[Boatanchors] An interesting book

[jhhaynes at earthlink.net]

On Wed, 7 Feb 2007, Jim Brannigan wrote:

> Few inventions are like Athena "Sprung full-blown from Zeus's head"
> Idea is built upon idea and the credit usually goes to the person with the 
> vision, perseverance and financing to create a viable commercial product.
> Edison, Marconi and Bell are examples.
>
> Jim

The book "Wireless : from Marconi's black-box to the audio" by Sungook
Hong throws some light on the invention of radio and on Lodge's claim
to have anticipated Marconi in inventing wireless telegraphy.

It appears that the scientists who understood Maxwell's work understood
that light and radio are similar; and they expected radio waves to
follow straight lines just as light does.  So they viewed Hertz's
demonstration of radio as a nice laboratory demonstration of Maxwell's
work and nothing more.  If radio waves had behaved as they expected
then radio would have been fairly worthless.  (Not that VHF radio is
worthless today; but in their time there was no vision of voice
transmission and portable equipment that makes VHF valuable today.)
It was up to Marconi, who didn't understand Maxwell's work, to believe
that he could get radio to work beyond the horizon because he didn't
know the waves were limited to line of sight.  So he just kept testing
farther and farther, and it took a while for theory to catch up with
his results.