Stubblefield's Wireless

The Legend:
On the campus of Murray State College in Murray, Kentucky, there is a stone memorial which commemorates the day in 1902 that Nathan B. Stubblefield first publicly displayed a wireless means of transmitting voices between two points. Stubblefield’s wireless telephone was first demonstrated in 1892, years before Guglielmo Marconi developed his wireless telegraph; but that had been a demonstration for just one man, one Rainey T. Wells. Stubblefield, a farmer and telephone repairman living in Calloway County, Kentucky, claimed he could send messages through the air without wires, a claim which attracted a huge crowd of spectators to the front of the Calloway County Courthouse in Murray on January 1, 1902. At points about two hundred feet apart on the lawn, Stubblefield and his son Bernard had set up two boxes that were not connected in any visible way. Each box was about two feet square and contained a telephone, through which Stubblefield and his son talked as if they were standing next to each other, their voices being perfectly audible to the crowds gathered around each box.
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