No large town could live for long if it were bombed from a distance by wireless, if gassed and poisoned from a distance, were it not for the balance of protection and defence which is usually maintained by nature.
We shall in the future, see forms of electric death and heat-rays which may materialise not as a direct projection of heat but as some form of oscillation which produces heat only when striking a metallic object.
We have been so often told that power can be transmitted by Radio that we are apt to look upon this statement with contempt. This is quite wrong: power will one day be transmitted by wireless; power can at present be inductively sent over quite a large air gap, though the energy available quite close to any wireless station is practically negligible to-day.
When motor-cars and ships are controlled or stopped by wireless, it is not the wireless which does the work; the therial oscillation merely sends signals to the ordinary operative mechanism.
Much excitement has been caused by the alleged injury of aeroplanes and motor-cars by wireless, but how is it that they can afterwards proceed? Do we forget that the petrol engine has to be restarted, and that, if allowed to fire when a car was in gear, it might be damaged and would probably not operate the moving parts?
If wireless power could be directed in such a form that it could be conveyed along a wave of “atomic” oscillation, many more valuable ends might be served than the enforced landing of aeroplanes.
Our clocks could be corrected by wireless, experiments could be conducted upon the nature of light and ether in various forms. We might decide the mode of propagation of light and thought, and investigate the apparent motion of the electron along the electro lines of force.
What an opportunity for study to the man of medicine! What a chance to find out how the oscillations of life are connected with those we partially understand.
What a chance for the burglar to discover the presence of hidden spoons as a mass of metal by means of wireless; what a chance for the surveyor and the seeker after oil to use this all-prevailing sense of oscillation and even to discover the meaning of radiation.
Oscillation—that is all we mean by Radio; and oscillation is at the base of life itself. It will not be long before travellers by air, land, and water, will be no longer alone.