25 APRIL .... the day of the father of the radio : MARCONI

Not to forget April 25th, the date of the birth of Guglielmo Marconi, an illustrious genious & scientist and our Italian NOBEL prize!

Marconi was born in Bologna on April 25, 1874 in Via IV Novembre N ° 7. At the age of twenty he began his first experiments working as a self-taught man helped by his butler. In the summer of 1894 he built a storm marker consisting of a pile, a coherer (also called coherer, a tube with nickel and silver filings placed between two silver caps, device invented by the Fermist Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti) and an electric bell , which emits a call in case of lightning.

He then succeeds, by pressing a telegraph key on a counter, to ring a bell on the other side of the room. One December night, William wakes his mother, invites her to his secret shelter and shows her the experiment he had made. The next day, even the father attends the experiment and when he is convinced that the doorbell rings without electric wires to give his son the money necessary for the purchase of new materials to incite him in some way to continue with his experiments. The young Marconi continues in his experiments also outdoors and finding himself in the country has the possibility of increasing the power of emissions and the distance that separates the transmitter from the receiver.

The turning point in his experiments was obtained on December 8, 1895, after several attempts his equipment proved to be valid in communicating the signals at a fair distance and also overcoming natural obstacles such as a hill that was behind villa griffone, where Marconi had set up his own laboratory. The shotgun Mignani shoots in the air to confirm the success of the experiment we all remember, it is in fact the baptism of the radio and this thanks to the experiments that Marconi completed by marking a story that we radio amateurs know by heart.


Remembering also the dear and famous Marconian friend Elio IK4NYY RIP, and his site:


http://www.radiomarconi.com/

73 de IW2BSF - Rudy

 

Sobering to realize that when Marconi was my age, he was in the tomb...

 

Sorry I missed your Birthday Guglielmo ! If you only knew how much we as HAM radio operators owe you ! Best wishes Mr. Marconi & 73 from all of us hams around the world. Phil KI6PMD..

 

Don't mean to rain on your parade but what about Nikola Tesla? Marconi died in 1937. Tesla died in 1943 and six months after his death the US Supreme Court ruled that all of Marconi's radio patents were invalid and awarded the patents for radio to Tesla. So, for the past 64 years, we still believe that Marconi invented radio. Few actually know of Tesla's radio inventions.

 

Yep

 

Some clarification on the above :

In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision on Marconi's radio patents restoring some of the prior patents of Oliver Lodge, John Stone Stone, and Nikola Tesla.[55][56] The decision was not about Marconi's original radio patents[57] and the court declared that their decision had no bearing on Marconi's claim as the first to achieve radio transmission, just that since Marconi's claim to certain patents were questionable, he could not claim infringement on those same patents.[58] There are claims the high court was trying to nullify a World War I claim against the United States government by the Marconi Company via simply restoring the non-Marconi prior patent.[55]

G3SEA/KH6

 

Not this again.

No.

The Tesla patents were viewed as PRIOR ART, based on the patent disclosures of Tesla. You are correct that Marconi's patents were viewed as derivative and not novel based on that.

However, Tesla did not invent radio, and the striking down of Marconi's patents does not mean Tesla had the PATENTS ON RADIO .

TESLA's patents had patent CLAIMS that REQUIRED wireless transmission with a "conductive medium". In other words, he saw the air as a conductor in completing an alternating current circuit for his wireless system. Tesla described apparatus that pre-dates Marconi, but Marconi used the apparatus for transmission of RF. Not an AC current via an air conductor, as Tesla's patents granted.

Radio invokes propagation in vacuo. That is a different mechanism.

 

Gee Whiz,

Just look up TESLA on google, and you will see that millions of people know about his (alleged) radio inventions. Been a long time since Tesla was obscure and unknown....

 

Let us not forget Fr. Murgas and his contributions.

 

Tesla was the inventor of radio but politics set in and the "invention of radio" was sliced into several pieces with Stubblefield, Marconi and Tesla attributed as related inventors. One was of radio, another was of radio broadcasting. There was a bunch of finagling involved in this.

What is clear is that Marconi knew how to market radio. Tesla was a theorist and Stubblefield was able to send voice signals in a relatively small area but it was more an induction process than radio propagation.

For a good view of what Tesla did, check out Nicola Tesla, Prodigal Genius by John O'Neil. And keep in mind that Tesla went on a lecture tour in Europe and, you guessed it, Marconi attended at least one of them. However, Marconi successfully demonstrated and marketed radio while Tesla was more of an experimenter.

Here is a website that may be interesting:
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/tesla-invented-radio-not-marconi

Here is another website that gives more insight into who invented radio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_radio

More about old time radio is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Radio

A history of radio is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio

Here is part of the last website:
Marconi

British Post Office engineers inspect
Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraphy
(radio) equipment in 1897.

In 1894 the young Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began working on the idea of building a commercial wireless telegraphy system based on the use of Hertzian waves (radio waves), a line of inquiry that he noted other inventors did not seem to be pursuing. Marconi read through the literature and used the ideas of others who were experimenting with radio waves but did a great deal to develop devices such as portable transmitters and receiver systems that could work over long distances, turning what was essentially a laboratory experiment into a useful communication system.

By August 1895 Marconi was field testing his system but even with improvements he was only able to transmit signals up to one-half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves. Marconi raised the height of his antenna and hit upon the idea of grounding his transmitter and receiver. With these improvements the system was capable of transmitting signals up to 2 miles (3.2 km) and over hills. Marconi's experimental apparatus proved to be the first engineering-complete, commercially successful radio transmission system. Marconi’s apparatus is also credited with saving the 700 people who survived the tragic Titanic disaster.

In 1896, Marconi was awarded British patent 12039, Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus there-for, the first patent ever issued for a Hertzian wave (radio wave) base wireless telegraphic system. In 1897, he established a radio station on the Isle of Wight, England. Marconi opened his "wireless" factory in the former silk-works at Hall Street, Chelmsford, England in 1898, employing around 60 people. Shortly after the 1900s, Marconi held the patent rights for radio.

Marconi would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 and be more successful than any other inventor in his ability to commercialize radio and its associated equipment into a global business. In the US some of his subsequent patented refinements (but not his original radio patent) would be overturned in a 1935 court case (upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1943)

 

Marconi invented a form of radiotelegraphic communication with his radio. While he was an early inventor of this technology, there was another inventor that used voice as the communications medium. This is from the last website cited in my earlier post and repeated here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radiohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio

20th century
In 1900, Brazilian priest Roberto Landell de Moura transmitted the human voice wirelessly. According to the newspaper Jornal do Comercio (June 10, 1900), he conducted his first public experiment on June 3, 1900, in front of journalists and the General Consul of Great Britain, C.P. Lupton, in São Paulo, Brazil, for a distance of approximately 5.0 miles (8 km). The points of transmission and reception were Alto de Santana and Paulista Avenue.

One year after that experiment, he received his first patent from the Brazilian government. It was described as "equipment for the purpose of phonetic transmissions through space, land and water elements at a distance with or without the use of wires." Four months later, knowing that his invention had real value, he left Brazil for the United States with the intent of patenting the machine at the US Patent Office in Washington, DC.

Having few resources, he had to rely on friends to push his project. Despite great difficulty, three patents were awarded: "The Wave Transmitter" (October 11, 1904), which is the precursor of today's radio transceiver; "The Wireless Telephone" and the "Wireless Telegraph", both dated November 22, 1904.

 

I know this is a little off topic, but Motorola's beginning had a lot to do with the inventive William Lear. Young Mr. Lear worked for the (Joseph and Paul) Galvin Manufacturing Corporation of Chicago which became Motorola in 1947. The first automobile radio was tested in an old Studebaker. Also, founder of Lear Jet Corporation.

William named a daughter Chanda Lear (like a chandelier).

Mr Lear didn't have a college education degree as did not Steve Jobs. Just putting it out there.

Tesla? Car manufacturer located about fifteen miles from where I live.

Thank you.

Jesse Castillo
KK6PKN

 

Well I sure did not forget Mr. Tesla if you look on my QRZ page in the upper right you all will see my TESLA coil in action ! shocking is it not !!! I have had that up there for years. And I guess tomorrow will be lets bash T.Edison day HiHi 73 all KI6PMD..

 

Read John O'Neil's book "Nicola Tesla — Prodigal Genius" to see why Edison should be bashed. Edison was a user and many of the good things attributed to Edison are myths.

 

??? sorry Sir, but Tesla isn't the inventor of the radio ! this is a clear point !

Tesla was a (mad) GREAT genious , it job & game with the AC current and to trasport in wireless the AC...

it not speriment like Marconi the radio comunication ... the REAL inventor ( it assembly and experiment) or the RADIO for comunication is ONLY marconi.


best 73 de IW2BSF