The Romance of Modern Invention

One day in 1845 a man named Tawell, dressed as a Quaker, stepped into a train at Slough Station on the Great Western Railway, and travelled to London. When he arrived in London the innocent-looking Quaker was arrested, much to his amazement and dismay, on the charge of having committed a foul murder in the neighbourhood of Slough. The news of the murder and a description of the murderer had been telegraphed from that place to Paddington, where a detective met the train and shadowed the miscreant until a convenient opportunity for arresting him occurred. Tawell was tried, condemned, and hung, and the public for the first time generally realised the power for good dormant in the as yet little developed electric telegraph.

Thirteen years later two vessels met in mid-Atlantic laden with cables which they joined and paid out in opposite directions, till Ireland and Newfoundland were reached. The first electric message passed on August 7th of that year from the New World to the Old. The telegraph had now become a world-power.

The third epoch-making event in its history is of recent date. On December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian, famous all over the world when but twenty-two years old, suddenly sprang into yet greater fame. At Hospital Point, Newfoundland, he heard by means of a kite, a long wire, a delicate tube full of tiny particles of metal, and a telephone ear-piece, signals transmitted from far-off Cornwall by his colleagues. No wires connected Poldhu, the Cornish station, and Hospital Point. The three short dot signals, which in the Morse code signify the letter S, had been borne from place to place by the limitless, mysterious ether, that strange substance of which we now hear so much, of which wise men declare we know so little.