For many years scientists had understood that electrical waves or vibrations travelled through the ether in a copper wire, and that gave us telegraphy by wires, but it was a new thing to think of the waves travelling in every direction through space without wires. These early investigators found out that they could detect these waves by a device called a Hertzian loop, which was simply a copper wire bent into a hoop with the two ends close together but not touching. A spark would appear between the ends of the wire when the electric waves were sent out. Marconi began his work where these scientists left off, as a very young man on his father's farm in Italy, but soon went to England, of which country his mother was a native, and placed the results of his experiments before the government authorities. Continuing his labors he soon had his wireless apparatus worked out in the form in which it first became known to the world. It consisted of a transmitter, receiving machine or detector, and a set of antennæ or aerial wires from which the electrical waves were sent. For his transmitter, he created a spark between the two brass knobs on the ends of two thick brass wires by closing and opening an electrical circuit with a key, very much like, but somewhat larger than the regulation telegraph key. The space between the knobs was called the spark gap. For a dash he would hold down his key and make a large spark, and for a dot he would release his key quickly and make only a short one. Thus, he could send the regular Morse or Continental telegraphic codes of dots and dashes. These impulses were transmitted by wires to the aerial wires, or antennæ. The impulses left the antennæ as electro-magnetic waves, and went forth in all directions, only to be caught on the antennæ of another station aboard a ship or on land.