© Mark Ollig
Today, we continue last week’s column about Dr. Mahlon Loomis (1826 to 1886), a dentist and inventor who explored using the upper atmosphere to transmit coded telegraph signals.
Loomis believed the atmosphere could act as a wireless telegraph line, replacing the wires and batteries used in existing telegraph systems.
His approach involved transmitting aerial signals using copper-wire tethered kites or balloons to reach the electrified atmospheric layers.
I read sources that describe him transmitting signals through the air using a key—a device for sending telegraphic messages.
While we don’t know all the details about these signals, it is likely that he attempted to use Morse code, which was commonly used at the time. However, no records exist of any successfully transmitted and received messages.
It is important to remember at this early stage in development, successfully transmitting a wireless electrical signal, even without a message, was a significant achievement.
The Aug. 13, 1929, edition of the Miami Daily News recounted Loomis’s process: “Messages were sent alternately from one station to the other by dot and dash interruption of a buzzer spark circuit. Reception was attained by deflecting a galvanometer needle at the receiving point.”
Mahlon Loomis obtained US Patent No. 129,971, titled “Improvement in Telegraphing,” for his wireless aerial telegraph July 30, 1872.
“The nature of my invention or discovery consists, in general terms, of utilizing natural electricity [the atmosphere] and establishing an electrical current or circuit for telegraphic and other purposes without the aid of wires, artificial batteries, or cables to form such electrical circuit,” he stated in the patent description.
Loomis envisioned tall towers with masts on high peaks of the Rocky Mountains in North America and the European Alps, designed to harness atmospheric electricity as key components of an aerial telegraph system capable of transoceanic communication.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote Jan. 30, 1873, “This aerial telegraph scheme is a novel thing. The plan of Dr. Loomis, the inventor, is to telegraph from a high point of the Rocky Mountains to the highest attainable peak of the Alps, at which point a tower is to be erected, on the top of which a huge mast is to be placed.”
The article continued, “An apparatus capable of collecting electricity is to be put upon the upper end of this mast, by means of which, at such elevation, it is claimed a strata of the atmosphere will be reached which is charged with electricity.”
“Ground connections, the same as in ordinary telegraphy, will be erected. This electrified strata of the atmosphere will, as with the ordinary single wire and ground connection, make a complete circuit, and it is claimed that the slightest pulsation of electricity at one tower will produce similar pulsation at the other,” the article concluded.
Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts (1811 to 1874) advocated Loomis’s wireless telegraphy research and helped secure congressional approval for his company’s incorporation.
The US Congress passed “CHAP. XLV [Chapter 45] – An Act to incorporate the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company,” March 3, 1873, which had been introduced by Senator Sumner.
President Ulysses S. Grant (1822 to 1885) signed the bill incorporating the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Co., authorizing it to have a capital stock of $200,000 (about $5.26 million in the present).
The capital stock dollar amount was not a direct government grant; instead, the bill allowed the company to seek up to $200,000 in funding from private investors for developing wireless telegraphy.
Scientists and engineers of the time were struggling to grasp the concept of communication without wires, and some dismissed Mahlon Loomis’s proposed aerial telegraph system as “impractical.”
Loomis was experimenting with atmospheric electricity, a concept that didn’t include the electromagnetic waves central to today’s modern wireless radio technology.
He encountered significant challenges due to the irregular nature of atmospheric electrical charges, making long-distance signal generation and detection difficult.
“The Panic of 1873” caused a financial crisis and economic depression in the US and Europe that lasted from September 1873 to 1879, severely limited funding, research, and development at the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company.
Despite poor health and public skepticism, Loomis continued experimenting and promoting wireless telegraphy.
Dr. Mahlon Loomis died Oct. 13, 1886, in Terra Alta, WV, at the age of 60.
He is buried in Terra Alta Cemetery, which overlooks the mountains where he conducted his wireless experiments.
The Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company, which depended on Dr. Loomis’s vision and efforts, ceased operations not long after his death.
Loomis’s experiments with wireless communication using atmospheric electricity predate Guglielmo Marconi’s initial development of radio technology using electromagnetic waves.
The time difference between Dr. Loomis’s US patent (1872) and Guglielmo Marconi’s British patent, No. 12,039 (1897), is 25 years.
In a Sept. 7, 1930, article in The Baltimore Sun, Harold R. Manakee quoted a letter Dr. Mahlon Loomis wrote to his brother, George, shortly before he died in 1886:
“In the distant future, when the possibilities of the discovery, as I see them, are more fully developed, public attention will be directed to its originator, and the congressional records will furnish the undisputable evidence that the credit belongs to me. But what good then?”
In 1966, the West Virginia Historic Commission erected a marker at the entrance of the Terra Alta Cemetery that reads:
“In the cemetery is buried Dr. Mahlon Loomis, sender of first aerial signals, 1866 to 1873, forerunner of wireless telegraphy. Signals were sent 14 miles using kites flown by copper wires. Patented 1872; company chartered by Congress, 1873.”
Dr. Mahlon Loomis’s journals and drawings are preserved in the Library of Congress.
Loomis’s unrealized vision reminds us that innovation often faces obstacles, and that true progress demands both ingenuity and perseverance.
