Tesla Did Not Invent Radio
The earliest documentation of the transmission of information via wireless that I have yet found appeared in an article in the October 14, 1882 issue of Scientific American. An experimenter named Lindsay (no relation) in 1859 transmitted wireless signals as reported in the September 6, 1882 issue of the Dundee Advertiser newspaper.
"In 1836 Mr. Lindsay lectured on the electric light, and stated that as early as 1831 he had turned his attention to the subject. In a letter published by him in 1845 he suggested the possibility of laying an electric cable across the Atlantic, a dozen years before the project was seriously entertained. Afterward he developed a scheme for telegraphing across oceans without cables. He lectured at Glasgow, in 1853, on his theory of forming an electric communication between Great Britain and other countries without the employment of submarine wires, and the cost of such communication to America he calculated to be £60,000. A patent for his scheme was taken out in 1854, and several experiments were made by him at different places. The following paragraph appeared in the Dundee Advertiser of May 20, 1859:
"Electric Telegraphing Across the Tay without Wires. - We have received the following note from Mr. J. B. Lindsay, reporting progress with his experiments. The results, it will be seen, are highly encouraging: 'Yesterday (May 17) I telegraphed successfully across the Tay, opposite to Glencarse, where it is about half a mile broad. The action on the needle was strong, and the same battery power would cross, I think, at Broughty Ferry.'"
The dock authorities at Liverpool invited him to exhibit his invention on the Mersey, but owing to his apparatus having been deranged, his experiment in England was not successful. This caused skepticism as to the merits of the discovery, and he made renewed tests with it on an extended scale on the Tay. These fully realized his expectations. The Dundee Advertiser of July 10, 1860, contained a letter to the editor, in which Mr. Lindsay wrote:
"During last week I was engaged in making a telegraphic experiment across the Tay below the Earn, at a place where the river is more than a mile broad. The experiment was successful, and the needle was strongly moved, but, as I had no person with me capable of sending or reading a message, it was not attempted."
It could very well be that these transmissions spurred Professor Clerk-Maxwell in Aberdeen, another Scot who might very well qualify as a full-blown genius, to produce his unified field theory and announce his initial findings to the world in 1865 (formally published in 1873) detailing how electrical energy could be transmitted with or without wires.
When Lindsay first performed his telegraphy experiments, Tesla was a mere school boy.
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