An extract from Vol. 28. Autumn 1940. No. 1. of the Magazine, St. Edward's College, Sandfield Park, Liverpool

The Wonder of Wireless

Is there any marvel of Science more astonishing than the invention that brings music and the voices of speakers and singers from anywhere on Earth right into our homes?

Thoreau, the poet, wrote his lines: "I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight," with no idea of wireless in his mind. It had not so much as been thought of, at the time of his death, in 1862. Yet the wireless has already turned the first of his imaginings into actual fact, and is, in a fair way to do so with the other.

You yourself may have sat at home and listened to Big Ben striking the hour in London and have known that many a person in Asia and Africa and Australia was listening to the sound of the same bell at the very same moment. The first scientist to take out a patent for sending signals through atmospheric space by means of electric waves was Guglielmo Marconi (1896). On March 3rd, 1899, the first wireless report of an accident to a ship at sea brought prompt rescue from lifeboats that put out from the shore. The case was unique. In the first the vessel that was in difficulties was a lightship - the East Goodwin Lightship, marking the dangerous Goodwin Sands off the coast of Kent; she had been run down by a steamer. And in the second, it so happened that this very vessel had been chosen by Marconi for one of his first experiments in communication across the sea; it was only a few months before that she had been fitted with apparatus capable of carrying messages over the twelve miles that separated her from the South Foreland lighthouse on the mainland.

Such is the history of the early days of the wireless telegraph, a marvel a few years ago but now taken as a matter of course. Once men knew that electric waves could be sent out into space, it was only a matter of time before someone would find out how to capture the waves and make them register their beats. The beats would spell out a message. As soon as Marconi had solved this puzzle, it became a simple matter to send the first messages or Marconigrams, as the first radiograms were called. The transmitter was just an Induction Coil with the spark gap connected with an aerial or an insulated wire suspended in the air. An Induction Coil is an arrangement for making a very small but energetic current jump in a spark across a gap. When the circuit was closed and the gap was sparking brightly, a continuous series of waves was shot out into space from the aerial - in the same general way in which a series of waves is sent rippling from a stone you may drop into the still water of a pond.

With the Morse Code to go by, a short series of waves would mean a dot and a longer series would stand for a dash. At the receiving end, the waves reaching the aerial would start a current in it which would be detected by Marconi's wave-detector. Through a head-phone, the buzz of dots and dashes could be heard and so the message could be intelligibly read. Soon after 1899, Marconi was trying the great experiment of sending messages across the Atlantic. It was a great day when man first reached out through the air to send a message over thousands of miles of ocean. A station was set up at Poldhu in Cornwall, on the West coast) to create the waves. It had a far greater power than any other station had ever had before; but, even so, some of the engineers were afraid that the waves would not travel around the curved surface of the earth, while others thought they would always be too feeble to be detected.

But Marconi was confident. When the station in England was ready, he went to St. John's, Newfoundland. In a little time he had his receiver in order and was ready to listen. He had told the people in England to send out the letter "S" at a certain time every day. On December 12th, 1901, he first heard the three clicks that stand for the letter "S" in the Morse Code. He had heard the first message through the air over the Atlantic. The new thing was at once another wonder of the world. The warships of all nations began to be supplied with wireless, and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 showed the great value of wireless communication in naval strategy.

The step that brought the wireless to all our houses was the change over from telegraphic to telephonic methods. As soon as that change was made, any sound could be brought from anywhere. By 1914, Marconi had conversed by·wireless telephony over a distance of fifty miles, and in the next few years the distance was to be rapidly increased as the instruments were improved. In 1915, speech was transmitted between Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A., and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and to Honolulu in the North Pacific islands of Hawaii.

We have come to "hear beyond the range of sound)" and by means of television we are beginning to " see beyond the range of sight.”

J. CALLANDER, VIa Mods

An extract from an article on "the Twenties"
The other major breakthrough in the Twenties was the birth of broadcasting. Experiments had been going on with wireless telegraphy since the beginning of the century and had received a tremendous boost during the First World War.

Eventually, the time came when wireless should be put to peaceful purposes, and the British Broadcasting Company was set up in 1922, taking over from early broadcasts by 2L0 from Marconi House aerials in the Strand. America already had several hundred commercial radio stations on the the air, competing for wavelengths.

The BBC avoided the evils of commercialism and airwave anarchy. But it brought music "out of the ether," into millions of homes. Sheet music sales were hit by the new wave of broadcasts. Why play the piano when you could hear it on the wireless? But bands became ever more popular as they broadcast every evening from 6 pm to 7 pm and there were late night sessions with the Savoy Orpheans, Savoy Havana Band, Jack Howard and many more. The Melody Maker pioneered dance band contests, and while Carnegie Hall in New York was to become the ultimate accolade for jazz in America, in Britain, Jack Hylton was already conducting his 25-piece orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.

The Scott Polar Research Institute - collaboration between Dr Rees and Dr Ray Williams (University of Tasmania) continued during the year (1998). This work involves the development of image-segmentation algorithms, originally devised through a collaboration between the Remote Sensing Group and the Marconi Research Centre, for the delineation of icebergs in radar images, and is now being applied to studies of the Antarctic ice budget.