Lesson 4: The Origin of Wireless
150 Years of American Telecommunications: The Online Course
Join Section A for FreeTHIS IS PART OF A 36-LESSON ONLINE COURSE ON 150 YEARS OF AMERICAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Broadcast radio arrived in the 1920s, and the technology behind it was already twenty years old. Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor working in Britain, reported hearing three pulses of Morse code sent from Cornwall at St. John's, Newfoundland, on December 12, 1901. Wireless in the two decades that followed carried coded messages between named stations, mostly ship to shore, and no household had reason to own a receiver. The Titanic sank in April 1912, Congress required a federal license to transmit four months later, and the Navy took every American station when the country entered the war in 1917. The Radio Corporation of America was assembled in 1919 to send telegrams across oceans, and the licensing assumption written for shipwrecks now governs every wireless device in use.
Where this lesson sits. This lesson bridges Section A, on the nineteenth-century wired networks, and Section B, on broadcasting. The telegraph and telephone lessons end with a country tied together by cable, where every message travelled over a wire that some company had paid to lay and therefore owned. Broadcast radio opens with a country listening to the air, where the path the signal travels is a natural resource that nobody laid, nobody paid for and nobody could, therefore, own. The two decades between those two sections are when the American government worked out what to do about medium nobody could own, and it worked that out at sea and in war, before a single entertainment broadcast aired. Every assumption the broadcast lessons rest on, that the airwaves are public, that transmitting requires a federal license, and that a license can carry conditions, was in place by 1912.
