Another advance, probably a most important one, has been made
in the use of electricity for the transmission of messages. Signor Marconi, who discovered that messages could be sent from point to point without connecting wire or cable, on Tuesday succeeded in transmitting them from South Foreland to Wimereux, near Boulogne, across the Channel. The distance is thirty-two miles, and the messages, which are flashed from a wire raised on a pole one hundred and fifty feet high to another wire at a similar altitude, were as easily and clearly read as if wires had extended over the distance. The message practically leaps from one point of wire to another across the intervening distance, the ether vibrating to the electric impact as a stretched wire would. This is like the revelation of a new law in Nature, and it is difficult not to dream of the results which may be obtained from it, for if the ether can transmit vibration in a guided direction, it can also transmit sound ; but farther experiments must yet be made as to the limit of distance,—the doubt, if we remember right, of the original inventor of the telegraph. Meanwhile, we can only remark that the machinery for wireless telegraphy across the Channel will hardly cost a fraction of that required for a cable, and that the invention is a menace for the shareholders in short sea-cable lines.
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