Mahlon Loomis

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Mahon Loomis (1826 – 1886) was an early wireless experimenter born in Oppenheim, New York

Loomis, a Washington, DC dentist, claimed to have transmitted signals in October 1866 between two Blue Ridge Mountain-tops 14 miles apart in Virginia, using kites as antennas, but with no independent witnesses present.

Loomis received U.S. Patent 129971 for a wireless telegraph in 1872. This one-page patent makes a vague claim about using atmospheric electricity to eliminate the overhead wire used by the existing telegraph systems, but it contains no schematic diagram of how to build it, and no theory of how it might function. Loomis envisioned towers "on the tops of high mountains, and thus penetrate or establish electrical connection with the atmospheric stratum ... to form the electrical circuit."

Loomis's patent is substantially similar to U.S. Patent 126356 received three months earlier by William Henry Ward who applied for the patent on June 29, 1871 when Loomis was actively promoting his idea of using atmospheric electricity for telegraph communication. Ward's patent also contains no schematic diagram. Instead, Ward illustrates and describes towers that rotate into the wind "to drive an aerial current of electricity into the insulated middle portion of the tower, which current passes upwardly through the upper portion of the tower and out through the ventilator or the top... whereby the tower is receiving continually fresh and new supplies of electricity".

The two patents in some places use almost identical language:

"I also dispense with all artificial batteries, but use the free electricity of the atmosphere, co-operating with that of the earth... for telegraphing and for other purposes, such as light, heat, and motive power." (Loomis)

"I entirely dispense with artificial batteries, forming my circuit merely by connecting the aerial current with the earth current... for the use of land lines of telegraphs or for other purposes, such as light, heat, &c." (Ward)

In January 1873, US Congress declined to charter the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Co. One congressman, pleading Loomis' case in the House, said, "He entertains a dream, and it may be only a dream, a wild dream that when his proposition comes to be fully applied, it may light and warm your houses...."

[edit] How It May Have Worked

Loomis noted that transmission was possible only when the kites were flown to the same altitude above ground, which seemed to confirm his hypothesis that he was completing a DC circuit through layers of the atmosphere that he hypothesized carried such currents. We know now that there is no basis for such a system.

One version of the Loomis apparatus used a keyed connection to ground at the transmitting station, and a spark gap to ground at the receiver. Radio frequency transients would have been generated by keying the sky-ground DC potential at the transmitter, and if the kite wires were of the same length (which would have the kites at the same altitude above terrain), the receiving apparatus would have been resonant and able to receive such a signal. This may account for his result -- that it was not a matter of tapping into the same layer of atmosphere, but of the wires being the same length.

[edit] External links

Library of Congress exhibit with Loomis notebooks
United States Early Radio History by Thomas H. White suggesting Loomis' work may have been fraudulent, citing lack of evidence.