While Alexander Graham Bell was the first to transmit the tones of the human voice over a wire by electricity, he was also the first to transmit the tones of the human voice by the wireless telephone, for in 1880 he spoke along a beam of light to a point a considerable distance away.  While the method then used is different from that now in vogue, the medium employed for the transmission is the same—­the ether, that mysterious, invisible, imponderable wave-conductor which permeates all creation.

While many great advances in the wireless art were made by Marconi and many other scientists in America and elsewhere, it remained for that distinguished group of American scientists and engineers working under my charge to be the first to transmit the tones of the human voice in the form of intelligible speech across the Atlantic Ocean.  This great event and those immediately preceding it are so fresh in the public mind that I will make but a brief reference to them here.

On April 4, 1915, we were successful in transmitting speech without the use of wires from our radio station at Montauk Point on Long Island to Wilmington, Delaware.

On May 18th we talked by radio telephone from our station on Long Island to St. Simon Island in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Georgia.

On the 27th of August, with our apparatus installed by permission of the Navy Department at the Arlington, Virginia, radio station, speech was successfully transmitted from that station to the Navy wireless station equipped with our receiving apparatus at the Isthmus of Panama.

On September 29th, speech was successfully transmitted by wire from New York City to the radio station at Arlington, Virginia, and thence by wireless telephone across the continent to the radio station at Mare Island Navy-yard, California, where I heard and understood the words of Mr. Theodore N. Vail speaking to me from the telephone on his desk at New York.

On the next morning at about one o’clock, Washington time, we established wireless telephone communication between Arlington, Virginia, and Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, where an engineer of our staff, together with United States naval officers, distinctly heard words spoken into the telephone at Arlington, Virginia.  On October 22d, from the Arlington tower in Virginia, we successfully transmitted speech across the Atlantic Ocean to the Eiffel Tower at Paris, where two of our engineers, in company with French military officers, heard and understood the words spoken at Arlington.

On the same day when speech was being transmitted by the apparatus at Arlington to our engineers and to the French military officers at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, our telephone engineer at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, together with an officer of the United States Navy, heard the words spoken from Arlington to Paris and recognized the voice of the speaker.