erity, made known the mechanism of the production, and
fully elucidated that of the propagation of these electromagnetic
waves.

He must naturally himself have thought that his discoveries might be
applied to the transmission of signals. It would appear, however, that
when interrogated by a Munich engineer named Huber as to the
possibility of utilising the waves for transmissions by telephone, he
answered in the negative, and dwelt on certain considerations relative
to the difference between the periods of sounds and those of
electrical vibrations. This answer does not allow us to judge what
might have happened, had not a cruel death carried off in 1894, at the
age of thirty-five, the great and unfortunate physicist.

We might also find in certain works earlier than the experiments of
Hertz attempts at transmission in which, unconsciously no doubt,
phenomena were already set in operation which would, at this day, be
classed as electric oscillations. It is allowable no doubt, not to
speak of an American quack, Mahlon Loomis, who, according to Mr Story,
patented in 1870 a project of communication in which he utilised the
Rocky Mountains on one side and Mont Blanc on the other, as gigantic
antennae to establish communication across the Atlantic; but we cannot
pass over in silence the very remarkable researches of the American
Professor Dolbear, who showed, at the electrical exhibition of
Philadelphia in 1884, a set of apparatus enabling signals to be
transmitted at a distance, which he described as "an exceptional
application of the principles of electrostatic induction." This
apparatus comprised groups of coils and condensers by means of which
he obtained, as we cannot now doubt, effects due to true electric
waves.

Place should also be made for a well-known inventor, D.E. Hughes, who
from 1879 to 1886 followed up some very curious experiments in which
also these oscillations certainly played a considerable part. It was
this physicist who invented the microphone, and thus, in another way,
drew attention to the variations of contact resistance, a phenomenon
not far from that produced in the radio-conductors of Branly, which
are important organs in the Marconi system. Unfortunately, fatigued
and in ill-health, Hughes ceased his researches at the moment perhaps
when they would have given him final results.

In an order of ideas different in appearance, but closely linked at
bottom with the one just mentioned, must be re