Talk:Guglielmo Marconi

You seem to misunderstand what a patent meant in the 1890s. Although the idea has been bastardised now, back then you could only patent an artificial "process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter" -- indeed until 1880 you had to provide a working model of it along with your patent application. Marconi didn't patent "radio" in the broad sense of all electromagnetic radiation phenomena, which would indeed have been ridiculous; he patented a system for actually using it as a practical form of communication, and presented a practical, long range device for doing so which was in full scale production and first commerical operation in the UK by 1898 (before Tesla's radio patent was even filed). There was a certain degree of resentment not just from Tesla, but also the many other workers in the field, because very little of Marconi's first patent was truly ground breaking. But it was all much, much better than their scratchings, and it did indeed include some new science. It was Marconi who discovered that you got better range by shielding various parts of the receiver from interference; that range was proportional to the square root of antenna height; that you could produce a directional beam by placing the antenna at the focus of a metallic parabola; and who invented coherer designs an order of magnitude more sensitive than Lodge's original design. And it was Marconi who invented "syntony" (what we would nowdays call "tuning"), invented the concept of radio channels and built a device that was able to operate with multiple channels simultaneously, etc. etc. Marconi's patent specifically says "My invention relates in great measure to the manner in which the above apparatus is made and connected together." That is the sort of thing you could patent in the 1890s, and none of the other contenders for the crown had anything remotely as good before him, nor indeed for several years afterward. An interesting overview is at [1] (http://www.marconi.com/Home/about_us/Our%20History/Publications%20Archive/GEC%20Publications%20Archive/GEC%20Journals/GEC%20Review/v11n1s/p37.pdf) (PDF, 1.15 MB) Securiger 17:31, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

With most major technological devices, the claim that "person A invented device B" is usually at least an oversimplification, and radio is no exception. What we call "radio" today bears little resemblance to the devices that came out in Marconi's time. As far back as Faraday and Hertz in the early 1800s, it was clear to most scientists that wireless communication was possible, and many people worked on developing many devices and improvements. The first wireless telegraphy devices started appearing in the 1860s. Edison, for example, patented one in 1885 for use by trains. Marconi's patent in 1896 was not a particularly remarkable development at the time (it primarily made use of the "coherer" invented by Branly in 1892), though his later contributions were significant improvements. Marconi and Braun shared the 1909 Nobel for "contributions to the development of vireless telegraphy". The first human voice ever transmitted wirelessly was by Canadian-American scientist Reginald Aubrey Fessenden.

A good source is the book Syntony and Spark: the Origins of Radio, Hugh G. J. Aitken, ISBN 0471018163. --Lee Daniel Crocker

I removed a comment here that replaced the common misattribution of Marconi with the misattribution of Tesla, which was no improvement (see Lee Daniel Crocker/The Myth of the Lone Inventor. Also, the common word for someone who receives a prize is "recipient" rather than "receiver", but for some reason I hesitated before replacing it in this case... :-)

I have no problem calling him the "father of radio" since he gave us a working commercial system, but in fairness, the patent was eventually awarded to Tesla.

In fairness, the US patent was eventually awarded to Tesla, at a time Marconi Co. was trying to sue the USG for non-payment of license fees; every other country where it was disputed upheld Marconi's priority. Securiger 17:31, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't Nathan Stubblefield deserve at least a mention here? Brutannica 00:55, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

(William M. Connolley 09:02, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)) Do you trust the text there?

"...and a power of 100 times more than any radio signal previously produced." I would prefer this sentence had an actual number that wasn't a multiple of some other unknown quantity.--Jsnow 05:16, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Number researched and added, with references. And I have to say, Gosh. Oh. My. Gosh. In 1901 his Poldhu transmitter had a peak pulse output of several tens of megawatts and a maximum continuous throughput of 35 kW. This is a CW signal, so it is keyed, and his keying apparatus is trunking that power on and off every time a dit or dah is sent! Pretty impressive for 1901. Securiger 15:15, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)