The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-03-08

The equipment with wireless teleg- raphy of practically every ship that
 sails the seven seas is expected to fol
 low the striking demonstrat:on of thu
 utility of this form of communication
 which was furnished in the case of thu
 recent collision of the steamships Re public and Florida. Had 1t not beer for the success of Jack Binps in flash. ing distress signals to other vessels and shore stations. the sea would prob. ably have claimed several hundred
 more victims.
 e. Q. D." the call for help. may be sent from or received by almost any American ports if the proposed legis- lation Is enacted by the next Congress | The proposition came too late for the Sixtieth Congress to act upon 1t. The Republic incident proved that wireless l telegraphy has come to stay. It open-
 ed the eyes of the world to the fact thak one of the greatest marvels of the ages is available for everyday use for the comfort and safety, business and pleasure of everyone who cares to take | advantage of 1t. The term wireless telegraphy Is said by scientista> to be . misnomer because the receiving and sending apparatus have wires running up into the air to catch and transmit the flying spark. 1 "Radio-telegraphy" 10 claimed to be the proper designation of this wonderful 1t is wireless telsgraphy. and that 1t Is and probably will remain.
 Wireless telegraphy is the modern development of an old idea. It is said that somebody suggested 1t about the time Of Christ. but the detail was not worked out practically until Guglielmo Marconi. young Italian inventor, took hn1A ~ Tn ha ulrNnnAdad transmitting e message without wires c distance of two miles, By 1897 he had increased the distance to nine miles. Developments followed rapidly until six years ago, when the first news dispatch was transmitted to The London Times via the Marconi trans- Atlantic wireless system between Ire- transatlantic communication was the result of a long series of experiments. marked by repeated failures and all sorts of difficulties.
 Narconi secured the first patent on wireless telegraphy about twelve years ego. The United States patent office has issued between 500 and 700 pat wireless telegraphy. and there are a large number of applications for such patents still pending. About thirty patents on wireless telephony have been granted, and other applications are pending. Nearly all the wireless patents have been granted during the past decade. lists suggested the possibility of the wireless transmission of electricity and they carried on many experiments. s. F. B. Morse conceived the idea of telegraphing without wires and suc- ceeded in sending few words across the canal at Washington in 1842. Alexander Graham Bell suggested the possibility of sub-aqueous electrical communication. Thomas A. Edison. the electrical wizard, succeeded fin ob- taining telegraphic communication with moving trains. Morse. Bell, and others, however, relied on water as the medium of transmission, while Edison connected with trains through the ground. Henry Hertz. German scien- tist, was the real father of telegraphy through space. His discovery, In 1887, of the solcalled electro o-magnetic waves made 1t possible for Marconi and other inventors to perfect wireless telegra- phy as known today.
 Wireless telegraphy has many faults and peculiarities. but they are being corrected and studied carefully by ex- perimenters all over the world. The faults include greater or less unreiia- biiity owing to atmospheric or other conditions, the lack of secrecy, and slow rate of transmission. The pecu- Iiarities are numerous and unexplained. For instance, the wireless telegraph works more satisfactorily in cold wea- ther or temperate climates than in the summer time or the tropics: better at night than during the day: better on the Pacific Ocean than on the Atlantic. Communication from Canada to Eng land is better than in the opposite d. rection.
 The unreliability and lack of secre- cy are being overcome by "tuning" the various sending and receiving stations so that there can be communication only between such stations as are de- sired. just as tuning fork. when struck. will communicate its vibrations to another tuning fork placed some distance away. As for speed, Edison has predicted that in a decade 1000 words a minute. instead of thirty-five or forty, as at present, will be sent across the ocean by wireless. and that the submarine cable will eventually be put out of business.
 The tremendous importance of wire- less telegraphy was recognized by the world in 1903 when an international conference on the subject was held at Berlin under the auspices of Kaiser Wilhelm. A second such conference was called in 1908. when an interna- tional convention was drawn up ana signed by the representatives of many governments. which provided among other things that all shore stations should take a message from any ship, without regard to nationality or the