FOOTNOTES:
[3] “History of the Wireless Telegraph,” by J. J. Fahie. Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood & Sons; New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899. This work is full of interesting detail, well illustrated.
[4] The value of wireless telegraphy in relation to disasters at sea was proved in a remarkable way yesterday morning. While the Channel was enveloped in a dense fog, which had lasted throughout the greater part of the night, the East Goodwin Lightship had a very narrow escape from sinking at her moorings by being run into by the steamship R. F. Matthews, 1,964 tons gross burden, of London, outward bound from the Thames. The East Goodwin Lightship is one of four such vessels marking the Goodwin Sands, and, curiously enough, it happens to be the one ship which has been fitted out with Signor Marconi's installation for wireless telegraphy. The vessel was moored about twelve miles to the northeast of the South Foreland Lighthouse (where there is another wireless-telegraphy installation), and she is about ten miles from the shore, being directly opposite Deal. The information regarding the collision was at once communicated by wireless telegraphy from the disabled lightship to the South Foreland Lighthouse, where Mr. Bullock, assistant to Signor Marconi, received the following message: “We have just been run into by the steamer R. F. Matthews of London. Steamship is standing by us. Our bows very badly damaged.” Mr. Bullock immediately forwarded this information to the Trinity House authorities at Ramsgate.—Times, April 29, 1899.
ELECTRICITY, WHAT ITS MASTERY
MEANS: WITH A REVIEW
AND A PROSPECT
George Iles
[From “Flame, Electricity and the Camera,” copyright by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.]
With the mastery of electricity man enters upon his first real sovereignty of nature. As we hear the whirr of the dynamo or listen at the telephone, as we turn the button of an incandescent lamp or travel in an electromobile, we are partakers in a revolution more swift and profound than has ever before been enacted upon earth. Until the nineteenth century fire was justly accounted the most useful and versatile servant of man. To-day electricity is doing all that fire ever did, and doing it better, while it accomplishes uncounted tasks far beyond the reach of flame, however ingeniously applied. We may thus observe under our eyes just such an impetus to human intelligence and power as when fire was first subdued to the purposes of man, with the immense advantage that, whereas the subjugation of fire demanded ages of weary and uncertain experiment, the mastery of electricity is, for the most part, the assured work of the nineteenth century, and, in truth, very largely of its last three decades. The triumphs of the electrician are of absorbing interest in themselves, they bear a higher significance to the student of man as a creature who has gradually come to be what he is. In tracing the new horizons won by electric science and art, a beam of light falls on the long and tortuous paths by which man rose to his supremacy long before the drama of human life had been chronicled or sung.
Of the strides taken by humanity on its way to the summit of terrestrial life, there are but four worthy of mention as preparing the way for the victories of the electrician—the attainment of the upright attitude, the intentional kindling of fire, the maturing of emotional cries to articulate speech, and the invention of written symbols for speech. As we examine electricity in its fruitage we shall find that it bears the unfailing mark of every other decisive factor of human advance: its mastery is no mere addition to the resources of the race, but a multiplier of them. The case is not as when an explorer discovers a plant hitherto unknown, such as Indian corn, which takes its place beside rice and wheat as a new food, and so measures a service which ends there. Nor is it as when a prospector comes upon a new metal, such as nickel, with the sole effect of increasing the variety of materials from which a smith may fashion a hammer or a blade. Almost infinitely higher is the benefit wrought when energy in its most useful phase is, for the first time, subjected to the will of man, with dawning knowledge of its unapproachable powers. It begins at once to marry the resources of the mechanic and the chemist, the engineer and the artist, with issue attested by all its own fertility, while its rays reveal province after province undreamed of, and indeed unexisting, before its advent.