In 1899 wireless communication was established across the English Channel, and in 1902 Marconi sent the first wireless message from England to America. Today, wireless waves measuring miles from crest to crest are being employed in the transmission of messages from points separated by thousands of miles, and the human voice has already been carried across the Atlantic by radiophone, but only in one direction. The wireless sending and receiving station of the Dutch government, at Kootmyck, in the Province of Gelderland, is equipped to employ a 12,000-meter wave-length in sending and receiving simultaneously messages between Holland and Java, 7,500 miles distant. It has the same capacity as our Long Island (Rocky Point) station, and is therefore one of the biggest in the world. On December 19, 1922, a long distance phonograph which records sounds made hundreds of miles away was demonstrated to the Society of Western Engineers, by E. H. Colpitts, of the Western Electric Company. The transmission of electric power by radio is as yet but a dream; but it is a dream which may come true within the next five years.[39] Signals are now being received from stations situated at distances as great as 12,000 miles, made possible, it is believed by the existence of an electrical conducting layer—electrified dust expelled by the sun—some 150 miles in depth, the bending of the radio-waves around the earth being caused by diffraction. Some unknown factor is operating to give the signals a strength millions of times greater than can be accounted for at present by any plausible theory, according to Prof. J. A. Fleming (Fifth Henry Truman Wood Lecture before the Royal Society of Arts, London, 1922). It is not reasonable to assume that no other electromagnetic waves remain to be discovered. We may yet hear “the roar of the sun-spots,” though Edison’s experiments along this line were unsuccessful. What, indeed, were the mysterious “signals” occasionally reported as having been received at Marconi wireless stations—registered, it was reported in the press, “only when a minimum of sixty-five-mile wave-lengths had been established,” but waves issuing from the mighty sun, 93,000,000 miles distant? However, Marconi tells us that one of the “signals” comes as three short raps—“S” in the Morse code. He believes that these “signals” may have been sent out from Mars or Venus. Similar mysterious “signals” were reported by wireless stations in different parts of the world during the apposition of Mars in August, 1924.