It was Professor R. Threlfall who seems to have been the first to clearly propose, in 1890, the application of the Hertzian waves to telegraphy, but it was certainly Sir W. Crookes who, in a very remarkable article in the Fortnightly Review of February 1892, pointed out very clearly the road to be followed.  He even showed in what conditions the Morse receiver might be applied to the new system of telegraphy.

About the same period an American physicist, well known by his celebrated experiments on high frequency currents—­experiments, too, which are not unconnected with those on electric oscillations,—­M.  Tesla, demonstrated that these oscillations could be transmitted to more considerable distances by making use of two vertical antennae, terminated by large conductors.

A little later, Sir Oliver Lodge succeeded, by the aid of the coherer, in detecting waves at relatively long distances, and Mr Rutherford obtained similar results with a magnetic indicator of his own invention.

An important question of meteorology, the study of atmospheric discharges, at this date led a few scholars, and more particularly the Russian, M. Popoff, to set up apparatus very analogous to the receiving apparatus of the 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