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The year 1905 saw many remarkable
developments in the international wireless scene in many different
countries. Some of these experimental
developments turned out to be quite insignificant, whereas as others proved to
be highly significant in the further progress of main stream electronic
development.
In
England, the Marconi company obtained a patent for what they called the
Directive Horizontal Antenna, the forerunner of what we call the Curtain
Antenna today. The Curtain Antenna is a
system of dipole antennas suspended from a cross
wire attached to two strong tall towers.
All Curtain Antennas are active radiators, and on many occasions another
Curtain Antenna strung behind the active antenna acts a passive reflector.
In
Germany, Professor Ernst Ruhmer established two way voice communication over a
distance of ten miles with the use of a modulated light beam. This procedure is quite successful, though it
requires an exact focus of the light beam, with no visible structure in
between.
At
San Francisco in the United States, Major George Squire experimented with the
usage of a tree as a transmitting antenna.
This procedure can also be quite successful, though there is a signal
loss due to dissipation throughout the structure of the tree.
Still
over in California, 17 year old Francis McCarty gave a successful public
demonstration of wireless with his transmitter in the carpenter basement at the
Cliff House and the receiver a mile away in the Cycler’s Rest store room. The McCarty demonstration consisted of voiced
messages, and he also sang five songs.
Newspaper reporters were present for this occasion.
The
United States navy conducted a mock sea battle off the continental east coast,
with one side using standard procedures for communication and the other side
using wireless. At the conclusion of
these mock hostilities, it was declared that the wireless equipped navy won the
event.
The
Telimco commercial company in the United States placed an advertisement for the
sale of wireless equipment in the magazine, Scientific American on November
25. It has been suggested that this was
the world’s first published advertisement for the sale of wireless
equipment. However, this can not be
correct, due to the fact that two years earlier, the Clark company placed an
advertisement in another magazine, the Western Electrician, on May 23,
1903. The Clark company was selling
complete wireless sets for $50 each.
Many
new wireless stations, both temporary and permanent, were established in many
different countries during the year 1905.
In the United States, the Canadian experimenter Reginald Fessenden
established a station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts; the American navy established
a series of eight wireless stations in eight different states along the
Atlantic Coast; Lee de Forest established a 50 kW station on Coney Island, New
York and he began work on four stations, Key West Florida, Puerto Rico, Cuba
and in the Canal Zone; Marconi completed the installation of a huge wireless
station in Nova Scotia Canada and he began work on a new station at Clifden in
Ireland; and Mr. H. G. Robinson obtained an experimental license for the
purpose of conducting wireless experiments in public halls in Sydney,
Australia.
In
the maritime scene, the first distress signal from an American ship was morsed
out from the
“Lightship Nantucket No. 58” which
sprang a leak at South Shoals, Massachusetts, and the navy vessel “Azalea”
rushed to the rescue, taking off all personnel before it sank.
The
Japanese ship “Shinano Maru” wirelessed a message out regarding the location of
Russian ships during the Russo-Japanese War, resulting in the defeat of the
Russian navy. The Italian vessel
“Castagna” was wrecked at the beach immediately below the wireless station at
Wellfleet on Cape Cod, out from Boston.
And
that’s our Ancient DX Report for the year 1905.
(AWR/Wavesca/NWS 245)
