The Matter of Air by Steven Connor

Author:Steven Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: REAKTION BOOKS

History of Atmospherics

The kinds of accidental interference that radiotelegraphers named, variously, ‘strays’, ‘xs’, ‘atmospherics’, ‘parasitic signals’, ‘static’ and ‘sturbs’ had a central place in the evolution of the theory and the material basis of radio. No sooner were radio waves detected and employed than the problem of atmospheric disturbance arose. It was clear early in the history of radio that atmospheric disturbances could produce and propagate the same kind of electromagnetic waves that Hertz had demonstrated by causing a spark to be transmitted across his laboratory.

But putting atmospherics back into the centre of the picture was a difficult, even a paradoxical enterprise because the point of understanding atmospherics was in order to suppress or expel them. Oliver Lodge, who in 1897 had taken out a patent on a tuning device that would enable radio to be transmitted and received without interference, declared bluntly that atmospherics ‘are of no assistance, and are a nuisance which ought to be eliminated’.7

Indeed, atmospherics had come to notice even earlier than this. Even before the development of wireless telegraphy, telephone users found that their apparatus was subject to interference too, an interference that may itself have predicted some of the forms and uses of radio itself, though the effects were usually the result of electrical induction rather than electromagnetic radiation. One Charles Rath-bone, who was listening on a private telephone run between his house in Albany and the Observatory, heard singing, which turned out to be emanating from an experimental concert transmitted by Thomas Edison over a telegraph wire between New York and Saratoga Springs. The New York Times carried a report in 1873 of the strange interferences produced in telegraph equipment by electric storms. The article explained that the ‘electric wave’ produced during a storm sometimes acted to block or obstruct transmissions, and sometimes augmented them. On occasion, it provided the possibility for a kind of wireless transmission of signals:

When the electric wave is of considerable duration and power, the operators have been known to let go their batteries, detach the wires, carry them to the ground, and, by means of the electric throbs, messages have been transmitted entirely independent of the ordinary auxiliaries.8

The electrical nature of lightning had been known since Priestley, and suspected before, but it seems to have been Oliver Lodge who first proposed that lightning produced impulses of a specifically oscillatory character, just like the spark that Hertz used to show the existence of radio waves. With the telegraph or the telephone, reception and transmission had to be born together – that is, one could only a receive a message that has been humanly sent, despite the fantasies of spiritualists. Radio, by contrast, revealed an excited, excitable world of radio discharges, audible evidence of the universe of overlapping oscillations and radiations revealed by nineteenth-century physics. In the very earliest days of radio, one listened to, or listened out for, atmospheric impulses, since there was little else to listen to.

Research into atmospherics remained patchy and sporadic during the first decades of the twentieth century.

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