CORRESPONDENCE.
THE WIRELESS TRANSMISSION OF ELECTRICAL ENERGY.
(TO THE EDITOR OF TRH "SPECTATOR.")
Sra,—Having been present at the experiments conducted by Messrs. Armstrong and Orling in the transmission of elec- trical energy without wires, I shall attempt, with your leave, to present a few reflections on them. The results of the experiments you already know, and I shall not offer you an unnecessary catalogue of them ; you know that whereas the Marconi system works through the air, the " Armorl " system, as it is called, sends its radia- tions most frequently through the ground or through water; and you know that these radiations have conveyed the exact inflections of the human voice, and have proved to be
• powerful enough to direct the course of a torpedo. As I understand it, the " Armorl" system professes to have two advantages over the Marconi system ; the first is that it is better for land use, and the second is that in the conveyance of messages it provides for a secrecy as yet not secured in practice by Marconi messages, open as they are to all the world and his receiver. In the recent naval manceuvres, for example, any ship that had a mind to seems to have inter- septed the messages of any other ship ; and it is said that in one case one of our cruisers read all the orders from a French man-of-war within whose "sphere of influence" she bad .come by accident in a fog.
Now to explain these two professed advantages. Tho Marconi rays, which pass intact over the sea, seem to lose a great percentage of their strength when travelling over woods and towns, but the underground " Armorl" system suffers no such interruption. You might suppose that the electrical radiations, when once they had come in contact with the earth, would disperse in all directions, and be lost for all practical purposes. Nothing of the sort appears to happen. Indeed, Mr. Orling believes that they arrive at their destination as strong as when they started ; if they lose some- thing they also gain something, being reinforced in some way, as yet insufficiently explained, from the natural electricity of the earth. .Be the explanation what it may, the fact is that the " Armorl " system is now achieving with low voltages results formerly attained by M. Tesla only with extremely high voltages. If Mr. Armstrong may be believed, an " Armorl" message in the freedom of its passage is to an overland Marconi message as a train in the "Twopenny Tube" is to an omnibus working its way along Oxford Street on a crowded day. And then there is the possibility of secrecy. You know the way in which, when you make a particular sound in a room, a sympathetic ring sometimes ' comes from a glass globe. Well, the equivalent of this sympathy in the pitch or tone of sounds exists among electrical radiations. There are forty thousand of these electrical pitches or tones. Mr. Orling, excellent master of the electric circus-ring, provides that all the tones shall move in their proper places without getting in one another's way. When two tones of the same quality meet they may have dealings with one another, and when a receiver has been tuned, as it were, to a particular tone it can receive radiations which are sympathetic with it. But radiations of unlike tone will pass by one another in their underground journeys as innocently and harmlessly as a finished woman of the world can pass an undesired acquaintance.
What may we look forward to from this discovery? I do not pretend that the Armstrong-Orling inven- tions are yet in a practical working state. I am no enthusiast about fledgling discoveries ; I know their high rate of mortality. But no man who heard, as I did, the articulate human voice rise through a long spike, devoid of wires, which had been thrust into the ground, can doubt that here we have the beginnings of an important change. This, then, is what we may look forward to. Some day men and women will carry a wireless telephone as com- monly as to-day we carry a card-case or a camera. We shall switch ourselves on to the underground radiations through the medium of our walking-sticks or our boots. We shall then tune up our receiver to tone number 39,451, or whatever may be the lawfully registered wireless-telephone number of hint to whom we would speak. We shall hear no distracting buzzings and wranglings, no echoes, too little faint, of other people's business or dinners. Tone number 39,451 will go about his business undisturbed. But to apply the invention more seriously. For military purposes should it not be extraordinarily useful ? Soon it should be no longer necessary to carry cumbrous coils of wire —wire which is always at the mercy of the enemy as it lies on the ground—and to pay them out tediously over the stern of a cumbrous trolley. The Staff officer and the scout will each drive his wireless apparatus into the ground and wait for the magic touch of the sympathetic tone. It is not even necessary to wait for perfection in the conveyance of the human voice. The Morse code is already transmitted with
more precision and greater ease, for other investigators besides Messrs. Armstrong and Orling have long been at work on the sending of unshaped sounds through the ground. A kindred apparatus which I examined is for the magnifying of telephonic sound. A considerable multiplication of the volume of a sound has been achieved already; we may expect that some day the mouse—for which we shall set 'a telephonic trap—will be able to roar like any bull. A ship will proclaim her name loudly through the fog; Calais and Dover in hazy weather will announce themselves to the approaching packets, "Calais !" " Dover! "
If the developments in telephony are the most remark. able inventions, those- in the wireless control of moving bodies are likely to be more immediately useful to the nation. But it must not be thought that the con- '&01 of a torpedo in this way is a new thing. In 1898 one went through as many tricks as it had then learned before King Oscar of Sweden. In 1899 M. Tesla made torpedoes perform in a like way in America. There must be other cases which are outside my knowledge. The Actinaut,' as Mr. Armstrong calls his torpedo, is an instrument of promise. It may be that in wirelesss torpedoes we have the best solution we shall find of . the difficulties of coast defence. A force of watchful and highly expert electricians, a suffi- cient supply of torpedoes and machines for guiding them, and how many expensive fortifications Might not we do without?
One note in conclusion. You may ask whether these new forces are sufficient only to affect delicate instruments, or whether they may become serious motive powers. Expert electricians say that inherent limitations forbid them from passing beyond the first stage. I take a pride in keeping my enthusiasm somewhat below proof; and I am not enthusiastic enough to contradict the experts. At the same time, it appears that those who study natural forces are divided, like those who have to do with literature, into two parties. There are authors and there are critics. Is it not a great irony that those . who exercise the critical faculty are frequently, by virtue of their excellent qualities, the very men in the world least fitted to sympathise with the creative faculty ? And this disability often continues in the case of the most advanced products of the creative faculty until those products have been reduced to rule, until, in a word, they have become_ "respectable." Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Orling—the latter in particular, for his genius is of a runaway order—have no critical faculty. They are scarcely—if I may say it in the polite sense I have indi- cated—respectable. But still—who knows ?—I am, Sir, 8;_c., X.
Previous page
