Guglielmo Marconi
By Aussiegirl
Today is a very important date in the history of radio. On this day in 1901 Marconi ... but let's let Wikipedia tell the story: A major advantage of radio is its ability to provide communication over water. Marconi quickly began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in order to communicate with ships at sea (In 1904, a commercial service was established to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ocean-going ships, which could incorporate them into their onboard newspapers). At the same time, he was quietly investigating whether it was possible to signal completely across the Atlantic, in order to compete with the transatlantic telegraph cables.
Marconi soon made the stunning announcement that on 12 December 1901, using a 122-metre (400-foot) kite-supported antenna for reception, he had personally received at Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland (now part of Canada) signals transmitted by the company's new high-power station at Poldhu, Cornwall. The distance between the two points was about 3,500 kilometres (2,100 miles).
If you wish to read more about the early days of Marconi and radio, here is the link:Guglielmo Marconi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
posted by Aussiegirl @ 11:09 PM
2 Comments:
Synchronicity compels me to comment. I just finished a bout of reading an excellent book about Marconi (Thunderstruck by Eric Larson) in my favorite reading room (the bathroom) and am on my way to the wide open high plains of Woodward Oklahoma to watch for meteors.
Aussiegirl, Smiley - I share your interest in Marconi and radio in particular. What I like the most about Marconi is that he, like modern amateurs, just had a bad case of the 'wannas' and insisted on experimenting when the Universities of Europe considered practical long-distance radio a lost cause. If this interests you, you'll want to read about Mahlon Loomis, an American dentist who, sometime around 1870, demonstrated radio for a distance of 22 miles in the American Southeast. This was well before Marconi or Tesla. Did you know that amateur radio operators among others are communicating via meteor bounce? The ionized trail can cause a radio signal to rise suddenly on a dead band due to the momentary reflection. There are people who have, with the use of computers, achieved sustained communications on these 'mirrors.' I have seen a perfect television picture appear coincidentally with the appearance of a bolide in the night sky while camping in northeastern Oklahoma. Why I was watching a 'dead' channel is another story. Dino, W5DBG.
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