Although "ahead of its time" is something of a cliche, this uncredited article, proposing point-to-point microwave communication, was in fact several decades ahead of its time. In the late 1880s Heinrich Hertz had shown it was possible to transmit and receive radio signals, but his experiments only covered short distances. In this review, it was suggested that a lightship could use microwave radio signals to communicate through the fog to land. Although the basic idea would prove workable, the technology for producing microwave signals would not be developed for another half-century. (In 1897, The Electrician referred back to this article, noting it was written "with the recent 'Eider' disaster in mind, a disaster which occurred by reason of a thick fog obscuring St. Catherine's light". The magazine added that this article refuted Guglielmo Marconi's assertion that "until the date of my experiments [in 1894] no mention was made in the scientific press of the possibility of long-distance signals being sent by Hertzian waves".)
The Electrician (London), April 10, 1891, page 685:
NOTES.
THE obvious way of communicating between a lightship or a lighthouse and the coast would be by flash signals, but a slight mist would effectually stop the beam of light, since mist is opaque to light. Why is it opaque? Partly because its particles are conductors of electricity, and partly because the frequency of the vibrations is high. The first reason cannot be avoided, and difficulties arise in attempting to get over the second. HERTZ has shown how slower vibrations may be received and observed, but the wave length of such vibrations is at least a foot. Optical experiments with these radiations have to be carried out with huge prisms and reflectors, and even then the longest dimension of the apparatus being only a few wave lengths, all sorts of difficulties arise from diffraction and interference. These phenomena, though they puzzle microscopists, have not yet been investigated, for they only occur in ordinary optics when we use lenses and prisms of a few hundredths of a millimetre in diameter. But if we could reduce the frequency about 2,000 times, and produce vibrations of about two hundred thousand million per second, we should get waves about one millimetre long. These radiations would probably pierce not only a fog, but a brick wall. When we get such vibrations there will be many interesting uses for them. One, at all events, would be the possibility of communicating between lightships and the shore.