The Universe a Vast Electric Organism

by Geo. W. Warder

Long electric waves are radiated to greater distances than shorter ones, and much depends on the syntonic system, or tuning of the instrument, so as to communicate with any selected receiver to the exclusion of all others.

An electric generator supplies the source of electricity for operating an induction coil to transform the low pressure into an alternating current of high pressure. This charges the wire suspended from a mast and the wire leading to the earth to a sufficient potential to cause the opposite charges of electricity to rush together, thus forming a spark or disruptive discharge through a small air gap; as a result high potential currents surge to and fro through the wires hundreds of thousands of times per second.

These high potential currents radiate electric waves which are propagated as light waves and spread out in every direction. It is said the whole process of transmitting and receiving wireless messages is not unlike to the emission of light and its reception by the retina of the eye.

The reception of these waves is by means of a vertical wire similar to that used in transmitting, the difference being the wires at the terminals are connected with metal filings inclosed in a small glass tube called the coherer instead of the spark gap. The electric waves impinge on the elevated wire and are converted into electric oscillations, which act on the filings, and an auxiliary circuit registers the impulses on a ribbon of paper in readable Morse dots and dashes. The higher the vertical or mast wires and the greater the number of wires, the greater the wave length and the farther the distance transmitted.

Marconi in his first Atlantic tests employed kites and balloons to carry the vertical wire so that long electric waves could be obtained. Since then he has carried his wires on high masts, as at Poldhu, Glace Bay, and Wellfleet Station. The Marconi companies have equipped six stations in the United States, five in Hawaii, twenty in Great Britain, one in Belgium and one in France. There are eighteen ocean steamers, thirty-two British-men-of-war and several Italian and American warships which have Marconi installations. Marconi says: "There are thirty-five land stations, twenty-one liners and eighty-five warships equipped with Marconi apparatus. Land stations cost $1,000, and ship equipment, $700. Trans-Atlantic stations cost $100,000 each."

Wireless telegraphy is the most recent miracle of electricity, and shows it to be the cosmic energy of the universe. Science stumbled upon it. And in the same way, Sir Wm. Crookes, in a recent interview, says: "Science may some day stumble upon the soul. Men of science believe more than they can express, spiritually as well as physically." He will not prophesy, but said with ominous import: "If you had come to me a hundred years ago do you think I should have dreamed of foretelling the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it. I use it every day, but I don't understand it. Think of that little, stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating not only sounds, but words, and with the most delicate and illusive inflections of tone which separate one human voice from another."

Mr. Peter Cooper Hewitt, says the Electrical Review, has invented a new apparatus which it is said will make a revolution in the method of sending wireless telegraph messages. The device consists of a glass globe about ten inches in diameter, having two tubes containing mercury sealed in the bottom of the vessel.

This apparatus acts, as a powerful and effective interrupter and takes the place of the spark gap now used in discharging the condensers for setting up electrical waves. It enables powerful, rapid and continuous oscillations to be set up in the antenna, or sending mast, used in transmitting wireless messages, and not only enables messages to be sent over very great distances with ease, but permits secrecy to be maintained, which heretofore has been impossible.

The operation of this device depends upon two new phenomena in physics which Mr. Hewitt has discovered in the course of his researches. The first is the resistance of the mercury in the apparatus to a passage of current until a high potential has been applied; the second is the disappearance of this resistance after this high voltage has been reached.

The effect of these two phenomena is to permit a condenser to be charged to a high potential and then, by the disappearance of the resistance of the interrupter, to discharge it very rapidly. The result of this action is to set up violent and rapid current impulses in the circuit containing the condenser, and thence in the sending wire. The current impulse, being very powerful, will enable messages to be sent to great distances, and as the number of oscillations per second can be controlled, this permits of selective signaling. The number of impulses can be made very high—above a million a second. The device is inexpensive and durable. It is considered a great contribution to wireless telegraphy and establishes it on a commercial basis, and selective signaling is solved and trans-Atlantic transmission will be easy.