Mahlon Loomis Commemorative Stations K1T and K6L-150 Years of Wireless Telegraphy

On 14-16 October 2016, special event stations K1T and K6L will be operating from the summit on Bear's Den Mountain on the Loudoun/Clark Counties (VA) line where in October 1866, a Georgetown DC dentist named Mahlon Loomis made the first demonstration of wireless telegraphy. Loomis flew kites from the sumitts of Bear's Den Mountain and Furnace Mountain located 21 miles away at Point-of-Rocks on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. The kites were covered with copper mesh and the flown with 600 foot copper wires. When Loomis keyed the copper wire on the kite on Bear's Den Mountain, the induced static electricity on the wire generated a spark across the key which produced repeatable movements on a crude Galvanometer connected to the wire of the kite flown from Furnace Mountain. Loomis theorized that there was a conductive layer in the atmosphere that he could tap into and provide wireless telegraphy across the continents.

Based on the success of the Oct 1866 experiment and subsequent experiments that included communications between two ships that were 2 miles apart, Loomis filed a patent application in 1869 and also sought to incorporate a company and receive a grant of $50,000 from the US Government to begin construction of stations. The patent was granted on 30 July 1872 (Patent #129,971) for Improvements to Telegraphing. Where in he claims " of utilizing natural electricity 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, and yet communicate from one continent of the globe to another" Senator Charles Sumner introduced a bill into the US Senate on January 13, 1869 for an act of incorporation the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company, and for the appropriation of $50,000. Congress did not approve the requested funding but did eventually pass the incorporation. On 11 January 1873 President Grant signed a bill incorporating the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company to operate within the District of Columbia. Loomis attempts to commercialize his invention failed due to a number if financial disasters, including the ‘Black Friday” of 1869 when many investors interested in Aerial Telegraphy lost their fortunes in a scheme to corner the gold market, another attempt which was financed by a group of Chicago bankers abruptly ended in October 1871 when the great Chicago fire destroyed the city and then again in the great financial panic of 1873.

Loomis continued to experiment with wireless communications until he died in 1886. From the surviving information it seems that Loomis never understood the physics that allowed his demonstrations to succeed. He did not realize that the spark that he creating when discharging the static electric potential was the source of RF energy that was radiated and received by the other wire connected to his crude detectors. However he did document that the two wires needed to be approximately the same length (resonant) for the system to work efficiently. If not for all his bad timing with the financial markets, perhaps he would have succeed where Marconi did some three decades later. His basic spark gap transmitter system was the basis for radio transmission in the early days of radio until about 1920.