Re: World Contact Day

On Mon, 17 Mar 2025 19:53:30 -0400 (EDT), Scott Dorsey wrote:

Charles Packer  <mailbox@cpacker.org> wrote:

Rudyard Kipling's _Wireless_ (1902). --scott

>
Yes, I learned about that one earlier. It's an important one for my
purposes because it makes a connection with radio transmissioon, though
indirectly.

 
Yes, and in part it was following Sir Oliver Lodge in that regard.  At
the time most people really didn't get Maxwell's equations which isn't
all that surprising since they were pretty incomprehensible until
Heaviside developed a new notation to simplify them and make them useful
by ordinary engineers.
 
So at the time a lot of people saw electromagnetic fields as just a
mysterious action at a distance, very much like some form of telepathy.
 

Except that I've discovered evidence in 1869 newspapers that
at least somebody was thinking about ether and possible
"undulations" through it of a "brain-wave" to carry thoughts.
This precedes the 1883 date generally accepted  for the origins
of telepathy (see the Wikipedia article). The newspaper stories
cite an anonymous article in the British magazine Spectator.