An Improbable Advertisement in "Astrophysical Journal", 1903.

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here's a scamperingly light post: an ad for Pears' soap making a very curious and probably intentional incorrect claim. Of course it is just an ad, and it is just soap, but it is displayed proudly full-page on the inside cover of the prestigious Astrophysical Journal for 1903¹, and it seems to make an odd statement about transoceanic radio communication, inferring that a message was sent across the Atlantic via wireless “20 years ago”.

Here's the deal: I don't understand why this ad is so purposefully wrong. The first message sent across the Atlantic didn't occur “20 years ago” or 1883 as is coddled in the ad--that honor belongs to Marconi (1874-1934) who expanded on his first experiments in 1894 to send and receive radio signals across the Atlantic on 12 December 1903. (The signals originated in Poldhu, Cornwall, England, and was received at Signal Hill, St. Johns, Newfoundland—the message was a simple Morse code for the letter “s”.) Those twenty years notwithstanding, Marconi and Ferdinand Braun shared the Nobel in 1909 for their work in radio.

Now, the ad says “sent 20 years ago” and not sent and received, or received at all for that matter. I know the “twenty years” doesn't correspond to when Pears began operation, because that occurred in 1807. So I'm not sure what it is that they're talking about here, though it is a pretty ad. If anyone has the answer to this little issue, I'd like to hear about it.

(The antennas depicted here are very unlike the ones that Marconi constructed for his famous feat: “The spark-gap transmitter fed a mammoth antenna array -- four hundred wires suspended from 20 masts, each 200 feet tall, placed in a circle. A similar station was set up on the American side of the Atlantic at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod.”--IEEE Milestones, “Milestones:Reception of Transatlantic Radio Signals, 1901.”)

Notes:

1. Oddly enough, Pears' was about the only advertiser in the 1903 volume of the journal. I don't know what the attraction was between soap and astronomy, though perhaps the elite at Pears' just wanted to sponsor the relatively new journal.