There is a strange factor which we may call the “Law of Supply and Demand.” This strongly implies the faculty of invention, a facility of “wishfulness to improve”; something far better than the necessity for invention. Let us remember that our clothes are not necessities; they are merely comfortable, and it is comfort that distinguishes us to-day just as it is convenience that will in the future give us a life which will be better by far than that experienced by the kings and princes of to-day.
Civilisation has depended almost entirely upon the speeding up of communication. We can travel fast; we can convey our thoughts at great speed, but, unfortunately, although all these means of intercommunication are devised with the one idea of preventing physical work and of obviating the movements of our gross bodies, our senses are very closely combined. It is consequently not possible to ring up somebody on the wireless telephone, a fact itself easy of accomplishment, and to impress our personality upon the listener. This is simply because we require a combination of senses for hearing, seeing, smelling, and other reactions, in order to convey our whole personality.
Vision at a distance is, therefore, very necessary as our inclination for travel decreases and its comfort increases.
It is also important from the point of view of “speeding up,” which we have no reason to suppose will cease. All operations have steadily increased in speed for many generations.
There was a time when we made appointments to meet our friends at the full of the moon, but now we say at “10 o’clock, and I can only give you two minutes.” In the future we shall probably say, “Meet me at 10.2.1-5 secs., and do not keep me waiting.” To do this we must have radio sight.
Many years ago, when experiments were made on the subject, the usual cry appeared from what I always mentally typify as the “Flat Earth Brigade”; they said, “Impossible.” What would our forebears have said of talking to a man in an aeroplane? “Impossible!” It is a foolish word. Now all over the world experiments are being conducted, many of them with success and some with the guarantee of reasonable success in twenty years or less.
Now wireless, if I may apply the word here, is very like light in many ways; it is capable of refraction and shadow effects; it travels at the same speed, and if the wave-lengths of wireless could be sufficiently shortened to become visible we should probably find ourselves with a new, and possibly effective, method of transmitting wireless light and even power.
Radio is a phenomenon of the spectrum like ordinary photographic light, X-rays, and so on. It is effects which determine the difference to our eyes of things invisible, solid, and transparent.
It may well be that, when we succeed in inter-planetary communication, we shall discover that the inhabitants see by the X-ray, by wireless, or by heat.
It is not difficult to obtain a proportionate interchange of radio and light oscillations. Even sunlight affects wireless telegraphy, and experiments which have been conducted upon the carrying and directional power of certain other rays and oscillations have not been entirely without results. We may, one day, obtain far greater sensitivity of direction, greater carrying power, from small initial output with a degree of selectivity almost infinite, in comparison with modern working.