[Boatanchors] An interesting book

[Jim Brannigan]

Perhaps it is not useful to debate who invented (insert favorite here) but 
speak of who made the process viable.
Henry Ford did not invent the internal combustion engine or the automobile. 
But ole Henry is credited with same.
What Ford did was develop the industrial process that made the automobile 
affordable.

Marconi had the vision to see that Hertzian waves were more than a 
laboratory curiosity.


Jim


> 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.