Control Engineering

Peter Welander

A wireless milestone
July 20, 2007

On this day, 70 years ago, Guglielmo Marconi died at the age of 63. The invention of radio communication is usually attributed to this man and he did win the Nobel Prize in physics for his efforts.

The early days of radio development brought out a fascinating assortment of colorful individuals. Lee DeForest, Edwin H. Armstrong, etc., brought some direction to the fledgling industry. (For a good technical history of this period, read Empire of the Air, the Men Who Made Radio by Tom Lewis.) Whatever competition there is now between various vendors and standards committees for industrial wireless applications, it pales by comparison with the truly vicious patent disputes between those strong willed engineers of the first half of the last century. While DeForest is given credit for inventing the triode vacuum tube, Armstrong showed in court that DeForest had no real understanding of how it worked. Armstrong is probably most responsible for the technology we have today, including the application of frequency modulation.

Posted by Peter Welander on July 20, 2007 | Comments (0)