W. J. Bryan'
The First Radio Channel
While perhaps not singly applicable to the subject of pictures by radio, it is certain that without the discovery that signals could be transmitted through the air without wires, we should not now have either audible or visual radio.
While in 1832 Professor Joseph Henry discovered that electrical oscillations could be detected a considerable distance from the oscillator, it remained for a dentist, Dr. Mahlon Loomis, of Washington, D. C., to actually send the first radio messages. In 1865 he built an oscillating circuit, and connected it to a wire aerial supported in the air by a kite. One station was set up on the top of Bear Den Mountain, in Virginia, not very far from Washington; a duplicate station being set up on top of Catoctin Spur, some fifteen miles distant.
Messages were sent alternately from one station to the other station, by dot-and-dash interruption of a buzzer spark circuit; while reception was attained by deflecting a galvanometer needle at the station which was at the moment receiving.
In Leslie’s Weekly (1868) Frank Leslie personally describes these “successful experiments in communication without the aid of wires.”
Later (1869) a bill was introduced in the U. S. Congress to incorporate the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company (though nobody would buy the stock, and it remained for others, years later, to reap the reward of radio broadcasting).