The Universe a Vast Electric OrganismWarder, Geo. W. (George Woodward)
Science
The Universe a Vast Electric Organism
Warder, Geo. W. (George Woodward)
Science -- Miscellanea
Marconi in his first Atlantic tests employed kites and balloons to carry
the vertical wire so that long electric waves could be obtained. Since
then he has carried his wires on high masts, as at Poldhu, Glace Bay,
and Wellfleet Station. The Marconi companies have equipped six stations
in the United States, five in Hawaii, twenty in Great Britain, one in
Belgium and one in France. There are eighteen ocean steamers, thirty-two
British-men-of-war and several Italian and American warships which have
Marconi installations. Marconi says: "There are thirty-five land
stations, twenty-one liners and eighty-five warships equipped with
Marconi apparatus. Land stations cost $1,000, and ship equipment, $700.
Trans-Atlantic stations cost $100,000 each."
Wireless telegraphy is the most recent miracle of electricity, and shows
it to be the cosmic energy of the universe. Science stumbled upon it.
And in the same way, Sir Wm. Crookes, in a recent interview, says:
"Science may some day stumble upon the soul. Men of science believe more
than they can express, spiritually as well as physically." He will not
prophesy, but said with ominous import: "If you had come to me a hundred
years ago do you think I should have dreamed of foretelling the
telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it. I use it every day, but
I don't understand it. Think of that little, stretched disk of iron at
the end of a wire repeating not only sounds, but words, and with the
most delicate and illusive inflections of tone which separate one human
voice from another."
Mr. Peter Cooper Hewitt, says the Electrical Review, has invented a new
apparatus which it is said will make a revolution in the method of
sending wireless telegraph messages. The device consists of a glass
globe about ten inches in diameter, having two tubes containing mercury
sealed in the bottom of the vessel.
This apparatus acts, as a powerful and effective interrupter and takes
the place of the spark gap now used in discharging the condensers for
setting up electrical waves. It enables powerful, rapid and continuous
oscillations to be set up in the antenna, or sending mast, used in
transmitting wireless messages, and not only enables messages to be sent
over very great distances with ease, but permits secrecy to be
maintained, which heretofore has been impossible.
The operation of this device depends upon two new phenomena in physics
which Mr. Hewitt has discovered in the course of his researches. The
first is the resistance of the mercury in the apparatus to a passage of
current until a high potential has been applied; the second is the
disappearance of this resistance after this high voltage has been
reached.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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