The Brothers Highton

This was all Pre-Marconi. In the mid 1940s when the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway started buying up telegraph patents to exclude others from the market. The two brothers Edward and Henry Highton, were early experimenters, innovators and inventors in the field of telegraphy. they bought Henry's ‘gold-leaf’ telegraph. It had a unique gold-leaf filament as an indicator in an air-filled glass tube that was moved left and right by an electro-magnet, using a single wire. It was delicate but functional, and more important salable.

They also employed him to circumvent the patents they didnt' own, specificly those owned by Cooke & Wheatstone. But after those competing patents expired in 1851 Highton went off to found a competitor to the Electric company. that's why we have non-compete clauses today. Free to make his own projects as of 1852, Henry too k an interest in sending telegraph signals over bodies of water. They called it trans-aqueous communication. And more here.

Edward published a book 'The Electric Telegraph: Its History and Progress,' based on their initial research. It outlined their experiments and summarized their results. It’s out of print and you can’t even find it at auction really, but Google was kind enough to scan and post for the world to read for free here. This is totally diferent than the book of the same title written by George BartlettPrescott eight years later.

They began by sinking bare wires in canals. They were attempting to measure the loss of power durring immersion. They wanted to first find the mathmatical law that governed the loss of current when no insulation was used. Ultimately the proved that telegraph signals couldn't be sent any signifigant distance without insulation. It seems intuitive now, but at some point sombody has to theorize, test measure and prove these things. More here.

At the time there wire insulation was primitive and often failed. Most wire was used bare. So what begat the question was when the Brits tried to use bare wire in very wet places, say India. India is very wet. and is criss crossed by canals and wetlands. so any wires must cross numerous water-ways. Dr. W.B. O'Shaughnessy, performed some experiments using iron rods and in some cases no metallic conductors at all. He succeeded in passing some signals, but found the enormous power consumption to be cost prohibitive. The Society of Arts gave him a medal for this.

The brothers Highton decided there were 3 methods to trans-aqueous communication. The first uses copper plates heavy gauge wire and a heavy consumption of voltage. The second uses more sensitive instuments that can discern what little signal is not lost to the water. the third is perfectly insulated wire. By 1973 wire insulation was much improved and much cheaper. this new insulation was a solution of vegetable tar and lead oxide. Henry, not sore at all wrote a letter to the times endorsing the improvement.

More about the wires

Radio has two kinds of weirdos. Those lone weirdos that end up in a shack on the edge of town, and those other weirdos that choose to work in teams. How did George and Henry know each other? Henry Edward Highton was George E. Dering's Rugby coach... His autobiography here.

Highton and Dering were British inventors working on the problems of wireless telegraphy. Dering had no less than eleven patents one of which was for a very respectable Needle telegraph that was used by such respectable institutions as the Bank of England. More importantly in terms of modern radio were his three patents on three seperate methods of "carrying off atmospheric electricity" from the line wires.

These all regard the very earliest forays into grounding, sheilding, and insulation.

They are as follows:
1. "Two roughened or grooved metallic surfaces separated by fine linen, one of which is included in the line-wire circuit, and the other is in connection with the earth." (repatented by William Siemens as the Serrated-Plate Lightning-Guard)
2. "The attraction or repulsion occurring between dissimilarly or similarly electrified bodies respectively. Thus metal balls may be suspended from the line-wire by wires, which on separating under the influence of the lightning-discharge make contact with plates connected with the earth; or the separation may simply break connection between the line-wire and the instrument."
3. "Introducing a strip of metallic leaf into the circuit, this being fused by the passage of the atmospheric electricity." More here.

Dering won an award at the Great Exhibition of 1851 for his innovations. A few years later, at the Paris International Exhibition of 1855, he was awarded a medal for general excellence. It were these kind of endorsements that made the people with money listen to these two rugby players. Dering's proposed a transmarine telegraph. It was a pretty big idea that would require eithe rprogerss or luck in wire quality and the effectiveness of insulation.

"The metal composing the wires may be iron or copper or any other suitable kind, and it may be coated with varnish, by which means the amount of exposed surface will be diminished, and the metal preserved from corrosion. " He was betting on varnish. It was optimistic. He even began fantasizing about a wireless cable to America. "...take the case of a longer line, say from England to America, I should select two points, as the Land's End in Cornwall and the Giant's Causeway in Ireland or some suitable place on the west coast of Scotland, and corresponding points on the American shore." His tests were destroyed by bad welds in the bare wire. He managed to run about 12 miles of cable into the sea before ist snapped under it's own weight at a weak weld.

It was nto the first time this kind of idea went kablooey. Previously two other attempts were made to connect Great Britain to Ireland by cable. Both failures were by Newall & Co. In the years prior to that multiple terrestrial runs of cabel failed due to defective insulation. Point being that wires sucked, and insulation was terrible. This created the mood in which engineers wanted to do away with wire entirely... i.e. broadcasting.

In 1913 just after George Edward Dering's death Theodore N. Vail purchased his personal library from his estate. The eccentric inventor had kept virtually every publication he ever encountered on the subject of electricity. This collection numbered approximately 35,000 books, articles and pamphlets dating to 1508! Vail had the entire collection sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology along with a generous fund for cataloging and housing it. Forming the core of the Vail Library at M.I.T. it represented the most complete and historically significant collection of documents related to the development of electrical engineering in the World at the time.