We are too apt, I think, all of us, to rejoice in our greatness as her devotees rejoiced in the greatness of Diana of the Ephesians: we should realise every time we undress that we are little removed from the animal, and that before many centuries have passed we shall be held in almost universal contempt.
If that does not stir us to do our best, we are indeed a nation of shopkeepers. But even the proprietor of the meanest store relies on his powers of prophecy for his profits.
The science of wireless is but a few years old. We know about it little more than our schoolboy sons, and in many cases not so much; let us therefore be open-minded if we are still ignorant.
Commercial invention trusts too far to mass thinking: an original mistake is very closely related to an accomplishment.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SOUND IN WIRELESS
A few lines of history are desirable here. I do not mean the history controlled by the fact that William the Conqueror made many important appointments in A.D. 1066 or that Stephen was particularly busy in A.D. 1100. I mean the history of wireless, for, although Radio Science is new, it has a history; all time is relative, and we ourselves are functions of that phenomenon.
Only a few years ago the efforts of wireless experimenters were entirely directed to the converting of the extremely delicate wireless oscillation, still but little understood, into a mechanical movement, in order that the motion of electrons in a problematical aether (which may be nothing but a thought projection and which may exist in many different forms) might be altered into something readable by a man with a check waistcoat and a stock and share list in his hand.
That particular use, and the information that one army is about to kill another could be transmitted to headquarters, naturally occurred to everyone as the first valuable applications of Radio.