MARCONI

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A little bit of radio history from Richard, VK7RO

        
        Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company in the early days of radio
        used the motto "The Magic Flight of Thought".
        
        What exactly were the magic thoughts transmitted by Marconi and
        his associates?   Some are to be revealed.

        When Marconi went to England in 1897 he made a number of 
        demonstrations of his system for the British Post Office, one
        of these was between Flatholm Island, in the Bristol Channel,
        and the Welsh mainland, a distance of 3 or 4 miles.

        This demonstration was requested because attempts at
        communication between the two points had previously been made
        using electrical induction.   This had been barely successful
        and had required enormous lengths of wire and huge currents.

        The Marconi demonstration in contrast, was very successful and
        impressive due to the smallness of the apparatus.

        Marconi always used a Morse inker attached to his receiver to
        obtain a permanent record of his results and no doubt to enable 
        him to read the message at his leisure without the need to 
        become skilled at Morse.

        A Morse inker consists of a clockwork mechanism which draws a 
        paper tape beneath a pen.   The Morse signal causes the pen to
        mark the paper.
        
        These permanent records of early experiments were in demand as 
        souvenirs of the occasion and one, containing a fragment of a 
        message from Flatholm Island is reproduced as the frontispiece 
        to the 1927 book "The Elements of Radio Communication".

        So . . .      What does the fragment say? . . . .

                "IT IS COLD HERE.   THE WIND IS . . ."

        Yes.   They were talking about the weather.