IS ANYTHING EVER DISCOVERED?
It was inevitable that Marconi’s splendid achievement should be challenged by lawsuits brought by alleged prior inventors. The Atlantic, however, has never before been crossed by ether-borne messages, and that tremendous practical success securely belongs to the Italian electrician. The first discoverer of communication by etheric waves, and the first to apply it over shorter distances, can not be certainly named. It is on record that sixty years ago Professor Morse, father of the electric telegraph, sent wireless messages across the Susquehanna River not far from Baltimore; also that in 1864 Clark Maxwell demonstrated that ether waves could be utilized over long distances for electrical purposes. Possibly, like the telephone, types and printing—and according to Wu Ting-fang the11game of ping-pong—wireless telegrams were known to China any number of centuries ago. Ralph Waldo Emerson says in one of his exquisite essays: “All machines in use have been invented and reinvented over and over; the mariner’s compass, the pendulum, glass, movable types, the kaleidoscope, the railway, the power-loom, etc., have been many times found and lost, from Egypt, China and Pompeii down.” For example, London is just now deeply interested in the discovery of a remarkable substance called electroid. Under its influence plants have an extraordinary forced growth, blossoming, coming to maturity, and fading away within a few minutes. But Papin, a seventeenth-century scientist, records in the Journal des Savants for 1685, a precisely similar discovery. Santos-Dumont and the other airship builders are supposed to belong to this and the last century, but the archives of Portugal hold a letter written to the king of that country in 1799, signed curiously enough by one Santos, who assures His Majesty that he has contrived a machine that will travel in the air more than two hundred leagues in a day and make the discovery of the North Pole easy. The ironclad ship was the child of American ingenuity in the Civil War—so we think. But in 1585, during the siege of Antwerp, the Dutch defenders built a large ship and plated it thickly with iron to protect it from a Spanish fire. Moreover, they built roomy platforms around its masts for sharp-shooters, thus anticipating by about three centuries the supposedly new fighting-tops of our battle-ships. The steam engine we credit to James Watt, George Stephenson and Robert Fulton, but one was certainly exhibited by Papin, already mentioned, to the English Royal Society in 1699. Three years later he fitted it to a boat and ran it so successfully on the Weser River, in Germany, that the alarmed boatmen wrecked and sank it. A century and a half earlier King Charles I. of Spain gave 50,000 crowns to a man who “amused him,” as the record says, by fitting up an old war-vessel with paddles worked by steam and running it at a speed of nine knots an hour. Being a normally dull King, it never occurred to him that the invention had any practical value. And the metal aluminum, first discovered in our own time, as most people believe, was known in the time of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who ordered a workman named Faber beheaded for bringing to him a cup of silvery white metal much lighter than silver, which the Emperor feared might make silver itself valueless. Marconi’s performance will lose nothing in value if it shall be finally proved that wireless telegraphy is among the thousand and one arts and sciences that have been lost and found again.—N. Y. World.