Wireless Telegraphy

The term wireless telegraphy is a historic term used today as applied to early radio telegraph communications techniques and practices. Wireless telegraphy originated as a term to describe electrical signaling without the electric wires to connect the end points. The intent was to distinguish it from the conventional electric telegraph signaling of the day that required wire connection between the end points. The term was initially applied to a variety of competing technologies to communicate messages encoded as symbols, without wires, around the turn of the twentieth century with radio emerging as the most significant.
These other competing wireless telegraphy technologies are interesting, but pale in significance. Wireless telegraphy rapidly came to be synonymous with Morse code transmitted with electromagnetic waves decades before it came to be associated with the term radio. Wireless telegraphy is used widely today by amateur radio hobbyists where it is commonly referred to as continuous wave (CW) radio telegraphy, or just CW.
The term Wireless Telegraphy came into widespread use around the turn of the previous century when Spark-gap transmitters and privative receivers made it practical to send telegraph messages over great distances, enabling transcontinental and ship-to-shore signalling. Before that time, wireless telegraphy was an obscure experimental term that applied collectively to an assortment of sometimes unrelated signaling schemes. It included such schemes as large mechanical arms for visual signaling and electrical currents through water and dirt.
Wireless telegraphy dates as far back as Faraday and Hertz in the early 1800s, when it was discovered that radio waves could be used to send telegraph messages. In 1832, James Bowman Lindsay gave a classroom demonstration of UHF wireless telegraphy to his students. By 1854 he was able to demonstrate transmission across the Firth of Tay from Dundee to Woodhaven (now part of Newport-on-Tay), a distance of two miles. Various wireless telegraphy devices started appearing in the 1860s. Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic radiation (radio waves) in a series of experiments in Germany during the 1880s.