction of the broadcasting station he is tuned to. Then he connects the little radio set, clamps on his head harness, and listens in."

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The Radio Girls of Roselawn--extracts (1922)

"It sounds almost impossible." "Of course, he doesn't get the sounds very loud. But he hears. He can go off in his automobile and take it all with him. Or out in a boat--Say, it would be great sport to have one in our canoe."

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Radiotelephony and Wire Systems (1922)

Telephony, January 7, 1922, pages 20-21:

Radiotelephony and Wire Systems Some Substantial Reasons Why the Radiophone Cannot Supplant the Wire Telephone Systems--A Suggestion that Independent Companies Present Requirements for Special Wave Lengths to Governmental Authorities

By Henry Shafer

Radiophones, and their possible effect upon Independent telephony was a subject of much interest to many who attended the recent national convention in Chicago. Some expressed fear of the results which might befall wire telephone systems if radiophones prove a general success. For the purpose of a discussion of the question regarding radiophones uppermost with the owners of Independently-owned wire telephone systems, it matters little whether the generally adopted hypothesis that electricity as well as light, radiant heat, X-rays and other radiant energy is transmitted through space by undulatory waves of ether, is established as an actual fact, or whether such reasonings are merely employed as a convenience in the explanation of the phenomenon. The important point is that it has been thoroughly demonstrated that energy can be directed through space to transmit telegraph signals, operate the telephone and printing typewriter, to direct distant submarines, boats, land tanks, motors, etc. One of the most striking statements to telephone companies of what the radiophone can do is in the 1920 Annual Report of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., which states that "radio telephone communication has been established from Santa Catalina Island, about 30 miles out in the Pacific Ocean, to the mainland near Los Angeles, and at that point making junction with the local and long distance wires of the Bell system throughout the United States." It may also be stated that one of the most important characteristics of radiotelephonic communication is the exceptional clearness of articulation, due supposedly to the absence of wave-form distortion which is always present in wire telephony by reason of the deleterious effect of the electrostatic capacity of metallic lines and cables. It may be said as an established fact, that even with the many great advantages of radiotelephony over wire telephony from the technical standpoint, there are very substantial reasons why the radiophone cannot supplant the wire telephone systems. If through some special control of the electrons, or the energy similar to that in psychical contagion, mental telepathy would become generally possible, such a phenomenon might be of grave concern to the owners of wire telephone systems--but the radiophone, when used to its fullest extent, can only he made an auxiliary to existing telephone systems. To what extent radiotelephony may be used to the benefit of Independently-owned wire telephone systems, largely depends upon what action the companies themselves take in the very near future. That the industry may be conducted upon the "open-door" policy so any small group of telephone companies, or a chain of elevators or co-operative associations, etc., can get radiophones and do all their long distance telephoning through space at will, is impracticable and never can be attained.

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Radiotelephony and Wire Systems (1922)

While there is a group of interests who evidently now are attempting to completely control all radio business through the patent laws, however, that is not the plan under which this business is to be regulated. The senior pioneers in Independent telephony who aided in the termination of the "paper" patents on the bridging bell, the battery, transmitter, the cord weight, the switchboard alternating generator, the common battery systems, etc., would not consider that an unsurmountable barrier if radio equipment is unreasonably withheld from public use. The June, 1921, circular of the American Railway Association shows that many of the railways are taking up the problem of wireless and "wired wireless," and will not entirely rely upon others in the adaptation of radio service to meet their special requirements. The city of Chicago is now taking a strong lead to employ radio signaling and radiotelephony in police and fire department work, and is developing a service along this line which is bound to be of great value to the general public throughout the United States. It is becoming quite common that radio receiving sets are being installed to "catch" the messages flying through space, but to what extent such messages may be transmitted to others via the wire lines, or otherwise, has so far not been very definitely defined. With the light of the pioneer days of Independent telephony (previous to 1900) focalized upon radiotelephony through the "open-door" lens of the present highest governmental agencies, it appears quite possible that in the very near future transmitting sets, as well as receiving sets, can be obtained for public and commercial purposes as well as for "amateur and experimental use only," such apparatus is now being sold to the general public by all responsible suppliers. The users of the transmitting sets, however, are bound to be limited in number (not distance) owing to the limited "circuits" or wave lengths through space by which the radio equipment so far developed may be selectively operated. This situation and the industry in general is being regulated in detail by federal laws based on international conventions. The regulation of radio communication in all countries is now conducted in accordance with the London radio convention of July 5, 1912, and in this country in particular according to "an act to regulate radio communication" passed by Congress June 24, 1910, and as amended August 13, 1912, and July 1, 1921. According to the London convention signed by practically all the civilized countries, it was agreed to give priority to distress signals and answers thereto; stations in use not to be disturbed by other stations "wanting the line"; any one coastal station not to "use the line" more than 15 minutes without a three-minute period of silent listening-in; regulations as to coastal and ship-board stations, and as to charges for messages and their transmittal over land lines; also specification as to "circuits" or wave length to be used for various purposes; as to priority of classes of service and other regulations common to all countries. Under the United States regulations, all radio stations must be licensed by the Secretary of Commerce, excepting apparatus for radio communication which merely receive radiograms and are not equipped for sending, or transmitting sets which do not interfere with radiograms coming across a state line, or apparatus for army or navy use. The licenses are classified for first, second or third-class ship stations, coastal stations and inland stations divided for general public service, limited public service, limited commercial, experimental,

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Radiotelephony and Wire Systems (1922)

technical and training-school, special amateur, general amateur or restricted amateur stations. The licenses specify the "circuit" or wave length to be used and bind the operator to secrecy and other regulations; they also require various examinations and proper experience for the different classes of stations. There are penalties of fines or imprisonments, or both, for divulging messages overheard and other various infractions of international and national regulations. Owing to the rapid developments in radio communications, the military representatives of the allied powers held various conferences during the war to discuss necessary revisions of the London convention, and about a year ago a preliminary communications conference of the "five principal powers" was held in Washington. At the close of this conference it was provided that a technical committee shall be appointed by the five powers and shall meet to formulate recommendations for the use of the next world conference. The French government called a meeting of this committee to be held in Paris in June, 1921. The Paris conference was in session during June, July and August, of this year. While its conclusions are not binding upon any of the governments, they are to be used as a basis of discussion and action at the next world's conference on communications. These recommendations of the technical committee are subject to additions at the present time. As the world's conference will largely control the classification of wave length or available "circuits" and other regulations, it has been suggested that if the Independently-owned telephone companies desire allotment of special wave lengths for their general emergency use in case of storm or breaks in their wire toll lines, for relieving their over-worked toll lines from their checking and routine messages and for ordering up long distance connections, etc.--their requirements should be submitted to proper authorities before the interallied committee completes its recommendations. In view of the foregoing observations, it is my opinion, that Independent telephony has nothing to fear from radiotelephony, but has much to gain by taking prompt action and being among the first in the working out of the general worldwide plan, and in getting that to which the 8,000 or more Independently-owned telephone companies, with their approximate 5,000,000 subscribers throughout the United States, are reasonably entitled.

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