Reborn as King of South America

Chapter 414 Wireless Telegraphy
ps: This week, the novel has been recommended for the first time since it was published more than two years ago. I hope everyone will vote for it! Thank you very much! (Two chapters in one)

The Han Army is a young army with a rich historical heritage. Batches of young officers with local formal military education and overseas study backgrounds have entered the army and gradually become the backbone of the army. However, because the army was established not long ago, many veterans who experienced the Argentine War still remain in the army to serve as squad leaders, deputy platoon leaders, non-commissioned officers, and military chiefs at the grassroots level. These soldiers are the most valuable talents in the army. They have rich practical experience and skilled combat skills.
But on the other hand, having survived gunfire and brutal fighting, they believe more in strength and military exploits. They admire their superior officers with outstanding military exploits and command abilities from the bottom of their hearts, and can satisfactorily complete the training orders issued by their superiors. However, these veterans are often not convinced by some top students who have just graduated from the Army Officers School or returned from studying abroad in military academies. Based on their own practical experience, they will express their opposition when young superior officers propose training deployments. Even some senior non-commissioned officers and sergeants will use their relationship with their previous superior officers to go over the heads of the company commanders and battalion commanders to ask for instructions on the training deployments and plans of the grassroots units.

This phenomenon exists in all the main army units that believe that strength is the first priority, and the Second Regiment of the Sixth Division where Lu Rongting is located is no exception.

Asking for instructions from superiors is not conducive to the command of grassroots troops and the growth of newly graduated young officers. Therefore, in the conversation with the two young battalion commanders Shi Jintang and Zhang Yougong, Lu Rongting specifically emphasized: "The formalization of military education is the general trend. Now is different from more than ten or twenty years ago. At that time, even if the cultural level was low, as long as you made military achievements, you had the opportunity to jump from a small soldier to a platoon or company-level officer. But now it is different. Except for a very small number of second lieutenants at the grassroots level who have very superior military skills and are promoted to officers and serve as grassroots leadership positions, more than 90% of lieutenants are top students who graduated from the Army Officer School.

After two years of university preparatory teaching and four years of higher military education, young graduates have accumulated military theoretical knowledge. However, due to the lack of actual combat experience, they will be unfamiliar and make mistakes when they take up grassroots leadership positions in the early stage. At this time, it is within the scope of duty for non-commissioned officers and military officers, who are the backbone of the soldiers, to point out the shortcomings and mistakes of their superiors. However, it is completely unacceptable to report to the company or battalion-level military chiefs instead of pointing out the mistakes made by their superiors in person when they know that they have made mistakes! "

Lu Rongting focused his eyes on the two men and said earnestly, "The military emphasizes order and discipline. Platoon leaders should do what platoon leaders should do, and company commanders and battalion commanders should do things within their duties. It is not advisable to allow grassroots non-commissioned officers to report to higher levels because of personal relationships, and to arbitrarily interfere in grassroots unit training, personnel arrangements, and other issues.

As the military commanders of the first and third battalions, you two must take the lead and actively communicate with the grassroots non-commissioned officers and young officers. You must communicate with them with reason and emotion, let them understand the harm of skipping the level to the command of the troops. At the same time, you must coordinate the relationship between grassroots officers and non-commissioned officers, visit more often, understand the actual situation of grassroots officers and soldiers, and try your best to understand the military background of every soldier under your command. "

"The problem of non-commissioned officers and grassroots officers reporting to higher levels is our negligence and mistakes in troop management. After the troops completed the year-end training assessment today, Captain Zhang and I immediately set about rectifying the various problems within the barracks and among the grassroots troops."

"If there is a problem, we must solve it immediately. You have served in the army for four or five years. I believe that with your experience, you can solve the problems between NCOs and junior officers."

First he reminded and warned, then he encouraged and motivated. Lu Rongting had a good grasp of the scale of managing his officers. Even if he raised problems, he would not let his officers lose their prestige in front of the soldiers.

"Captain, Director Tang from the General Staff Headquarters has arrived and is waiting for you at the regiment headquarters."

After finishing the conversation with the two people, Lu Rongting was inspecting the soldiers' tactical exercises when he met the guards from the regiment headquarters who had come specially to deliver the message.

"Director Tang? It should be Director Tang Yuanzhan of the Telegraph Department of the Army General Staff Headquarters."

Lu Rongting recalled the recent situation of the troops and guessed the identity of the visitor.

"Let's go back to the regiment headquarters and see what good things Director Tang brought us."

Lu Rongting took a step forward and walked towards the headquarters of the Second Regiment of the Sixth Division with the guards. …………

The telegraph was first invented in 1837.
The first telegraph line to be put into operation appeared in the United Kingdom in 1839. It was installed by the Great Western Railway between two stations for communication. The line was 13 miles long and was a pointer design invented by Charles Wheastone and William Cooke. The two obtained a British patent for the invention in 1837.

In the United States, Samuel Morse invented the telegraph at about the same time and patented it in the United States in 1837. Morse also developed a method of encoding letters and numbers for transmission, called Morse code.

In 1838, the second year after the invention of the wired telegraph, scientist David invented the first practical chemical telegraph, taking the first step in the direction of automatic telegraph. This telegraph used an electrified needle to contact a chemically treated paper roll that was rotated by a clock mechanism to send and receive telegrams.

It was exhibited in London for several months, after which the inventor was forced to abandon his work and emigrate to Australia due to financial difficulties. Alexander Bain took up his idea and in 1864 obtained a patent for an automatic telegraphing device in which a punched paper tape was fed into a telegraph mechanism and the message was recorded by a chemical recorder at the far end of the line. At that time, experiments had demonstrated the transmission of up to 400 messages per hour.

But for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint, these attempts and the invention were abandoned. Other developers have patented improved versions of the above device, but none have met with real success.

However, the use of perforated paper tape to operate automatic telegraphs was adopted, such as the Wheatstone Automatic System (1866), which was adopted by the Electric Telegraph Company in the same year. It was found that it could handle 280 to 55 characters per minute over a line of about 80 miles, depending on the cross-sectional area of ​​the wire used.

By 1879, improvements in construction had resulted in a speed of at least 200 characters per minute for the same distance under optimal conditions. By this time, about 170 such machines were in operation. The principle on which Wheatstone's invention was based is still used today.

Since the first telegraph was invented in 1837, after half a century of development, automatic chemical telegraphs and submarine cable telegraphs have become popular. Because of the limited telegraph connection, the information exchange between countries has become more convenient and close. In Europe, the British built a total of nearly kilometers of cable lines, and in the Far East, in the Central Plains where the Westernization Movement was in progress, the total length of telegraph lines reached kilometers.

The limited telegraph became the mainstream method of information dissemination in countries around the world. In South America, the length of the limited telegraph laid by the Han Dynasty reached 1.4 kilometers. After the telegraph lines were connected to every state capital city, the expansion was stopped in 1888 because in that year, the Han Dynasty made phased progress in the research and development of unlimited telegraph.

Although the tremendous development of radio communications and various electronic devices was a feature of the 20th century in the original historical process, it is worth pointing out that many parts of the basic theory of electromagnetic radiation were completed before 1900, and as early as the 1880s, European scientists had experimentally confirmed the applicability of this theory.

A corollary of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory is that a "wave" can be generated by an electrical disturbance, which is similar to a light wave and propagates at the same speed as a light wave. In fact, Maxwell also regarded light waves as electromagnetic waves.

Henrich Hertz (1857-1894) was committed to using experiments to confirm this prediction. In 1887, he confirmed the existence of radiation and measured many of its characteristics. His transmitter was an electric spark oscillator with two metal plates, which acted as an oscillator and an antenna respectively. His receiver also had a similar structure. If a spark appeared in a small gap in the receiving circuit, it meant that the receiver had received the electromagnetic wave radiated by the transmitter.

The wavelength used by Hertz's system was about 24 cm, so he was able to demonstrate the "light" properties of electromagnetic radiation (such as reflection and deflection). Although Hertz's discovery and his experimental device did not immediately lead to great development, his results were not completely ignored. On the contrary, because of the early attention paid by the Han Dynasty in the first ten-year development plan, Hertz's theory was practically broken through and applied in South America.

For example, in 1885, Liang Jinrong, a Chinese scientific researcher studying abroad, successfully transmitted a signal 0.7 kilometers away in Chang'an with the help of a new detector invented by Rutherford, a foreign scientist from the Royal Academy of Sciences.

In 1886, another foreign expert working at the Royal Academy of Sciences, Lodge, invented a method of using an induction coil as a tool for tuning an electric resonator, and in July of the same year he invented a metal powder detector for radio waves.

The inventions and research results of Liang Jinrong, Rutherford and Lodge laid the technical foundation for the emergence of wireless telegraph.

In February 1887, Tang Yuanzhan, a local scientific research expert in China, completed the first experiment of wireless telegraphy and achieved success. By studying the rough theoretical part of wireless telegraphy provided by Li Mingyuan,

In June 1887, he developed radio propagation technology with wavelengths much longer than those discovered by Hertz. He was the first to prove that wavelengths of the order of 6-300 meters were far more suitable for communication than shortwave. Because of the disadvantages of shortwave, it was not until the 3000s that relatively sensitive electronic detectors were used, and long-distance signal transmission with shortwave wavelengths of 20-20 meters became possible. The shortwave wavelengths used by Hertz were not effectively used until more recently.

Compared with the shortwave discovered by Hertz, after using a wavelength of 300-3000 meters as the transmission signal, within half a year, the signal transmission distance quickly increased from 0.7 kilometers to 20 kilometers. In June 1888, the transmission distance of wireless telegraph signals exceeded 6 kilometers. In the most successful experiment, it reached 90 kilometers. (In real history, Marconi was the first to apply wireless telegraph to real life. In 107, he transmitted wireless signals to a distance of 1895 kilometers.
In early 1899, China imported several Marconi wireless telegraph machines, which were installed in the Guangdong-Guangxi Governor-General's Office, fortresses such as Weiyuan, and ships of the Nanyang Fleet for military command. In the same year, Marconi had just persuaded the British Postal Service to establish a wireless telegraph station.

In 1901, Marconi sent and received signals across the Atlantic Ocean between Poldhu in Cornwall and St. John's in Newfoundland.)
The South American Han country had a technological advantage in the field of wireless telegraphy about 8 years earlier than European countries. The first batch of 90 wireless telegraph machines developed and manufactured by the local Royal Academy of Sciences had a limited signal transmission distance of about kilometers. They were only experimental products and equipped a small number of main forces. Before the manufacturing cost and signal transmission distance reached the expected values ​​of the military, they were not yet equipped with troops on a large scale. Because of the breakthrough in the application of wireless telegraphy, Tang Yuanzhan and another researcher in the chemical industry became the only two people who won the hereditary noble title of Feng after Zhou Sheng and Lin Shenhe during the ten years of the emperor's reform. It was also because of his achievements in the field of wireless telegraphy that Tang Yuanzhan was appointed as the director of the Telegraph Department of the Army General Staff Headquarters, specifically responsible for the subsequent research and development breakthroughs of wireless telegraphy, as well as the popularization of equipment.

After entering the headquarters of the Second Regiment of the Sixth Division and waiting for the Second Regiment Commander Lu Rongting to arrive, the Director of the Telegraph Department adhered to his usual principles and said neatly: "This is the latest model of radio transmitter, with a limited signal transmission range of 80 kilometers. The Sixth Division of the National Defense Army has been allocated four, one for the division headquarters and one for each of the remaining three main infantry regiments. The radio transmitters for the division headquarters and the other two regiments have been delivered. The last one is for your Second Regiment. Please sign for it, Commander Lu."

"Wireless telegraph? This thing can send signals without wires?"

Even though he had seen new things like electric lights, telephones, and hydroelectric power stations in his home country, Lu Rongting could not help but be very curious when he saw for the first time a wireless telegraph that could transmit signals directly without going through wires.

"Of course, otherwise I wouldn't have come all the way to the Sixth Division camp."

Tang Yuanzhan maintained the inherent sense of urgency of a scientific researcher and urged, "The Royal Academy of Sciences and the Ministry have a lot of things to do. After delivering this batch of wireless telegraphs, I have to return to Chang'an to complete the subsequent research and development of wireless telegraphs. Captain Lu, please sign your name quickly. If you are still curious, you can ask the telegraph soldiers directly. Each combat unit equipped with wireless telegraphs has two telegraph soldiers who are receiving training. If you have any questions, you can ask them directly."

"Director Tang is a very busy man. Your time is precious. We cannot delay your research progress."

Lu Rongting stared at the wireless telegraph machine curiously for a while, turned his head and joked with the other party, then quickly signed his name on the material handover form.

(End of this chapter)