It was back in the year 1849, more than one and a half centuries ago, that the first wireless experiments took place in old British
India. At the time, the illustrious 30
year old German speaking Queen Victoria was on the throne in England; there
were just 30 states in the United States; and India was under the control of
the East India Company. The capital city
of India back then was Calcutta, the second largest city in the British
Empire, with London as the largest.
In
the said year, 1849, Dr. Sir William O’Shaughnessy, Superintendent of
Telegraphs in Calcutta, successfully transmitted wireless signals across the
Huldee River three forth mile wide. He laid two
wires along the banks of the River Huldee, one on each side, with a metal plate
at each end of each wire, with the metal plates immersed in the water.
The
active wire was powered from 250 battery cells filled with nitric acid and a
platinum electrode in each, making the project prohibitively expensive. Communication was achieved across the wide
river, though with difficulty. Nine
years later, he performed a similar experiment across the waters of Lake Ootacamund
in Tamilnadu South India.
A
subsequent superintendent of the Indian Telegraph Department was a Mr.
Blissett. In 1858, he conducted similar
wireless experiments with the use of a long wire on each bank of a river and in
this way achieved fair success.
In
1873, a Mr. Winter in India made some astute observations regarding cross
modulation of Morse signals between parallel telegraph wires on the same poles.
An
electrician with the telegraph department, Mr. Schwendler, carried out similar
cross-river communications in the same way as his predecessors. His experiments were conducted across the
River Hooghly at Barrackpore, near Calcutta, using parallel wires with metal
plates submerged in the water. That was
in the year 1876.
Another
subsequent electrician with the telegraph department was Mr. W. P. Johnston and
he repeated the same experiments across a nearby waterway 200 yards wide. That was on September 9, 1879. Nine years later, he carried out many similar
experiments across nearby canals in the Calcutta area, and also across the
River Hooghly itself.
Mr.
Johnston died in April 1889, and his position was taken over by Mr. Melhuish,
who also conducted similar experiments with the use of water as a conducting
medium. He discovered that the wires
lying on the bank on each side of the river need to be at least as long as the
river is wide, in order to achieve reliable communication.
It
should be remembered that all of these early wireless experiments in India
involving cross-water communication during the 1800s were conducted in Morse
Code.
The
first experimental work on the transmission and reception of radio signals in
India was carried out by Dr. Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose. He was born in 1858 near Dhaka in Bangladesh,
though in those days that territory formed part of the province of Bengal in
old British India.
It
was towards the end of the year 1894 that Bose began his experimentation with
wireless; and in November 1895, he gave a public demonstration in the Calcutta
Town Hall with Bengal’s Lieutenant Governor Sir William Mackenzie in
attendance. In this public
demonstration, Bose transmitted wireless signals at a wavelength of just ½ inch
over a distance of 75 ft through several solid walls. He also used a wireless signal to ring a bell
at a distance, and to fire a gun remotely.
On
two separate occasions, Bose gave public lectures in London England in which he
presented details of his wireless experiments in Calcutta India. His 1897 lecture was before the Royal
Institution, and two years later his lecture was before the Royal Society. In his 1899 presentation, Bose gave details
of the coherer receiver that he had developed, and it is understood that the
young Italian experimenter Marconi incorporated the Bose coherer in his own
subsequent public demonstrations in England.
(AWR Wavescan/NWS 254)
