This answer does not allow us to judge what might have happened, had not a cruel death carried off in 1894, at the age of thirty-five, the great and unfortunate physicist.
We might also find in certain works earlier than the experiments of Hertz attempts at transmission in which, unconsciously no doubt, phenomena were already set in operation which would, at this day, be classed as electric oscillations.

It is allowable no doubt, not to speak of an American quack, Mahlon Loomis, who, according to Mr Story, patented in 1870 a project of communication in which he utilised the Rocky Mountains on one side and Mont Blanc on the other, as gigantic antennae to establish communication across the Atlantic; but we cannot pass over in silence the very remarkable researches of the American Professor Dolbear, who showed, at the electrical exhibition of Philadelphia in 1884, a set of apparatus enabling signals to be transmitted at a distance, which he described as "an exceptional application of the principles of electrostatic induction." This apparatus comprised groups of coils and condensers by means of which he obtained, as we cannot now doubt, effects due to true electric waves.
Place should also be made for a well-known inventor, D.E.Hughes, who from 1879 to 1886 followed up some very curious experiments in which also these oscillations certainly played a considerable part.

It was this physicist who invented the microphone, and thus, in another way, drew attention to the variations of contact resistance, a phenomenon not far from that produced in the radio-conductors of Branly, which are important organs in the Marconi system.

Unfortunately, fatigued and in ill-health, Hughes ceased his researches at the moment perhaps when they would have given him final results.
In an order of ideas different in appearance, but closely linked at bottom with the one just mentioned, must be recalled the discovery of radiophony in 1880 by Graham Bell, which was foreshadowed in 1875 by C.A.Brown.

A luminous ray falling on a selenium cell produces a variation of electric resistance, thanks to which a sound signal can be transmitted by light.