e present wireless telegraphy. This comprised
a long antenna and filings-tube, and M. Popoff even pointed out that
his apparatus might well serve for the transmission of signals as soon
as a generator of waves powerful enough had been discovered.

Finally, on the 2nd June 1896, a young Italian, born in Bologna on the
25th April 1874, Guglielmo Marconi, patented a system of wireless
telegraphy destined to become rapidly popular. Brought up in the
laboratory of Professor Righi, one of the physicists who had done most
to confirm and extend the experiments of Hertz, Marconi had long been
familiar with the properties of electric waves, and was well used to
their manipulation. He afterwards had the good fortune to meet Sir
William (then Mr) Preece, who was to him an adviser of the highest
authority.

It has sometimes been said that the Marconi system contains nothing
original; that the apparatus for producing the waves was the
oscillator of Righi, that the receiver was that employed for some two
or three years by Professor Lodge and Mr Bose, and was founded on an
earlier discovery by a French scholar, M. Branly; and, finally, that
the general arrangement was that established by M. Popoff.

The persons who thus rather summarily judge the work of M. Marconi
show a severity approaching injustice. It cannot, in truth, be denied
that the young scholar has brought a strictly personal contribution to
the solution of the problem he proposed to himself. Apart from his
forerunners, and when their attempts were almost unknown, he had the
very great merit of adroitly arranging the most favourable
combination, and he was the first to succeed in obtaining practical
results, while he showed that the electric waves could be transmitted
and received at distances enormous compared to those attained before
his day. Alluding to a well-known anecdote relating to Christopher
Columbus, Sir W. Preece very justly said: "The forerunners and rivals
of Marconi no doubt knew of the eggs, but he it was who taught them to
make them stand on end." This judgment will, without any doubt, be the
one that history will definitely pronounce on the Italian scholar.

Sec. 7

The apparatus which enables the electric waves to be revealed, the
detector or indicator, is the most delicate organ in wireless
telegraphy. It is not necessary to employ as an indicator a
filings-tube or radio-conductor. One can, in principle, for the purpose
of constructing a receiver