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Essay on Early Methods of Maritime Communications
The idea of wireless communication is astonishingly old. Leaving away ancient practices like e.g. communication by smoke clouds, which are obviously wireless, too, the speculations about wireless communication started at the latest around the middle of the 19th century [Story, around 1920]. They were, at that time, not about electromagnetic waves, which had not been discovered yet, but about a different physical principle, the one of conduction, which could be used and indeed was used to transmit signals from A to B without wiring. (Story 1920).
Wireless communication by means of conduction traces its origin from Germany in 1838. Carl August Steinheil (1801-1870) in Munich discovered by chance that the conductivity of the earth was far greater than previously known. In his experiments, he tried to use railway gauges for wired telegraphy, which did not work very well, as the metal of the gauges was very badly isolated. He found, though, that electric impulses could be transmitted (“conducted”) through the ground and induces a current in a distant wire [Story]. This phenomenon became of some importance for wired telegraphy.
The first person to suggest transatlantic wireless telegraphy apparently was the linen-weaver-turned-science-lecturer James Bowman Lindsay (1799-1862), that speculated about it as early as 1845. His idea was to combine the two conductive principles. He developed a system that was presented to the public in Dundee in 1853 and on which he received a patent in 1854. The patent described his invention as
“A mode of transmitting telegraphic messages by means of electricity or magnetism through and across water without submerged wires, the water being made available as the connecting and conducting medium”(Story, 1920).
The mechanism was as follows: He put two copper plates into the water on each bank of a river and connected them with a long wire, which was interrupted by a battery on the one bank and by a galvanometer on the other bank....
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