100 YEARS AGO

The fact that the message from the King to President Roosevelt, in reply to the latter's wireless telegram greeting, had to be sent to America by cable occasioned at the time much comment and correspondence in the daily papers on the attitude of the Post Office towards Mr. Marconi... Mr. Marconi made the following statements:— “We asked the Post Office authorities whether they would allow us to connect our station at Poldhu by wire with Mullion — at our own expense, mind you — but they refused absolutely and entirely. The message (that from the King) was not received at our offices until after Mullion Post Office had closed for the night, and one cannot very well keep a King's message lying about for twelve hours. I think it would have been much more discourteous to the King to have kept his message waiting for a day than it was to send it by cable.”... In these circumstances, it is not surprising that Mr. Marconi's feelings towards the Post Office are rather bitter... He now proposes to go to Italy and build a huge station there, partly, no doubt, because, as he says, “Abroad I can get everything I want. Here in England I can get nothing.” This is a little sweeping, for all England has not been so backward in supporting Mr. Marconi's enterprise as the officials of the Post Office.

From Nature 19 February 1903.

50 YEARS AGO

We have formulated a structure for the nucleic acids which is compatible with the main features of the X-ray diagram and with the general principles of molecular structure, and which accounts satisfactorily for some of the chemical properties of the substances. The structure involves three intertwined helical polynucleotide chains. Each chain, which is formed by phosphate di-ester groups and linking β-d-ribofuranose or β-d-deoxyribofuranose residues with 3′, 5′ linkages, has approximately twenty-four nucleotide residues in seven turns of the helix. The helixes have the sense of a right-handed screw. The phosphate groups are closely packed about the axis of the molecule, with the pentose residues surrounding them, and the purine and pyrimidine groups projecting radially, their planes being approximately perpendicular to the molecular axis. The operation that converts one residue to the next residue in the polynucleotide chain is rotation by about 105° and translation by 3.4 A.

Linus Pauling, Robert B. Corey

From Nature 21 February 1953.