Abstract
IN view of the current report in the daily Press that Mr. Marconi has succeeded in receiving at St. John's, Newfoundland, by means of a wire raised with a kite, signals sent from his station at Poldhu, Cornwall, it may be interesting to recall that kites were used here during the summer of 1899 in some similar experiments. In the “Report of S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for the Year ending June 30, 1900,” it is stated on p. 10: “In addition to the above investigations a Hodgkins grant has been approved to enable Mr. Rotch to carry on a series of experiments in space telegraphy, it being thought that the unprecedented heights attained by kites might materially extend the range of communication by this method. In the preliminary experiments, however, kites were not used, sufficient elevation being attainable without them, but when the difference between the stations was increased from one mile to three, kites were employed to raise the transmitting and receiving wires. In the later experiments it was found, not unexpectedly, that the long wires, carried up and supported by kites, collected so much electricity as to interfere with and greatly complicate the messages sent from station to station. These interruptions seem to show that the limit of elevation for the receiving wire was under these conditions less than five hundred feet. The greatest distance covered in the experiments was approximately twelve miles, from a wire supported by a kite about two hundred feet above Blue Hill to the tower of Memorial Hall in Cambridge, which was used as the receiving station. These experiments draw attention to the fact that electrification increases with the altitude to which the wire is carried, and that it is always present, although varying with the meteorological condition of the atmosphere. The experiments were discontinued in the autumn of 1899.”
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ROTCH, A. Kites and Wireless Telegraphy. Nature 65, 198 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/065198a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/065198a0
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