25 FEBRUARY 1928, Page 19

It is curious, as Mr. Ellison Hawks says in his

interesting Pioneers of Wireless (Methuen, 12s. 6d.), how many of the early discoverers of the principles of electricity were amateurs. Dr. Gilbert was physician to Queen Elizabeth, Franklin a printer and statesman, Young a doctor, Morse a painter, and Mr. Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was a teacher of deaf mutes before he began, with Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford, to revolu- tionize our civilization. Within all our memories is the old transmitting station, with its romantic coils, whence great sparks came, liberating ozone and cracking like stock whips. Now all that is a thing of the past, as the frontispiece to this volume shows. We commend the -book most heartily to the mechanically minded.

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