Who Actually Discovered Radio?
As a young man Marconi studied the work of Hertz and others reproducing their equipment and their experiments
. While still in his early 20's he travelled to England and made a number of impressive demonstrations; communication over ever increasing distances without the use of wires. The demonstrations included one across Salisbury Plain, one across the Bristol Channel and one the prestigious Royal Institution in June 1897.
In 1899 Marconi travelled to the USA as the guest of the New York Herald Newspaper; he had been asked to report on the result of the America's Cup, a yacht race which took place off the coast of New Jersey. This was his first demonstration in the USA and on his way back to the UK Marconi installed wireless equipment on board the ship, the SS St Paul, which then became the first ship in history to report it's arrival in advance using wireless technology. The St Paul was 66 miles off the coast when Marconi's Needles radio station picked up her transmission.
The race was then on the establish transatlantic communication, which Marconi claimed to have done in 1901 with a message ( a letter S in Morse code) sent from Poldhu in Cornwall (one of the most westerly points in the UK) to St Johns in Newfoundland.
There is some dispute about this event as there is no independent evidence of the reception of the message. Marconi's chief rival, the brilliant Nikola Tesla, pointed out that any such achievement by Marconi had been done using discoveries patented by Tesla years earlier.
Tesla had arrived in the USA with a letter of recommendation to Edison who then hired him to work for the Edison Machine Works. Tesla later redesigned Edison's method of Direct current delivery, but when he asked for the $50,000 fee he believed he had been promised for the work Edison laughed.
Seeking some sort of recompense, Tesla then asked for an increase in pay from the $18 per week he was paid to $25. Edison refused and Tesla resigned, preferring to dig ditches to fund work which was now, unequivocally his own.Tesla went on to give the world many wonderful discoveries, among them the alternating current which powers all our homes.
In 1893 Tesla demonstrated a device which could transmit and receive radio, a full 11 years before Marconi's first patent, and most of Marconi's patent applications in the USA were turned down on the basis of Tesla's prior claim, however in 1904 the US Patent Office suddenly changed its mind and granted Marconi the patent for the invention of radio.
Tesla paid little attention, but when Marconi received the Nobel prize in 1909 Tesla finally took action and sued for patent infringement, however he did not have enough money to pursue his rights. It was not until 1943, after Tesla's death that the Supreme Court overturned the earlier patents and declared Tesla the true inventor of radio.
Marconi died in 1937. He had been made a Marquess by King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy in 1924 and joined the fascist party in the same year. Mussolini made him President of the Royal Academy of Italy and a member of the Italian fascist Grand Council.
His death was followed by an Italian State Funeral and all radio stations throughout the world maintained a two minute silence as a mark of tribute.
Tesla was Croatian by birth but had become a US citizen in1891. He believed that the power of electricity should be available to all, so when the war between Westinghouse and Edison over AC or DC electricity threatened to bankrupt Westinghouse, Tesla tore up a contract which could well have made him the world's richest man to make sure ACwas available to everyone.
He died in 1943 in relative poverty; the US Government seized his property, papers and experiments and they were impounded by the Alien Property Custodian despite the fact that Tesla had been a US citizen for over 60 years.
by:Tom Thors
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