Wireless PossibilitiesLow, A. M. (Archibald Montgomery)
Science
Wireless Possibilities
Low, A. M. (Archibald Montgomery)
Radio
As far as communication is concerned, we shall have whole armies in
instantaneous touch with each other: it may indeed make real secrecy
more difficult. It should always be recollected that when we refer
to wireless speech, wireless control, and Radio Vision, we do not
necessarily mean the same form of electrical wave by which we now
broadcast a comic opera.
It is with oscillation that we are really concerned, and we may
discover many forms of electronic vibration at present occupying
portions of the so-called spectrum which are as yet very little
understood.
It may be impossible for the Commander-in-Chief of the future to
conceal a document from the eyes of wireless; and who knows but that
the electrical operation of thought may be reduced to a science so that
our very ideas are not secret without protection?
How many of us to-day could risk all our thoughts being known? It would
probably improve moral standards if they were published: science tends
to effect an average improvement.
We have never yet really seen the extraordinary value of wireless in
war. If we had solved the problem of selection, the transference of
speech by phonograph records dropped from aeroplanes would never have
arisen.
Undoubtedly, we shall see wireless controlled tanks, submarines,
and torpedoes on both land, air, and water. All will be accurately
controlled, and they will possibly be able to find their way home and
to operate from a distance while out of sight.
Even to-day it is possible for an aeroplane to operate a torpedo, to
steer it properly, to slow it down; and for a pilot of an aeroplane
many miles away to work his will upon it with a reasonable degree of
accuracy and with the help of a gyro control.
The day will undoubtedly come when the problem of defending an island
is not that of the mainland itself but of all its dependencies.
No large town could live for long if it were bombed from a distance by
wireless, if gassed and poisoned from a distance, were it not for the
balance of protection and defence which is usually maintained by nature.
We shall in the future, see forms of electric death and heat-rays which
may materialise not as a direct projection of heat but as some form of
oscillation which produces heat only when striking a metallic object.
We have been so often told that power can be transmitted by Radio that
we are apt to look upon this statement with contempt. This is quite
wrong: power will one day be transmitted by wireless; power can at
present be inductively sent over quite a large air gap, though the
energy available quite close to any wireless station is practically
negligible to-day.
When motor-cars and ships are controlled or stopped by wireless, it is
not the wireless which does the work; the therial oscillation merely
sends signals to the ordinary operative mechanism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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