He put the carrier pigeons out of a job
One of Detroit's great inventors and "human wormholes"
Sometime in the first few years of 1900s1, two newspapermen visited the top floor of a laundry building in downtown Detroit, across Michigan Avenue from the Book Cadillac Hotel, to see something amazing. James E. Scripps, the founder of the paper that would become The Detroit News, and his son William E. Scripps, then 19 or 20 years old, had come for the chance to watch a message travel a distance of two blocks — over the air, wirelessly.
The magician giving the show was the tinkerer Thomas E. Clark, a former employee of General Electric who had been working on a wireless telephone system in his “laboratory” at the laundry building and testing it out in the clear air of Belle Isle. He told the Scrippses that he would send a message from the laundry building to the Board of Commerce building two blocks away, and that the message would be returned.
“With great fanfare, my old friend Tom started to click out a message in code and the sparks started to fly,” William E. Scripps told the News a half-century later. The message was returned after a few minutes “with a great roar of telegraph instruments and more sparks.” William asked to pull back a literal curtain in Clark’s lab to make sure it wasn’t a trick. After the demonstration, the stunned father and son gave Clark $1,000 to fund the continued development of his technology.
Sparks kept flying in the following years, sending messages farther and farther. In March of 1902, Clark’s equipment was used to send the first ship-to-shore wireless transmissions in Great Lakes history to and from the steamer City of Detroit. (Sent: “Capt. McKay, steamer City of Detroit — Have you trouble with ice?” Received: “Steamer City of Detroit on Lake Erie — Weather clear. Have not encountered much ice.”) In Key West, Florida, in mid-December 1906, officers at the U.S. Naval radio station there were “greatly surprised” to receive a message from Clark sent over the air 1,700 miles from Detroit — a message that was only supposed to go as far as Cleveland. Some radio historians have floated Clark as a candidate for the world’s first radio disc jockey, because in 1907, Clark used his wireless system to transmit phonograph music played on shore into the main cabins of the City of Detroit.
By 1908, the Clark Wireless Company’s eight wireless telephone stations around the Great Lakes could communicate with ships 25 miles offshore. The Detroit and Cleveland Navigation Co. retired its homing pigeons.
A ca. 1905 advertisement for the Clark Wireless Telegraph & Telephone Co. showing telegraph stations on the shore and ships on the horizon, via the Detroit Historical Museum.
Despite the Scripps family seed funding and the dazzling technological accomplishments, the Clark Wireless Company was not an unqualified business success. In 1910, Clark’s company was absorbed into United Wireless Telegraph Company, the largest radio communications company in the country. This probably made a lot of business sense at the time, presuming Clark didn’t know that United Wireless was running one of the era’s biggest stock frauds. Oops!
But it pretty much worked out for Thomas E. Clark, who organized a new company, Tecla2, in the mid-1910s to sell his telephone and telegraph equipment and market his electrical experimentation services. Later that decade, Clark — who had installed the radio at Wildwood, William E. Scripps’ rural estate near Lake Orion — was invited to consult on a new project at The Detroit News: A radio station. That station, WWJ, transmitted its first broadcast on Aug. 31, 1920, two-ish decades after Clark gave the Scrippses just an inkling of what wireless technology could do.3
I think about that meeting in the laundry building and I think about “human wormholes,” Jason Kottke’s turn of phrase for people whose lives bridge huge spans of time. Clark, it has become clear to me, is one of Detroit history’s great examples of this kind of lifetime.4 At the turn of the 20th Century, he stood in a room with James Scripps, born before the invention of Morse code, and showed him a rudimentary wireless communications device. For his 80th birthday, Clark treated himself to a visit to the WWJ-TV station, where he watched engineers use the same basic idea that had sent his dots and dashes across a few rooftops in downtown Detroit to broadcast live images and sound to thousands of television sets in thousands of homes. Clark told a Detroit News reporter then that every time he thought broadcast technology had become as good as it could be, it would somehow get dramatically better a short time later, the “old” ways of doing things abruptly obsolete. “We are just entering the field — its limits are beyond even our imagination,” Clark said. It was 1950. That same year, Clark donated some of his early wireless equipment to the new Detroit Historical Museum.
Clark would live another 12 years. He was still alive when the first telecommunications satellite, Telstar 1, was launched into space.
Various accounts of this meeting set it in 1900, 1901, and 1902. Which year was it? The answer may exist but I don’t care to work any harder to find it!
Tecla is still in business. GET THIS: In the 1930s, a marine engineer who worked for Tecla who also happened to be a dog show hobbyist inspired the company’s invention of the “guillotine-style” dog nail trimmer, which they marketed under the brand name Resco. THE DOG NAIL TRIMMER! A DETROIT ORIGINAL!!!!! They still make it today! (source!)
A straight line is sometimes drawn from Clark’s laundry building meeting with the Scrippses to the establishment of WWJ. Maybe there is something to that; he reportedly worked with Scripps on the pitch meeting for the radio station in 1919. But my guess would be that it was kind of an indirect path from point A in 1901ish to point B in 1920. One reason I feel this way is that WWJ seems to have been inspired not by Thomas E. Clark alone, or by The News’s visionary old suits, but by their radio hobbyist kids, specifically William E.’s son William John Scripps. A 19-year-old ham radio operator installed the first transmitter at the station and a 16-year-old office boy read the first newscast, according to this history of WWJ by John F. Schneider. Kids’ stuff!
I am obsessed with human wormholes. I think I gave a whole sort of crazed talk about human wormholes once? My other favorite local human wormhole is Sebastian S. Kresge, the entrepreneur who opened the first Kresge Five-and-Dime in 1899 and who was still alive when the first Kmart opened in 1962. Thomas E. Clark was also still alive when the first Kmart opened in 1962!