All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

12 All About Inventions inventor and his colleagues engaged in the common quest, but there was this one satisfaction : the Needles were falling farther and farther behind, while the mainland was looming nearer and nearer. At last the tug reached the mainland: the Solent was spanned by wireless! True it was only a matter of fourteen miles between the points as the crow flies, but it was a startling achievement for those days. The distance was afterwards increased by establishing the permanent experimental station at Poole, lower down the coast, the gap through the air thus being eighteen miles. But the ability to communicate through space across the Solent incidentally led to the first com- mercial recognition of wireless. Needless to say, newspaper enterprise was responsible for this develop- ment, but it was not a London paper which gave this stimulus, as might be supposed. The fact that Mar- coni had been able to send and to receive messages from a moving station as represented by the tug moving across the Solent impressed the editor of the Dublin Daily Express. The Kingstown yacht regatta was to be held in July, and the editor decided to essay a scoop over his rivals, and sought the assist- ance of the Italian wizard. Marconi accepted the invitation, and accordingly a mast no feet in height was erected at Kingstown, while an aerial was stretched from the mast of the s.s. Flying Huntress, which was specially chartered for the occasion. As a re- sult of his preliminary experiments Marconi enter- tained no apprehensions concerning his ability to fulfil the editorial desires, because he found it quite an easy matter to maintain communication with