In 1893 physicist W.B. Croft exhibited Branly's experiments at a meeting of the Physical Society in London. It was unclear to Croft and others whether the filings in the Branly tube were reacting to sparks or the light from the sparks. George Minchin noticed the Branly tube might be reacting to Hertzian waves the same way his solar cell did and wrote the paper "The Action of Electromagnetic Radiation on Films containing Metallic Powders". These papers were read by English physicist Oliver Lodge who saw this as a way to build a much improved Hertzian wave detector. On 1 June 1894, a few months after the death of Heinrich Hertz, Oliver Lodge delivered a memorial lecture on Hertz where he demonstrated the properties of "Hertzian waves" (radio), including transmitting them over a short distance, using an improved version of Branly's filings tube, which Lodge had named the "coherer", as a detector. In May 1895, after reading about Lodge's demonstrations, the Russian physicist Alexander Popov built a "Hertzian wave" (radio wave) based lightning detector using a coherer. That same year, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated a wireless telegraphy system using Hertzian waves (radio), based on a coherer.
