New Discoveries Will Help Wireless To Defy Weather.

New York Times 100 years ago today, October 6, 1912:
When Powerful High-Frequency Electrical Generators Replace the Spark-Gap Method of Sending Oscillations a Forward Step Will Be Marked, Says Prof. Pupin    Wireless telegraphy is poised for an important forward step, the longest and most important, in the opinion of Prof. I. Pupin of Columbia University, since the first step of all when Marconi gave the new idea to the world. This step will be the replacing of the spark-gap method of sending out oscillations. There will be used instead huge, powerful, high-frequency electrical generators.
    To the layman this gives no hint of the tremendous importance of the step, but the student of wireless progress and development sees in it the promise of vast improvement. He foresees the transmission of wireless messages going on at all times and in all weathers in a new and sorely needed independence of atmospheric conditions. He foresees messages sent a far greater distance than at present and far more easily. He foresees the removal of many of the most besetting difficulties of wireless telephony. Above all, he foresees wireless brought down far nearer to the level of its ultimate desire, the ordinary level of the ordinary telephone, the "foolproof" level.
    As Prof. Pupin explained it the other evening, sitting in the University Club, it was originally felt necessary that the oscillations for wireless transmission should be of very high frequency. The oscillations in wireless telegraphy are the aerial vibrations sent out from the transmitter of a wireless station to be caught by the receiver of a station within the radius of the waves produced. At the outset the operations called for as many as a half million or a million oscillations a second, high frequency such as only a spark-gap could produce. These were necessary for any great distance work, and yet there were difficulties involved in their use. Such high oscillations are constantly lost in sun-lit air, and, furthermore, besides being dependable on the weather, they are as discontinuous and irregular as the spit-spit-spit of the crackling spark-gap itself.
    Gradually, by such experimentation as is afforded only by the practical, commercial use of wireless, it was learned that messages could be sent across the water with a far lower frequency oscillation, as low as from twenty to forty thousand a second.
    This was recently announced by Marconi himself, and with the announcement the electricians rose and said:
    "If you can use oscillations of as low a frequency as that for wireless, then we can make you powerful dynamo-electric generators that will produce them. You will no longer have to depend on the spark-gap with its intermittent, spitting explosions. We will give you a powerful high-frequency machine that will send out a continuous, smooth train of oscillations and yet will have a hundred horse power to drive them as far as you wish."
    "And when that was made possible," said Prof. Pupin, "the practical problems of wireless were greatly simplified. For sending by slow oscillations is practically independent of the weather. The slow, continuous, oscillations sent out from a hundred horse power machine will go through any kind of atmosphere. The sunlight, which disintegrates the constituents of the air and destroys its capacity as a non-conductor, is ruination to the high-frequency oscillations, which therefore call for rain and cloud and darkness.
    "The demands are just the reverse of those of the sailor's. The weather for ships is not good weather for the wireless, for good weather for wireless is good weather for ducks, as the saying goes. But the slow, powerful oscillations from the machine will go through any wind and weather and the stations need not be idle just because the sun is shining. This means an immense saving of time in that feature alone! Of course, it was always possible for the spark-gap to produce low-frequency oscillations, but to do so you would have had to drop to a horse power of three or less. And that wouldn't reach very far."
    Prof. Pupin believes that within a year many high-frequency generators will be installed at the wireless stations on both sides of the Atlantic. He himself has ordered one from the General Electric Company for use in the laboratory at Columbia University. To speak of such machines as high-frequency machines is to use "high" only in relation to machines. It is very low for wireless, of course.
    Besides the fact that with this new method wireless transmission can go on at all times of the day, regardless of the weather, the use of the powerful machines such as any electrical company can manufacture for a station will mean a considerable extension of the practicable distance range of the stations.
    "It will surely increase the distance," said Prof. Pupin. "How much, I do not know. It may double it or even treble it. That is something we will have to find out.
    "And, mind you." he went on, "this new step is being taken by the electrical world at large. It is not the work of a single mind, the device of a single inventor. It is a development arrived at by constant experimentation of many minds. It is a development such as the laboratory could not have brought forth, for it needed the experiments in actual world-girdling distances to ripen it. But wireless telegraphy has reached that stage where the touch of the genius is no longer needed and where the problems ahead for its perfecting are simply engineering problems. Marconi could die and wireless development would inevitably and continuously continue.
    "When I say that, I am not slurring Marconi. On the contrary, I am giving him praise that is almost beyond words. It means that his work lives on and grows, whether he lives or not. And that means that his work is immortal. It is the greatest thing that can be said of a man's work. Take it in history.
    "I say that Bismarck was a greater man than Napoleon. He was. His work lived after him. With Napoleon there were brilliant battles that built up an artificial empire, and yet that empire died with Napoleon. It died even before he did. It died when he was removed from Europe. He was the life of his work. His work had no life in itself. But Bismarck! Prince Bismarck, my friend, built an empire that lived after him, that lives to-day and grows stronger with every passing year, Bismarck's work is immortal. He was a far greater man, then, than Napoleon. It is so with Marconi. His genius gave the idea to the world, and he taught the world how to build a telegraphic practice upon the basis of this idea. The world will do the rest.
    "Why, look right here in our own country. See the genius of those men who wrought the Constitution of the United States. It survives everything. It lives to-day, stronger than ever, tested by the rack and strain of constant, wearing use. The men who wrought that instrument of government were giants. I find myself thinking every day that the Constitution might perhaps go to pieces under the assaults upon it. It lives on. Franklin, Hamilton, Jay, Washington, Madison — those men made something which withstood a great civil war. Their work lives after them, and grows stronger with every breath of life. It is immortal. It is so with Marconi. He did an immortal job.
    "And the further perfecting of his idea, the development of it, needs no genius, calls for none, is employing none. It is being perfected in laboratories all over the world, and experimentation that will be useful in its progress is done in every message sent from every station. The men who do this perfecting will be nameless in the history of wireless. They are the silent heroes of the laboratory.
    "Wasn't it so with the incandescent lamp. Edison invented that, and then innumerable minds were bent upon it, and of late years there has come forth out of this united effort, out of this patient, painstaking labor in the laboratories of this country and Germany, the efficient light of to-day, the tungsten filament lamp, so concertedly and impersonally produced that it bears the name of no inventor, but is called by the name of the metal used in its manufacture. We have the personal tag in the naming, of the Cooper-Hewitt lamp, honoring the man who gave birth to the idea embodied in this beautiful lamp. I suppose that when that lamp is perfected to a high efficiency it will lose its personality and be called by the name of some new and more suitable material which some day will, perhaps, replace the mercury employed to-day by Mr. Hewitt.
    "And wireless will develop, mark you. It will reach to any place on earth. You will be able to send messages through the atmosphere to any point in all the world, and this world will seem so small then, won't it? Why, wireless will make old Earth look like 30 cents.
    "Replace cable? No, I don't think it ever will. There is no reason why it should. Wireless and wire telegraphy will each have enough to do, always. But it will force the improvement of cable service. It will stimulate it. It has stimulated it. But wipe it out! Never. There has been a greater use of cable service since 1896, when wireless came, than ever before. Mr. Ward of the Postal Telegraph Company tells me that the cable business is steadily increasing.
    "But that was to be expected. The introduction of lighting by electricity did not do away with gas. There is more gas used now than ever before. Automobiles have not done away with the business of horse dealing. Horses — good horses — are more in demand than ever and harder and more costly to get. You cannot buy a fine saddle horse without paying a ridiculous sum for it. The stimulation of cable service by wireless will improve and cheapen it, but not kill it. Invariably one art reacts upon another in this stimulating way."
    Prof. Pupin also thinks that the introduction of high-frequency generators in wireless work will mean the solution of many of the problems besetting wireless telephony. The same trouble with the spitting, discontinuous, intervaled transmission by the spark-gap method blocked the progress of wireless telephony. The same dependence on atmospheric conditions discouraged the experimenters in this outcrop of Marconi's invention. The smoothing of the way by the production of smooth, continuous oscillations sent out from a powerful machine is a promise of rich developments in this field, as Prof. Pupin reads the signs, but whether it will ever mean talking across the ocean is another matter. This was promised by experimenters on the other side of the Atlantic some years ago, but it went little further than a promise.
    "They thought it was in reach then," said Prof. Pupin, "but they were foolish to think so."
    In this connection it is interesting to recall a comment that Prof. Pupin made on this very subject nearly three years ago, when the interest in the telephony projects were at their height.
    "Remember," he said then, "that the conditions must all be extremely favorable for the transmission of wireless telephone messages. The atmosphere must be just right, the sending and receiving instruments in perfect accord, or the message will not be received. Now in electricity, where the progress is so rapid, it is foolhardy to prophesy one way or the other, but it seems to me that the inherent difficulties of wireless telephoning fix a definite limit to its general use. It is possible, of course, to talk under favorable conditions for many miles in all directions. I have no doubt that, with such sending stations as the Eiffel Tower, remarkable results are being obtained, but I am not hopeful of its universal application. It is significant that the United States experimented with the wireless telephone at some length and abandoned the work."
    But Prof. Pupin seemed to take the largest satisfaction in the new steps of wireless telegraphy in that it gave promise of reducing the art to the "fool-proof" level. That was his own phrase.
    "To make an invention generally useful, you must have it reduced to such simple terms that it will be 'fool-proof,' " he said. "The telephone is on that level. The telephone asks of the daily user nothing more intricate or arduous than the lifting of a receiver from a hook. It is about as simple a mental process as turning a door knob to open the door, and it has to be. Wireless is reaching that stage. With these machines installed at the stations, the whole wireless story will be told in simpler terms. The new step takes us measurably nearer the day when anybody can send a message anywhere."
    Something of the present progress and the future progress in the world of wireless was pointed out by Prof. Pupin in a speech he made last Spring before the New York Electrical Society, which speech the society is about to publish.
    "In my opinion," he said in this speech, "the first claim for wireless telegraphy belongs to Mr. Marconi absolutely, and to nobody else. If wireless telegraphy has not made as much progress during the last sixteen years as it might have made the outside world is to blame and not Mr. Marconi himself. The outside world interfered too much; but things are looking better now — a good deal better.
    "Ten years ago when it was announced that Mr. Marconi had succeeded in signaling across the Atlantic the famous letter 'S' people did not believe it. They thought it was impossible. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers did not share that opinion — they believed the statement. I believed it, and we gave a dinner that year to congratulate him upon his wonderful success. To-day we receive I do not know how many thousands of words from the other side daily and nobody thinks anything about it. That is a huge success in the face of the difficulties, and it took only ten years.
    "Instead of using short, rapid electrical waves they use slower ones, and they have found that slower ones can penetrate through the atmosphere in the daytime as well as during the night. Now that is wonderful progress. Ten years ago people thought that without using at least 100,000 oscillations per second you got no practical wireless telegraphy. To-day they use but 40,000; and Mr. Marconi told me in private they are satisfied to use 25,000 per second. This is progress. You may ask why that is considered to be progress — this stepping from rapid oscillations to slow ones. The reason is not so open to any one who has not tried to build a machine for these electrical oscillations.
    "Another point is the receiver. You have to tune your receivers so that you will not have interference from Tom, Dick, and Harry. Of course you cannot tune a circuit when your transmitted oscillations are not of the proper sort, and the trouble with those is that it is very difficult to make oscillations of the proper sort. When we have a good transmitter that will give us continuous oscillations then we will have to attend to the receiver and have a receiver that can be properly attuned.
    "We have receiving circuits that can be properly attuned — there is no doubt about that; and scientific research is by no means exhausted in that direction. The amount of work which Mr. Marconi did is enormous. Nobody who has not worked with the fixed rotating disks and the condensers and the shunting circuits has any idea of the amount of work Mr. Marconi has done to progress from the 'S' in 1902 to the transmission of thousands of words 1912. It is enormous."