Improves Radio-Telephone.

New York Times 100 years ago today, December 29, 1912:
French Inventor Believes He Is Close to an Important Discovery.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    PARIS, Dec. 28.— Important improvements in wireless telephony are foreshadowed by the experiments of Edouard Branly in his laboratory at the Catholic Institute here.
    In an interview this week M. Branly says that he is at work on an investigation of the essential element of wireless telegraphy, the radio-conductor, especially as regards the action of shock. He has already proved that its effect is not produced by a new distribution of conducting grains in a tube of iron filings, as hitherto thought, and his most recent experiments, carried out with extreme care and in great variety, with special apparatus, have brought him to the conclusion that "the conductability of a radio-conductor is the conductability of a thin non-conducting body between two conductors."
    In his experiments M. Branly has employed gutta-percha, collodion, mica, copal, resin, celluloid, &c., as non-conductors, and has used a tube of zincite filings, which has given remarkable results.
    He finds, in fact, that the tube can be used as a direct telephonic receiver, even without a battery, and to obtain the maximum telephonic sonority the pressure on the filings necessary is quite different from that required for telegraphy.
    Although M. Branly abstains at present from drawing too definite conclusions from his discoveries, it is generally believed here that he is on the eve of making wireless telephony absolutely practicable, and of far greater scope than hitherto.