In the history of the applications of electrical undulations,
the names of Young, Fresnel, Fizeau, and Foucault must be inscribed;
without these scholars, the assimilation between electrical and
luminous phenomena which they discovered and studied would evidently
have been impossible.
Since there is an absolute identity of nature between the electric and
the luminous waves, we should, in all justice, also consider as
precursors those who devised the first luminous telegraphs. Claude
Chappe incontestably effected wireless telegraphy, thanks to the
luminous ether, and the learned men, such as Colonel Mangin, who
perfected optical telegraphy, indirectly suggested certain
improvements lately introduced into the present method.
But the physicist whose work should most of all be put in evidence is,
without fear of contradiction, Heinrich Hertz. It was he who
demonstrated irrefutably, by experiments now classic, that an electric
discharge produces an undulatory disturbance in the ether contained in
the insulating media in its neighbourhood; it was he who, as a
profound theorist, a clever mathematician, and an experimenter of
prodigious dexterity, made known the mechanism of the production, and
fully elucidated that of the propagation of these electromagnetic
waves.
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