History of Wirless

The textbook version of the history of “the wireless” usually continues with the Italian engineer and businessman Guglielmo Marconi, who introduced wireless telegraphy in large scale in the British Empire and who was the first to transmit wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Wireless telephony was developed and, shortly before and during World War I, the success story of radio broadcasting began. The idea of wireless television a

The first person to suggest transatlantic wireless telegraphy apparently was James Bowman Lindsay, who speculated about it as early as 1845. His idea was to combine the two conductive principles. He developed a system that was presented to the public in Dundee in 1853 and on which he received a patent in 1854. The patent described his invention as

Directly after 1888, wireless communication did not perform a major leap, as one might have expected. Although Hertz’s discovery was widely recognized as a major scientific breakthrough, wireless applications using his waves were not at hand right away. Scientists continued to dream of the future, as they did before. A famous example is William Crookes’ visionary article Wireless Telephony in the magazine Fortnightly review in 1892. In this article, Crookes not only sketched a vision of a wireless world, but also clearly stated the problems, that remained to be solved, including the question of developing techniques to guarantee the secrecy of transmitted messages. All in all the idea of using Hertzian waves for wireless communication seems to have been pretty widespread in the years directly following their discovery [Crookes, 1892].

In terms of technology development there are several interesting aspects in this chapter of the development of wireless communication. What stands out is surely the personality of Guglielmo Marconi himself, who made wireless communication industry a single-man-adventure at least for some years. The story confirms that there is some truth in Joseph Schumpeter’s model of technological change, in which he emphasizes the dominant role of the entrepreneur [Russell, 2003]. Marconi clearly did cause change and growth and his personal engagement was at least equally important as the underlying science. The new science of electromagnetism did not “cause” technology right away [Rosenberg, 1994]. Interestingly, technology in this case even seems to have preceded science, as shown by the examples of Loomis and Dolbear. Loomis’ early failure in creating a lucrative industry might be explained by bad luck, but also by the science still missing, as it was not possible for him to improve his system without knowing what to improve (i.e. the stability and purity of the produced but still unknown waves at the transmitting end and the sensibility of the receiver).

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