Making Waves
- The first public demonstration of electromagnetic waves
- During the 1894 British Association meeting in Oxford, Oliver Lodge was
lecturing on light and the way in which it is perceived by the brain. On 14th
August he set up a demonstration in which a morse key activated a transmission
that was received in an adjacent room and caused the deflection of a spot of
light. This was in effect the first public demonstration of wireless, but
no-one saw any practical application for the phenomenon, and it passed without
note.
- Marconi on the job
- Marconi, however, who had almost no formal scientific education, worked round
the clock to develop a commercial communication system. The British GPO were
only mildly impressed, and failed to see the possibilities of a popular
entertainment system based on radio. Similarly, the experts mocked Marconi's
plans for transatlantic communication: they knew that the curvature of the
earth would defeat him, and that his straight-line signals would simply head
out into space!
- The first hackers?
- At an early Marconi radio demonstration, a rival group set up nearby and
transmitted a jamming signal so as to disrupt the proceedings.
Items on this page come from a book on Oliver Lodge, Cambridge University
Library 459.c.97.159