A DREAMY VIEW OF MR. PREECE'S EXPERIMENT.
IT is difficult for any one who is unscientific, yet possesses imagination enough to apprehend scientific results, to read a paper like that which in the Times of Tuesday de- scribes Mr. Preece's experiments, without dreaming dreams. The results transcend by so very far what we are accustomed to consider the limits of the possible. Mr. W. H. Preece, Chief Engineer and Electrician to the Post Office, has been trying to teat at Cardiff the idea which has for some time past been floating among experts in electricity—Mr. Crookes, for example, alluded to it in the Fortnightly Review—that it was possible to convey a message by electricity from point to point without the intervention of any wire; and this is the result he has obtained. He put up a wire a mile long on the coast near Lavernock, a little south of Cardiff, and a shorter wire on Flatholm, a little island three miles off in the Bristol Channel. He fitted the latter wire with a " sounder " to receive messages, and sent a message through the former from a powerful telephonic generator. That message on the main-land was distinctly heard on the island, though nothing connected the two,—or, in other words, the possibility of a telephone between places unconnected by wire was con- clusively established. This of itself is a wonderful triumph of applied science, for henceforward communication can be estab- lished, without laying cables, between any shore and any neigh- bouring lighthouse, or between the shore and a ship approaching it, or between a besieged city and Mends outside who cannot use any other means of communication. There are, in fact, a hundred uses, advantageous to humanity, to which such a discovery can be applied, and for these Mr. Preece will pro- bably acquire world-wide credit ; but these are trivialities compared with the possibilities opened by the method of transmission. That message did not travel through earth or water, or even air, but was transmitted through ether by waves of a certain, probably unusual, magnitude. That is, it flew through a medium independent, not only of human 'volition or energy, but of this planet, the medium which, -so far as we know, fills all space,—the medium through which light reaches us, say, from the star Sirius. In other words, Mr. Preece has generated a wave of electricity which, for aught he knows, or any one else knows, may have the power of conveying sound as far as the wave of ether which conveys light, that is, for a distance which human thought does not cover, and which is for human purposes the equivalent of infinity. Very likely it will not have the power. There have been no sufficient experiments yet as to the effect of distance on the transmission ; much may depend upon the generator; and we know very little as yet as to the conditions under which the mode of motion in ether called electricity gets tired, though we do know that it is capable of apparent fatigue, the " current " getting too "weak" over certain dis- tances, and through certain obstacles, to be of any practical use. But that it can go is certain, to a distance possibly dependent on the generator, possibly affected by unknown causes, but still possibly, also, without limit. If you stir that ocean of ether, the motion so created must roll on, in some sense, for ever ; for a portion of ether is displaced, and must displace another portion, though it may be in a gradually weakening degree, and Mr. Preece, with his mechanism, does stir it. The reflected light from Mars gets here, being a generator strong enough to keep the waves of ether in motion so far, and there is no reason what- ever as yet visible why a generator strong enough should not send the wave of electricity to Mars, where, if a " sounder" were ready, and human beings there to hear, it would be audible, telling the message previously told on earth. The thing may _never happen, because of limiting conditions as yet unknown ; but of the possibility of its happening there can be no reason- able doubt whatever. It does happen as regards light; and light and electricity, whether identical or not as only methods of motion, are undoubtedly transmitted in the same way, and by waves, the same in kind, though differing in magnitude and in speed,—electricity as compared with light being rather of the "lumbering lout" description. Still there is a possibility here of inter-planetary communication, a good deal more worthy attention than any scheme for making gigantic electric flashes, which the Martials, assuming them to exist, might mistake for lightning of an unusual degree of force. That is a, dream, perhaps—or, certainly, if you will—but as to the possibilities within our planet there is no dream at all. We do not know if we can communicate by telephone through the ether to New York or Melbourne, with or without cables, but we do know that if we cannot, the fault is in our generators and sounders, and not in any prohibitory natural law. We shall see; but there is no reason, except in the kind of difficulties such as arrested telegraphy itself in its infancy, why the whole world should not, in a few years, be in telephonic communica- tion, independent of any connecting cables at all. We are by no means hankering after that stupendous result, holding that man is neither wiser, nor better, nor happier for so much opportunity of chattering, or, to be polite, for so much extra speed in communicating ideas ; but of its possibility, granted certain mechanical conditions, Mr. Preece, we conceive, would express no doubt at all.
Will our habitual readers bear with us for a moment if we wander into another, and, as many of them will think, a supra-sensual region P Mr. Preece's experiment seems to us to throw a strange light, not indeed on the fact of the inaudible and invisible transmission of thought, but on its possible method. The thought in a man's brain which causes him to advance his foot, mast move -something in doing it, or how could it be transmitted .down that five or six feet of distance ? If it moves a physical something, internal to the body, why should it not move also something external, a wave, as we all agree to call it, which MI another mind prepared to receive it—fitted with a sounder, in fact—will make an impact having all the effect in the con- veyance of suggestion, or even of facts, of the audibility of words? Why, in fact, if one wire can talk to another without connection, save through ether—and two properly chosen tuning-forks will visibly do it—should not mind talk to mind wthout any "wire "at all? There must be conditions, of course, as there must be conditions before Mr. Preece's experiments can be carried on ; but granted the conditions, wherein consists the inherent impossibility of the occurrence ? None of us under- derstand accurately, or even as yet approximately, what the conditions are ; but many of us know for certain that they have occasionally, and by what we call aooident, been present to particular individuals, and that, when present, the com- munication is completed without cables, and mind speaks to mind independently of any machinery not existing within itself. That, we shall be told, in terms varying with the intelligence and courtesy of the remonstrant, is an individual conviction, or illusion, or fad—fad meaning a prepossession either above or below reason, but, at all events, outside it—and for the moment we will, as to the occurrence of the conditions in stated cases, accept that judgment ; but still the central query remains,—Why is the occurrence, apart from con- ditions, inherently impossible P For that, and no less, is the assertion of those who declare the theory of brain. waves to be preposterous or absurd. You can drive a dog half mad with rage or fear by looking at him. There must be some motive-power in the brain, or how does it set the toes going, or produce stigmata on the body ? and if there is a motor, why should it not move something of which as yet we know nothing, but the impact of which another brain may perceive ? Why, in the name of science, is that more of a "miracle," that is, an occurrence prohibited by immutable law, than the transmission of Mr. Preece's message from Lavernook to Flatholm P Nothing that we can see with our eyes conveyed that, and our fathers would have treated reference to such a supra-sensual carrying-medium as " ether " as a grotesque conjecture. Professor Huxley might tell us, per- haps, that Mr. Preece's message, the conditions granted, will always go, and the brain-wave will not ; but that would be pure assertion. The conditions may be there, and still never be in gear till the fitting time arrives, and the mind to use them. There are men who cannot hear the noise of the crickets, but the cricket's chirp sounds all the same for that. The operator is not the sole agent, there must be the " sounder " as well; and in the case of mental motion, we not only do not know what sounder will answer, but we know that no two sounders are alike, and that few will respond to exactly the same " tone " in the message-sender,—a peculiarity, by-the-way, which, though not quite so obvious in the mechanical telephone, is still distinctly perceptible, John being almost useless as a message-sender, while Jack can be heard all over the receiving-room. Granted the conditions, the result seems to us, reasoning from analogy, to be inevitable, and the deduction, therefore, is plain. Beings may exist, finite beings, possibly beings living under most limited conditions, who, in their communications with each other, are independent of all the conditions necessary to what we call speech,—who, to use the clearest expression of our meaning, can, in thinking a thought, make that thought audible. That reflection, as it seems to us, is justified by the facts, and helps to make it possible for men to conceive of what spiritual existence may be like, and to enlarge our con- ception of the range of sentient existences which the universe may contain. Whether such a speculation is profitable, we hardly know, but we ought to gain something from every enlargement in the area of our ideas about the powers of mind.
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