Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/444

440 As in all other cases of oscillatory motion, the principle of resonance may here be brought into play to increase immensely the amplitude of the current oscillations thereby set up in the receiving aerial. As already explained, any vertical insulated wire placed with its lower end near the earth has capacity with respect to the earth, and it has also inductance, the value of these factors depending on its shape and height. Accordingly, it has a natural electrical time-period of its own, and if the periodic electromotive impulses which are set up in it by the passage of the waves over it agree in period with its own natural time-period, then the amplitude of the current vibrations in it may become enormously greater than when there is a disagreement between these two periods. Before concluding these articles we shall return to this subject of electric resonance and syntony, and discuss it with reference to what is called the tuning of Hertzian wave stations. Meanwhile, it may be said that for the sake of obtaining, at any rate in an approximate degree, this coincidence of time-period, it is generally usual to make the receiving aerial as far as possible identical with the transmitting aerial. If the receiving aerial is not insulated, but is connected to the earth at its lower end through the primary coil of an oscillation transformer, we can still set up in it electrical oscillations by the impact on it of an electric wave of proper period; and if the oscillation transformer is properly constructed we can draw from its secondary circuit electric oscillations in a similar period.

One problem in connection with the design of a receiving aerial is that of increasing its effective length and capacity, so as to increase correspondingly the electromotive force or current oscillations in it. It is clear that if we put a number of receiving wires in parallel so that each one of them is operated upon by the wave separately, although we can increase in this way the magnitude of the alternating current which can be drawn off from the aerial, we cannot increase the electromotive force in it except by increasing the actual height of the wires. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the height of the receiving aerial. It has to be suspended, like the transmitting aerial, from a mast or tower, and the engineering problem of constructing such a permanent supporting structure higher than, say, two hundred feet, is a difficult one.

Since any one station has to send as well as receive, it is usual to make one and the same aerial wire or wires do double duty. It is switched over from the transmitting to the receiving apparatus, as required. This, however, is a concession to convenience and cost. In some respects it would be better to have two separate aerials at each station, the one of the best form for sending, and the other of the best form for receiving.

In Mr. Marconi's early arrangements, the so-called coherer or