s the garden in far-away Italy was a simple matter--the depressed
key completed the electric circuit created by a strong battery through
the induction coil and made a spark jump between the two brass knobs,
which in turn started the ether vibrating at the rate of three or four
hundred million times a minute from the tin box on top of a pole. The
vibrations in the ether circled wider and wider, as the circular waves
spread from the spot where a stone is dropped into a pool, but with the
speed of light, until they reached a corresponding tin box on top of a
like pole on the other side of the garden; this box, and the wire
connected with it, caught the waves, carried them down to the coherer,
and, joining the current from the local battery, a dot or dash was
recorded; immediately after, the tapper separated the metal particles
in the coherer and it was ready for the next series of waves.

One spark made a single dot, a stream of sparks the dash of the Morse
telegraphic code. The apparatus was crude at first, and worked
spasmodically, but Marconi knew he was on the right track and
persevered. With the heightening of the pole he found he could send
farther without an increase of electric power, until wireless messages
were sent from one extreme limit of his father's farm to the other.

It is hard to realize that the young inventor only began his experiments
in wireless telegraphy in 1895, and that it is scarcely eight years
since the great idea first occurred to him.

After a year of experimenting on his father's property, Marconi was able
to report to W.H. Preece, chief electrician of the British postal
system, certain definite facts--not theories, but facts. He had actually
sent and received messages, without the aid of wires, about two miles,
but the facilities for further experimenting at Bologna were exhausted,
and he went to England.

Here was a youth (scarcely twenty-one), with a great invention already
within his grasp--a revolutionising invention, the possibilities of
which can hardly yet be conceived. And so this young Italian, quiet,
retiring, unassuming, and yet possessing Jove's power of sending
thunderbolts, came to London (in 1896), to upbuild and link nation to
nation more closely. With his successful experiments behind him, Marconi
was well received in England, and began his further work with all the
encouragement possible. Then followed a series of tests that were fairly
bewildering. Messages were sent t