, for a Dublin newspaper, the events at a
regatta at Kingstown, when about seven hundred messages were sent from a
floating station to land, at a maximum distance of twenty-five miles.

It was shortly afterward, while the royal yacht was in Cowes Bay, that
one hundred and fifty messages between the then Prince of Wales and his
royal mother at Osborne House were exchanged, most of them of a very
private nature.

One of the great objections to wireless telegraphy has been the
inability to make it secret, since the ether waves circle from the
centre in all directions, and any receiving apparatus within certain
limits would be affected by the waves just as the station to which the
message was sent would be affected by them. To illustrate: the waves
radiating from a stone dropped into a still pool would make a dead leaf
bob up and down anywhere on the pool within the circle of the waves, and
so the ether waves excited the receiving apparatus of any station within
the effective reach of the circle.

Of course, the use of a cipher code would secure the secrecy of a
message, but Marconi was looking for a mechanical device that would make
it impossible for any but the station to which the message was sent to
receive it. He finally hit upon the plan of focussing the ether waves as
the rays of a searchlight are concentrated in a given direction by the
use of a reflector, and though this adaptation of the searchlight
principle was to a certain extent successful, much penetrating power was
lost. This plan has been abandoned for one much more ingenious and
effective, based on the principle of attunement, of which more later.

It was a proud day for the young Italian when his receiver at Dover
recorded the first wireless message sent across the British Channel from
Boulogne in 1899--just the letters V M and three or four words in the
Morse alphabet of dots and dashes. He had bridged that space of stormy,
restless water with an invisible, intangible something that could be
neither seen, felt, nor heard, and yet was stronger and surer than
steel--a connection that nothing could interrupt, that no barrier could
prevent. The first message from England to France was soon followed by
one to M. Branly, the inventor of the coherer, that made the receiving
of the message possible, and one to the queen of Marconi's country. The
inventor's march of progress was rapid after this--stations were
established at various points all around the coast