invention of radio

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pages: 478 words: 131,657

Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney

Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dematerialisation, fudge factor, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, scientific management, VTOL

But, by a few years, it precedes Marconi’s inventions and practical demonstrations of wireless telegraphy.”2 Figures 165 and 185, referred to in the United States Supreme Court case, are from Tesla’s 1893 lecture and are frequently cited as evidence supporting his claim of invention of radio. Anderson points out that some have confused the argument with respect to the principles of transmission and reception of radio signals with the matter of transmitting voice—an important improvement made practical by DeForest’s Audion, or triode vacuum tube. “In a discussion of priority in the invention of radio, one must be very specific about definitions,” he writes. “In the . . . case of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America vs. United States (which was decided June 21, 1943, against the Marconi Company and striking down the fundamental Marconi patent), the following definition evolved out of the exhaustive depositions taken from many technical experts in the fields of radio and the physical sciences: “‘A radio communication system requires two tuned circuits each at the transmitter and receiver, all four tuned to the same frequency.’

Edison Chapter 5: The War of the Currents Begins Chapter 6: Order of the Flaming Sword Chapter 7: Radio Chapter 8: High Society Chapter 9: High Road, Low Road Chapter 10: An Error of Judgment Chapter 11: To Mars Chapter 12: Robots Chapter 13: Hurler of Lightning Chapter 14: Blackout at Colorado Springs Chapter 15: Magnificent and Doomed Chapter 16: Ridiculed, Condemned, Combatted Chapter 17: The Great Radio Controversy Chapter 18: Midstream Perils Chapter 19: The Nobel Affair Chapter 20: Flying Stove Chapter 21: Radar Chapter 22: The Guest of Honor Chapter 23: Pigeons Chapter 24: Transitions Chapter 25: The Birthday Parties Chapter 26: Corks on Water Chapter 27: Cosmic Communion Chapter 28: Death and Transfiguration Chapter 29: The Missing Papers Chapter 30: The Legacy Bibliographical Essay Reference Notes Postscript Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish particularly to thank: Leland Anderson, one of the founders of the Tesla Society,* a coauthor of the annotated Dr. Nikola Tesla Bibliography (San Carlos, Ca., Ragusan Press, 1979), and author of the monograph, “Priority in the Invention of Radio—Tesla v. Marconi.” Mr. Anderson’s research and scholarly works on Tesla have been a major interest of his life. An electrical engineer and former computer consultant, he reviewed my manuscript and generously shared his collection of Tesliana, including many previously unpublished materials and photographs.

., for permission to reprint photos, illustrations of the artist Frank Paul, and quotes from “My Inventions,” by Nikola Tesla, that appeared in the Electrical Experimenter and Science & Invention, formerly published by Hugo Gernsback. And to Leland Anderson for permission to quote from “Priority in Invention of Radio, Tesla v. Marconi,” Antique Wireless Association, March 1980. In addition the author is indebted to the Nikola Tesla Museum for words quoted from Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900, by Nikola Tesla; to King Peter II for a quotation from A King’s Heritage, Putnam, New York, 1954, and for lines from T.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

The real binding up and deprovincial-ization of the planet requires a technology that communicates much faster than horse or sailing ship, that conveys information all over the world, and that is cheap enough to be available, at least occasionally, to the average person. Such a technology began with the invention of the telegraph and the laying of submarine cables; was greatly expanded by the invention of the telephone, using the same cables; and then enormously proliferated with the invention of radio, television, and satellite communications technology. Today we communicate—routinely, casually, with hardly ever a second thought—at the speed of light. From the speed of horse or sailing ship to the speed of light is an improvement by a factor of almost a hundred million. For fundamental reasons at the heart of the way the world works, codified in Einstein's special theory of relativity, we know that there is no way we can send information faster than light.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Others, including Norman Cousins, John Kenneth Galbraith, Marshall McLuhan, Archibald MacLeish, and Victor Papanek, would follow Packard’s lead in pointing out how the media create artificia needs within vulnerable consumers.The sheer volume of print Americans have devoted to this topic since 1927 demonstrates that obsolescence has become a touchstone of the American consciousness. The book you have in your hand is a collection of stories that emerged during my search for obsolescence in uniquely American events: the invention of packaging, advertising, and branding; the rivalry between Ford and GM; “death dating”; the invention of radio, television, and transistors; the war and the postwar competition with Japan; rock and roll, the British Invasion,and male fashions; universal home ownership; calculators, integrated circuits, and PCs; the space race, tailfins and TelStar; and the looming crisis of e-waste. The theory and practice of obsolescence play a central role in each of these American milestones.


pages: 330 words: 99,226

Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

For all these reasons radio waves were clearly ideal for longrange communication, and that, too, without the wires that telegraphs and cables required. The first to make practical use of radio waves in this way was the Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937). In 1901, he sent a radio-wave signal across the Atlantic Ocean, a feat generally recognized as the invention of radio. From that day on, with further improvements and refinements, radio became a more and more important means of communication. It was clear to many people that any technological civilization would surely make use of radio communication in preference to anything else. Therefore, when the planet Mars made a closer than usual approach to Earth in 1924, there was some attempt to listen for radio signals from the presumed civilization that had built its canals.


pages: 309 words: 101,190

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

If life when it starts has anything other than a low probability of giving rise to intelligent life, we might take this as evidence that life itself is rare. An alternative conclusion to this chain of reasoning is the bleak proposal that intelligent life may arise quite frequently, but typically only a short time elapses between the invention of radio and technological self-destruction. Life may be common in the universe, but we are also at liberty to speculate that it is exceedingly rare. It therefore follows that the kind of event we are seeking, when we speculate about the origin of life, could be a very very improbable event: not the kind of event that we can expect to duplicate in the laboratory and not the kind of event that a chemist will deem ‘plausible’.


pages: 398 words: 100,679

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

Different crops prefer particular conditions of tilth; wheat, for example, likes a fairly coarse seedbed, with clods about the size of a child’s fist, whereas barley prefers a much finer tilth. Lighter harrowing is applied after sowing to cover the seeds, and can also be used between cultivated rows to tear up weeds. Once an appropriate tilth has been prepared, the next step is to put seeds into the ground. The original meaning of “broadcast”—coined centuries before the invention of radio or TV—is scattering seeds far and wide, tossing them from a sack as you walk back and forth across the field. You can distribute seeds relatively quickly this way, but you have little control over their exact placement, which makes weeding later difficult. But again, with a little bit of ingenuity you can improve this process immeasurably.


pages: 482 words: 106,041

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

DURING THE 1890s, a Serbian immigrant to America, Nikola Tesla, and an Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, each patented devices capable of sending wireless signals. In 1897, Tesla demonstrated sending ship-to-shore pulses across bodies of water in New York, even as Marconi was doing the same among various British isles—and, in 1901, across the Atlantic. Eventually they sued each other over the claim, and the royalties, to the invention of radio. No matter who was right, by then transmission across seas and continents was routine. And beyond: Electromagnetic radio waves—waves much longer than poisonous gamma radiation or ultraviolet sunlight—emanate at the speed of light in an expanding sphere. As they move outward, their intensity drops by a factor of one over the distance squared, meaning that at 100 million miles from Earth, the signal strength is one-fourth what it was at 50 million miles.


pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

But his attention had switched away from gas theory and thermodynamics to electromagnetism. For much of the 1860s, he focused his intellectual energy on the latter, eventually delivering his seminal mathematical analysis of the subject in 1873. That analysis not only described all electric and magnetic phenomena, but it would reveal the true nature of light, enable the invention of radio, and inspire Einstein’s work on relativity. In addition, in 1871, Maxwell was appointed the first head of Cambridge University’s new physics laboratory, the Cavendish. Teaching now became his main preoccupation. In this institution, the next five generations of scientists would discover the electron and the neutron, split the atom, and uncover the structure of DNA.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Of course, free hardware projects are much harder to bootstrap than FOSS projects. Production costs, demands on logistics, and patent laws are major obstacles preventing a take-off of a free hardware movement. Despite the difficulties, some comfort can be taken in remembering that the personal computer was the invention of radio amateurs and hippies. And a few hardware projects are up and running at the time of writing. OpenCores is a portal gathering of about 2000 developers collaborating on free hardware devices. The seriousness of the undertaking is suggested by the fact that the industry keeps a close eye on OpenCores, to the point that companies have threatened the developers not to enter their business, while other companies have invested money in the project.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

To my mind, both of these organizations are too closely tied to the military and therefore to the part of the government that relies on Internet insecurity, but they’re a start. There is significant historical precedent in the US for this idea. New technologies regularly lead to the formulation of new government agencies. Trains did. Cars did. Airplanes did. The invention of radio led to the formation of the Federal Radio Commission, which became the Federal Communications Commission. The invention of nuclear power led to the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission, which became the Department of Energy. We can debate the specifics, and the appropriate limits of this new agency.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

One observer at the time, apparently oblivious to the economic forces of global capitalism, mused that airplanes opened up “the realm of absolute liberty; no tracks, no franchises, no need of thousands of employees to add to the cost,” while in 1915 the editor of Flying magazine—the Wired of its day—enthusiastically proclaimed that the First World War had to be “the last great war in history,” because “in less than another decade,” the airplane would have eliminated the factors responsible for wars and ushered in a “new period in human relations” (apparently, Adolf Hitler was not a subscriber to Flying). As much as one could speak of utopian airplane-centrism of the 1910s, this was it. But it was the invention of radio that produced the greatest number of unfulfilled expectations. Its pioneers did their share to overhype the democratization potential of their invention. Guglielmo Marconi, one of the fathers of this revolutionary technology, believed that “the coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.”


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

Because, you see, now like then, the game of patenting and intellectual monopoly is not all that democratic and open to the little guys as Ms. Khan’s recent and altogether interesting book would like us to believe. So, it is the case that Marconi, supported by the likes of Edison and Carnegie, kept hammering the U.S. Patent Office until, in 1904, it reversed course and gave Marconi a patent for the invention of radio: “The reasons for this have never been fully explained, but the powerful financial backing for Marconi in the United States suggests one possible explanation.”43 We will spare you the sad story of Nikola Tesla’s hapless fight against Marconi, you can figure that out by yourself. In fact, we are also sparing you the stories of the P1: PDX head margin: 1/2 gutter margin: 7/8 CUUS245-08 cuus245 978 0 521 87928 6 April 29, 2008 15:42 206 Against Intellectual Monopoly many other fights poor Tesla lost against some of the great “inventors” and “entrepreneurial geniuses” of the time, Edison foremost.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

New Technology Will Change Contagion Rates and Recovery Rates Notable changes in information technology, with changes in contagion rates and recovery rates, have occurred over the course of history. The early invention of printed books in China, the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century, the invention of newspapers in Europe in the seventeenth century, the invention of the telegraph and telephone in the nineteenth century, the invention of radio and television in the twentieth, and the rise of the Internet and social media have all fundamentally altered the nature of contagion, but to date there has been no systematic quantitative study of these inventions’ impact on contagion. Social media and search engines have the potential to alter the fundamentals of contagion.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

There’s a lot of myth surrounding it, and the credit for paper is traditionally given to a man named Cau Lun, who lived from 48 to 121 CE. However, there’s acheological evidence of paper predating even that date, including some dating as far back as 179 BCE. All the research I found suggests the date here is at best an informed guess! 34 This suggestion that the early invention of radio could’ve saved a lot of time messing around trying to invent clocks that work on boats has been put forward before! I encountered it in Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge, which you can find in the bibliography. 35 Like many inventions, radio receivers were independently invented by multiple people at the same time.


pages: 501 words: 145,097

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

He was also afflicted with an obsessive-compulsive disorder; he refused to shake hands, he would feel a need to read all the books written by any author he encountered, and he had a peculiar devotion to the number three and to any other number divisible by it. Though the Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla, clever, fragile, and an eccentric showman, was until recently widely overlooked, it is now generally accepted that he made vast contributions to the development of alternating electrical current and the invention of radio, long before Marconi. He has lately won legions of new admirers, mostly young, who see him as a forgotten hero of American science. Nikola Tesla was, in short, the classic exemplar of the mad scientist, and the fact that he made dangerously interesting inventions by the score resonates still with today’s imaginative fans of the far-fetched.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Yet the U.S. monetary system was an unresolved national question in large measure because the nation remained so dependent upon foreign capital flows. More, the ebb and flow of financial markets was slowly becoming a daily political referendum on the job done by Washington regarding the economy in general, an influence that would be made acute with the invention of radio, television, and eventually the internet over the next century. The public’s concern regarding the adequacy of the money supply in the first decade of the twentieth century is all the more ironic since it was growing at a pretty brisk pace compared with the nation’s population, which was at about 76 million at the turn of the century and reached 97 million by 1913.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

BuzzFeed News, after conducting an analysis of web traffic and engagement following the 2016 American election, found that “the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others.” The invention of radio had united the country by allowing everyone to share the same experience. They could listen together to an FDR fireside chat or an Edward R. Murrow report from London as the bombs fell. With the coming of television, they could watch together as Murrow took on Joseph McCarthy, as John Kennedy, Jr., saluted his father’s coffin, as Walter Cronkite reported on the Vietnam War, or as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.


pages: 733 words: 184,118

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Howeth, History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy, chap. 19, “Operations and Organization of the United States Naval Radio Service during Neutrality Period,” sec. 3, “Operation of the Tuckerton and Sayville Stations,” http://earlyradiohistory.us/1963hw19.htm. 16. “Tesla Sues Marconi on Wireless Patent,” New York Times, 4 August 1915; NT, Radio Testimony; Peterson quote is from http://www.tfcbooks.com/teslafaq/q&a_022.htm; Leland I. Anderson, Priority in the Invention of Radio—Tesla vs. Marconi (Breckenridge, CO: Twenty-First Century Books, n.d.); A. David Wunsch, “Misreading the Supreme Court: A Puzzling Chapter in the History of Radio,” Antenna 11, no. 1 (November 1998), http://www.mercurians.org/1998_Fall/Misreading.htm. 17. Branimir Jovanović, “Nikola Tesla-Research Methodology in the Light of Facts Discovered during Reconstruction of His Work on Bladeless Pumps from 1908–1911” (paper presented at ICOHTEC meeting, Belfort, France, July 1998), 8. 18.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

During periods of perturbation, more of the ways in which society organizes itself are up for grabs; more can be renegotiated, as the various other components of human stability adjust to the changes. To borrow Stephen Jay Gould's term from evolutionary theory, human societies exist in a series of punctuated equilibria. The periods of disequilibrium are not necessarily long. A mere twenty-five years passed between the invention of radio and its adaptation to the mass-media model. A similar period passed between the introduction of telephony and its adoption of the monopoly utility form that enabled only one-to-one limited communications. In each of these periods, various paths could have been taken. Radio showed us even within the past century how, in some societies, different paths were in fact taken and then sustained over decades.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

Its gradual departure as a concept marked an end to the physical picture on which Faraday and Maxwell alike had relied to conceive their theories. After Maxwell, mechanical explanations of electric phenomena no longer sufficed, yet theoretical knowledge of their nature remained far from complete.64 Stupendous discoveries and developments flowed from Maxwell’s concepts. They led most directly to the invention of radio and more abstractly to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. At the time, however, many physicists shrank from Maxwell’s argument despite its solid grounding in mathematics. They could not accept the notion that insulators, which confined electric currents within prescribed paths, could also be the seat of electric action.


pages: 1,396 words: 245,647

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

Robertson, M. (1985) ‘Recollections of Princeton: The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s’, available at http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aids/ mathoral/pm02.htm (accessed 22 May 2008). Roqué, X. (1997) ‘The Manufacture of the Positron’, Studies in the Philosophy and History of Modern Physics, 28 (1): 73–129. Ross, S. (1962) ‘Scientist: The Story of the Word’, Annals of Science, 18 (June): 65–85. Rowlands, P. and Wilson, J. P. (1994) Oliver Lodge and the Invention of Radio, Liverpool: PD Publications. Rozental, S. (ed.) (1967) Niels Bohr: His Life and Work as Seen by His Friends and Colleagues, New York: Wiley. Russell, B. (1972) The Collected Stories, London, George Allen & Unwin. Sachs R. G. (ed.) (1984) The Nuclear Chain Reaction: Forty Years Later, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.