LINDSAY AND MARCONI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 15, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 15.

LINDSAY AND MARCONI.

The triumphs of Marconi are naturally bringing forward the previous experiments of James Bowman Lindsay, to whom we referred a few weeks ago. Lindsay was born in a Scotch village in 1799; worked as a weaver at a hand loom in his early youth, but a taste for reading became his ruling passion. As Elihu Burritt when he was a blacksmith apprentice tied a text-book to the bellows and read what was in it as the bellows went up, and recited it to himself when the bellows went down, so Lindsay invariably tied a book to his loom during working hours. He worked and plodded until he became a student at St. Andrew’s, and afterward a teacher in Dundee. He devoted his time between science and language; experimented as an electrician, and undertook to compile a dictionary of fifty languages. He certainly forecast wireless telegraphy, the heating and lighting of houses by electricity, and the general introduction of electric power.

He began his electrical work in 1831; in four years devised a telegraphic system, suggested welding by electricity, and produced a continuous electric light which he said could be increased without limit. He went about lecturing and predicting that houses and cities would be lighted by electricity instead of gas, and heated by it instead of by coal. These prophecies were made in 1834. He resumed the experiments in 1844 and telegraphed messages across ponds without wires. In 1853 he sent them a quarter of a mile at Portsmouth, and later three-fourths of a mile on the Tay. In 1859 he read a paper on wireless telegraphy before the British Association.

But his details were entirely different from Marconi’s. Lindsay immersed two sheets of metal on one side of a pond or river, and connected them with a wire which passed through a coil to move a needle. And on the other side he placed two smaller plates connected similarly. He thought it necessary to have the plates on each side of the pond or river a mile apart. When he talked about transatlantic telegraphy he proposed to immerse and connect plates three thousand square feet at the northernmost and southernmost headlands of the United Kingdom, and supply a coil of two hundred pounds and a battery of one hundred and thirty square feet, and to have this on both sides of the Atlantic. This is almost totally unlike the plan of Marconi. Marconi operates with vertical wires in the air rather than with electrical wires in the water, as did Lindsay. Sir John Leng, who has taken great interest in Marconi’s experiments, knew Lindsay well.—Christian Advocate.