The First Radio Channel
While perhaps not singly applicable to the subject of pictures by radio, it is certain that without the discovery that signals could be transmitted through the air without wires, we should not now have either audible or visual radio.
While in 1832 Professor Joseph Henry discovered that electrical oscillations could be detected a considerable distance from the oscillator, it remained for a dentist, Dr. Mahlon Loomis, of Washington, D. C., to actually send the first radio messages. In 1865 he built an oscillating circuit, and connected it to a wire aerial supported in the air by a kite. One station was set up on the top of Bear Den Mountain, in Virginia, not very far from Washington; a duplicate station being set up on top of Catoctin Spur, some fifteen miles distant.
Messages were sent alternately from one station to the other station, by dot-and-dash interruption of a buzzer spark circuit; while reception was attained by deflecting a galvanometer needle at the station which was at the moment receiving.
InLeslie’s Weekly(1868) Frank Leslie personally describes these “successful experiments in communication without the aid of wires.”
Later (1869) a bill was introduced in the U. S. Congress to incorporate the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company (though nobody would buy the stock, and it remained for others, years later, to reap the reward of radio broadcasting).
In speaking on the bill, Senator Conger repeated, he said, the explanation that Dr. Loomis made to him, that—
This Illustration of Dr. Mahlon Loomis’s Wireless Telegraph Set Was Made from His Original Drawings of His Invention Which Are on File in the United States Patent Office at Washington.
This Illustration of Dr. Mahlon Loomis’s Wireless Telegraph Set Was Made from His Original Drawings of His Invention Which Are on File in the United States Patent Office at Washington.
This Illustration of Dr. Mahlon Loomis’s Wireless Telegraph Set Was Made from His Original Drawings of His Invention Which Are on File in the United States Patent Office at Washington.
“The system consists of causing electrical vibrations, or waves (from the kite wire aerial) to pass around the world, as upon the surface of some quiet lake into which a stone is cast one wave circlet follows another from the point of disturbance to the remotest shores; so that from any other mountain top upon the globe another conductor which shall receive the impressed vibrations may be connected to an inductor which will mark the duration of such vibration, and indicate by an agreed system of notation, convertible into human language, the message of the operator at the point of first disturbance.”—From Congressional Globe, Library of Congress.
Perhaps it may be a coincidence, or perhaps a blood strain of the pioneer, that the first radio school ever set up by a woman should have been founded by his granddaughter, Miss Mary Texanna Loomis, Washington, D. C.
[Photographs]