U.S. Technology: History

Lesson 8: Communication Technologies

This final chapter will look at communication technologies and the ways in which they have changed our lives.

Marconi

Communication is a fundamental activity in which all of us engage. Therefore, we have constantly tried to improve it, for if technology’s basic function is to improve our lives, it only makes sense that we would want to improve such a basic activity.

The history of modern communications did not begin in America; it began in England with James Clerk Maxwell. It was Maxwell who demonstrated that light was an electromagnetic wave, and he predicted (on theoretical grounds) that similar waves of different frequencies could be generated by electric discharges. In 1887 Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist, created an apparatus which generated and measured both high-frequency and low-frequency waves from a device called a spark-gap transmitter.

A few years later an Italian named Guglielmo Marconi was studying electricity when he came across Hertz’ work and noticed a feature in it that would allow him to do something that Hertz had overlooked. Hertz had actually sent his messages from a transmitter to a measuring device WITHOUT wires and did not realize it. Marconi experimented with this further and was eventually able to replicate it successfully on a regular basis. Marconi sent messages in Morse code. This was a series of long sparks and short sparks that intertwined to make a language and Marconi sent it two miles without a wire.

Marconi’s invention took off and in 1897 there was a British Marconi company and in 1899 an American Marconi company.

1  2  3  4