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

i4 All About Inventions Bologna. With each successive development and improvement, new possibilities and technical questions arose. When Marconi first communicated with Sir William Preece he emphasised the fact that the dis- tance over which communication might be maintained varied according to the height of the mast. By the time the Solent was bridged the law governing the range of distance appeared to be the square of the mast’s height. That is to say, if the mast were in- creased from 80 to 160 feet, a message could be sent with the latter up to eighty miles as compared with twenty miles with the 8o-foot mast, while if the mast were made 240 feet in height then the message could be sent 180 miles, and so on. According to this principle of calculation it would demand a mast about 1,000 feet in height to send a message from London to New York. Now, naturally, the erection of' such a mast would not only be highly expensive, but it would be costly and difficult to maintain. Accordingly, Marconi concentrated his efforts upon the revision of this law, if it were at all possible. By improving his instruments at the Needles and Poole stations he discovered that he could use lower masts, and within a few months of bridging the Solent he had actually reduced the height of the mast at the Needles by one half—from 120 to 60 feet. The possibility of being able to bring the height of the mast down to a convenient point was only one field for further investigation which was opened up as a result of these later researches and experiments, but one and all contributed very materially to the efficiency of the system and its commercial value. The claims of humanity now became centred upon