Inventor Of Radio Quotes

Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

Kirkus (starred review): A lucid, expertly researched biography of the brilliant Nikola Tesla. (Readers) will absolutely enjoy (Munson’s) sympathetic, insightful portrait. Booklist: Celebratory, comprehensive profile. ….A well-written, insightful addition to the legacy of this still-underappreciated visionary genius. Library Journal: Entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and futurists will find this biography inspiring. Gretchen Bakke (author of "The Grid"): Munson has provided us with an intimate tapestry of Tesla's life, personality, and inventions. Filled with quotes, and clearly researched with great care, Munson brings Tesla to life, not as a superhero but as a man—both ordinary and extraordinary. What surprised me, and proved to be one of the great pleasures of the book was to realize how much Tesla’s story is an immigrant story. Anne Pramaggiore (CEO of Commonwealth Edison): Tesla is an exactingly-researched history and wonderfully crafted tale of one of the most important and fascinating visionaries of the technological age. This book’s teachings have never been more relevant than in today’s world of digital transformation.

I discovered what a truly astounding man this Armstrong was. You can argue all you want about whether Marconi or Tesla is the “real” inventor of radio, but the inventor who gave us the radio technology that Astounding and Analog readers grew up with was Edwin Howard Armstrong.

Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1874. His family

I don’t think the Library could’ve come to life if it hadn’t found an accepting climate, a moral willingness to latch on to . . . We’ll skip over the widespread tendency of many citizens to confide their worries in newspaper agony aunts and talk radio hosts . . . It’s certain that from those media, things passed into a slimy subsoil, a drainage basin where anyone could tip anything they wanted, all the gunk they kept inside themselves. Have you ever seen something spawned from a garbage dump?” “To be honest, no, I haven’t,” I replied. “But isn’t it possible that the Library did reach one of its goals? To bring people closer together?” “Oh, it reached goals! Quite a lot of goals!” he said with a dash of sarcasm. “But certainly not the goals you’re talking about! Even those infamous contributions, those dialogues across the ether that were later purged by the Library, helped break that cycle of loneliness in which our citizens were confined. Or rather they helped to furnish the illusion of a relationship with the outside world: a dismal cop-out nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation. The inventors of the Library knew their trade well!

Tesla was, at first, unconcerned with his competitor’s progress and remarked, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents." Later, however, Tesla would sue Marconi for stealing his ideas. In 1943, the Supreme Court would overturn Marconi’s patent in recognition that Tesla was the original inventor of radio transmission.

The invention of the Audion sounds like a classic story of ingenuity and persistence: a maverick inventor holed up in his bedroom lab notices a striking pattern and tinkers with it for years as a slow hunch, until he hits upon a contraption that changes the world. But telling the story that way misses one crucial fact: that at almost every step of the way, de Forest was flat-out wrong about what he was inventing. The Audion was not so much an invention as it was the steady, persistent accumulation of error. The strange communication between the spark gap transmitter and the Wersbach gas burner flame turned out to have nothing to do with the electromagnetic spectrum. (The flame was responding to ordinary sound waves emitted by the spark gap transmitter.) But because de Forest had begun with this erroneous notion that the gas flame was detecting the radio signals, all his iterations of the Audion involved some low-pressure gas inside the device, which severely limited their reliability. It took another decade for researchers at General Electric and other firms to realize that the triode performed far more effectively in a true vacuum. (Hence the term “vacuum tube.”) Even de Forest himself willingly admitted that he didn’t understand the device he had invented. “I didn’t know why it worked,” he remarked. “It just did.