Scientific discoveries, political developments, collective visions and individual conceptions or misconceptions will play an important part in this rally, and it will be the task to find out to what extent each of them contributed to the future development. .
The idea of wireless communication is astonishingly old. Leaving away ancient practices like e.g. communication by smoke clouds, which is obviously wireless, too, the speculations about wireless communication started at the latest around the middle of the 19th century. They were, at that time, not about electromagnetic waves, which had not been discovered yet, but about a different physical principle, the one of conduction, which could be used and indeed was used to transmit signals from A to B without wiring.
The first person to suggest transatlantic wireless telegraphy apparently was James Bowman Lindsay, who speculated about it as early as 1845. His idea was to combine the two conductive principles. He developed a system that was presented to the public in Dundee in 1853 and on which he received a patent in 1854. The patent described his invention as .
"a mode of transmitting telegraphic messages by means of electricity or magnetism through and across water without submerged wires, the water being made available as the connecting and conducting medium". .
The Second Invention of Wireless.
The idea of wireless communication was in the air, or rather in the water, for quite a while before Hertz's discovery of the electromagnetic waves that were already predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864.
The idea of antenna seems to be older than electromagnetism: In a patent given in 1872 the American dentist Mahlon Loomis describes an apparatus which uses the atmosphere as a conductive medium. His idea was to .
"Erect suitable towers and apparatus to attract the electricity and thus obtain a current of electricity or shocks or pulsations which traverse the atmosphere between two given points by connecting it to the negative electrical body of the earth below".