Preface to the Second Edition
Research workers and engineers toil unceasingly on the development of wireless telegraphy. Where this development can lead, we know not. However, with the results already achieved, telegraphy over wires has been extended by this invention in the most fortunate way. Independent of fixed conductor routes and independent of space, we can produce connections between far-distant places, over far-reaching waters and deserts. This is the magnificent practical invention which has flowered upon one of the most brilliant scientific discoveries of our time!
These words accompanied the presentation of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Guglielmo Marconi in December 1909.
Marconi’s success was the practical and commercial realization of wireless telegraphy – the art of sending messages without wires – thus exploiting for the first time the amazing capability for wireless communication built into our universe. While others worked on wireless telephony – the transmission of audio signals for voice communication – Marconi interestingly saw no need for this. He believed that the transmission of short text messages was entirely sufficient for keeping in touch.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the explosion of wireless voice communication in the intervening years has proved Marconi wrong; but the resurgence of wireless data transmission at the close of the twentieth century, beginning with the mobile text messaging phenomenon, or ‘SMS’, reveals in part the depth ...
