- According to many people
Guglielmo Marconi invented the wireless Telegraph.
In fact, his name was so connected to wireless telegraphs.
That for many years, telegraphs were called marconigrams.
However, he wasn't the first
to make a wireless transmission.
nor did he invent most of the devices
used in his experiments.
How did this, basically, uneducated man make a
wireless telegraph empire, win the Nobel prize,
and destroy Nicholas Tesla's life?
We'll tell you in the video. Ready? let's go.
♪Electricity, electricity, electricity, electricity♪
In the summer of 1894 an Italian Irish man
named Guglielmo Marconi read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz
and was inspired to make wireless telegraph
go around the world.
Marconi was oddly uneducated.
I say odd because he came from a very wealthy family.
His father was from Italian nobility
and his mother was an heiress of the whiskey
fortune from Jameson and Son. - (Bottles Clinking)
However Marconi's Protestant mother didn't want him to quote
come into contact
with a great superstition that is commonly taught
to small children in Italy.
Therefore Marconi was educated by a string
of tutors that gave him a sporadic education that
with his mother's permission skipped anything
that young Marconi didn't like
including most math and physics.
The obituary of Hertz
mentioned Hertz' greatest accomplishment.
He had discovered invisible electromagnetic waves that moved
and acted just like light waves.
In other words, Hertz had discovered radio wave
Hertz had created his wave
with an antenna attached to an induction coil
and received it by looking
at a teeny tiny spark in a ring receiver.
If Marconi was gonna to use Hertzian waves
to send long distance wireless telegraphs,
the first thing he needed was a better receiver.
And luckily for him
an Englishman named Oliver Lodge had found one.
Lodge had met Hertz and was profoundly sad to hear
of his passing.
To honor him, lodge decided to give a talk
on the work of Hertz.
However, to make a more dramatic demonstration
he needed a better way to show
that radio waves travel long distances.
For that reason, lodge decided to use a tube
with metal filings in his receiver.
Four years earlier, a French physicist had shown
that these little metal filings will stick together
or cohere when they're in the presence of a radio wave
and will therefore have much lower resistance.
This is why lodge called this item a coherer.
Lodge had the bright idea of setting up a separate circuit
in his receiver with an antenna, a battery, a coherer
and a current meter that turned a mirror,
so that it was visible to all when the current changed.
When he created a radio wave on one side of the room,
the metal and the cohere stuck together
and became conductive so the current meter turned
In other words, Lodge made the first known radio wave
that was easily detected.
Lord Rayleigh told lodge,
quote, "there is your life's work."
but instead Lodge went on vacation
and then got distracted with other work and mysticism.
Marconi, however was not distracted.
In fact, he was possessed.
Once he read of lodges experiment, he spent thousands
of hours improving on the coherer through trial and error.
Marconi ended up creating a coherer
that was a small tube, with only a tiny V-shaped
area for the metal shavings and a partial vacuum.
Marconi also found that a tall antenna worked better
than a short one and an antenna that was grounded,
stuck into the ground at the top of the hill,
worked even better.
These inventions were important,
but Marconi's biggest input had to do
with his complete lack of understanding of basic physics.
See, no one at the time thought radio waves
could travel that far, because they move in a straight line
and the earth is curved.
It's like having a really bright light
on a lighthouse, after a certain distance
you can't see it no matter how bright it is.
Marconi didn't have a good answer for this.
He was just really, really convinced
it would work out somehow.
Still, he needed a way to make a very powerful radio wave.
And luckily for him,
Nikola Tesla had already figured that out.
Back in the summer of 1889, five years before Hertz's death,
Nikola Tesla had heard about the miracle
of Hertz' wave at the world's fair in Paris.
Inspired, he adjusted the transmitter
by using an AC source instead
of a DC battery and an interrupter and moving the position
of the capacitor or the condenser and making it variable.
This oscillating transformer made extremely
high voltage alternating current
and Tesla patented it in April of 1891.
What he invented was quickly called the Tesla coil
and it was a sensation.
However, Tesla wasn't much interested
in long distance telegraph.
He had loftier idea, long distance wireless lighting
and then electrifying the atmosphere
and even making the whole earth quiver with electricity.
All of this by the way is complete nonsense
but they had no way of knowing this at the time.
In fact, in March of 1901, JP Morgan gave Tesla $150,000
for a giant whole earth transmission tower.
Meanwhile, Marconi was trying to build his receiving
and transmission tower.
In 1900, Marconi tried to patent his transmitter,
but was rejected by the patent office as being too similar
to Tesla's previous ones.
Undeterred, Marconi left the details to the lawyers
and built giant radio receivers and transmitters
in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and in Cornwall, England.
The machine in Cape Cod
was so loud (lightning claps)
that it was affectionately known as the thunder factory.
On December 12th, 1901, Marconi said that he heard an SOS
in Cape Cod from England over 2,200 miles away.
I used the phrase said that he heard,
because there was much doubt at the time
whether he actually heard it.
And now we are totally convinced
that he did not hear that signal.
Radio waves at that frequency do not travel that far
during the day.
Because of the skeptics, two months later,
Marconi listened to signals from Cornwall
on a ship, as it sailed away with people to verify it,
and got a message as far as 2000 miles away
but only at night.
During the day, he could only get signals at 700 miles.
Marconi called this the Daylight Effect.
His daughter wrote that he yelled
"Damn the sun. how long will it torture us?"
But why did radio waves travel further
than if they were just going in straight lines?
And why did that not occur during the day?
Marconi had the odd theory that the wave skimmed
along the surface of the earth,
due the fact that he grounded his antenna
and the sunlight acted like a fog.
And Tesla thought it was going through the earth
just like he predicted with no reason at all
for the sunlight to have any effect.
Later that year, Oliver Heaviside,
a man with an awful hairdo,
who condensed Maxwell's equations
from 20 to four, solved the riddle.
He thought the part of the atmosphere
reflects the radio waves so that it could bounce
along the surface and the ground.
He also thought this layer had more complexity
during the day.
So the waves would often bend instead of bounce
irrespective of why,
Marconi proved that radio waves could travel long distances.
He was proud to say that, quote,
"there is no longer any question about the ability
of wireless telegraphy to transmit messages
across the Atlantic."
When Tesla heard of Marconi's accomplishments
he was unconcerned, saying,
"Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue.
He's using 17 of my patents."
However, that good feeling was destroyed in 1904,
when the patent office reversed its rulings
and gave the patent to Marconi.
At the same time, J.P. Morgan was getting pretty frustrated
with Tesla and the money pit of the tower
Marconi's method was cheaper and was proven to work.
Morgan stopped funding Tesla,
and Tesla had to give up the project.
The tower was destroyed (Metal clanking)
and he had a nervous breakdown.
He died penniless 39 years later.
A few months after Tesla's death,
the U.S. Supreme Court recognized
Tesla and Lodge and others for their initial contributions
to wireless telegraphs.
Back to Marconi, despite the fact that he didn't know how
or why his telegraphs worked, he still got them to work.
Soon, many ships had Marconi machines to send marconigrams.
In a feet of pure propaganda,
Marconi co-won the Nobel prize in physics in 1909.
Marconi moved back to Italy,
joined the Italian fascist party,
and became close friends with Mussolini.
On July 19th, 1937, Marconi had a heart attack
and politely told his valet,
"I'm very sorry, but I'm going to put you
and my friends to considerable trouble.
I fear my end is near.
Will you please inform my wife?"
Marconi died 45 minutes later.
At his funeral, wireless and radio operators
held two minutes of silence in his honor.
That was the last time there were no manmade radio
signals whizzing through the air.
Of course, in 1937, a large portion
of the radio signals were not sending Morse code.
Instead, they were
broadcasting music and news. (1900's music)
How did we change from wireless Morse code to music?
I'll explain the physics for the first radio broadcast
next time on the secret history of electricity.
♪Electricity, electricity, electricity, electricity♪
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Okay. Have a nice day.
(Jazz music)