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From: Charles Packer <mailbox@cpacker.org>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: World Contact Day
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:02:27 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Mon, 17 Mar 2025 19:53:30 -0400 (EDT), Scott Dorsey wrote:

> Charles Packer  <mailbox@cpacker.org> wrote:
>>> Rudyard Kipling's _Wireless_ (1902). --scott
>>
>>Yes, I learned about that one earlier. It's an important one for my
>>purposes because it makes a connection with radio transmissioon, though
>>indirectly.
> 
> Yes, and in part it was following Sir Oliver Lodge in that regard.  At
> the time most people really didn't get Maxwell's equations which isn't
> all that surprising since they were pretty incomprehensible until
> Heaviside developed a new notation to simplify them and make them useful
> by ordinary engineers.
> 
> So at the time a lot of people saw electromagnetic fields as just a
> mysterious action at a distance, very much like some form of telepathy.
> 

Except that I've discovered evidence in 1869 newspapers that
at least somebody was thinking about ether and possible
"undulations" through it of a "brain-wave" to carry thoughts.
This precedes the 1883 date generally accepted  for the origins
of telepathy (see the Wikipedia article). The newspaper stories
cite an anonymous article in the British magazine Spectator.