Mahlon Loomis's Journal

Photographs of
Wireless Telegraph Apparatus
and of Mahlon Loomis
Silver gelatin prints (125.2a,b)
Manuscript Division

Mahlon Loomis (1826-1886)
Journal
Page 2 - Page 3
Mahlon Loomis Papers
Manuscript Division (125.4)

On February 20, 1864, Mahlon Loomis wrote in his journal: "I have been for years trying to study out a process by which telegraphic communications may be made across the ocean without any wires, and also from point to point on the earth, dispensing with wires." Two and a half years later, Loomis would do this very thing between two mountaintops in Loudoun County, Virginia.

In October 1866 Mahlon Loomis (1826-1886), an American dentist and amateur inventor, successfully demonstrated what he called "wireless telegraphy." Loomis was able to make a meter connected to one kite cause another one to move, marking the first known instance of wireless aerial communication. He accomplished this eight years before Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, was born.

Shown here are one of Loomis's early speculative sketches illustrating the possibility of transoceanic wireless communication, his journal and photographs of the inventor, and his telegraph apparatus.

Mahlon Loomis (1826-1886)
Drawing with colored pencil and graphite,
October 1866 (125.3)
Manuscript Division
[ Digital ID# uc125.3p1]