Article December 27, 1900 Issue

Recent Advances in Wireless Telegraphy

John A. Fleming

London Times

As the subject of wireless telegraphy has not yet apparently lost interest for the general reader, I venture to ask a little space to make known for the first time some recent achievements by Mr. Marconi which have astonished those who have been allowed to examine them. Every one is aware that in his system of electric wave telegraphy an important feature is the employment of an elevated conductor, which generally takes the form of a wire suspended from a mast. When Mr. Marconi attracted attention by his feat of establishing communication across the English Channel without wires, critics raised a not invalid argument against its commercial utility, that a wave or signal sent out from one transmitter would affect equally all receivers within its sphere of influence, and hence the privacy of the communication would be destroyed. No one felt the force of this objection more strongly than the distinguished inventor himself, whose original work has caused so many others to attempt to follow in his steps. For the last two years he has not ceased to grapple with the problem of isolating the lines of communication, and success has now rewarded his skill and industry. Technical details must be left to be described by him later on, but meanwhile I must say that he has modified his receiving and transmitting appliances so that they will only respond to each other when properly tuned to sympathy. I am well aware that other inventors have claimed to be able to do the same thing, but I do not fear refutation in saying that no one has given practical proof of possessing a solution of this problem which for a moment can compare with that Mr. Marconi is now in a position to furnish.

These experiments have been conducted between two stations thirty miles apart, one near Poole, in Dorset, and the other near St. Catherine's in the Isle of Wight. At the present moment there are established at these places Mr. Marconi's latest appliances, so adjusted that each receiver at one station responds only to its corresponding transmitter at the other. During a three days' visit to Poole, Mr Marconi invited me to apply any test I pleased to satisfy myself of the complete independence of the circuits, and the following are two out of many such tests: Two operators at St. Catherine's were instructed to send simultaneously two different wireless messages to Poole, and without delay or mistake the two were correctly recorded and printed down, at the same time, in Morse signals on the tapes of the two corresponding receivers at Poole.

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