At 14:15 7/27/02, Lee Penzias wrote:
But government - in any country - did not "invent" the internet. That is
certainly just not true.
NOT TRUE. It was created by DARPA and was called ARPANET to link together
the U.S. Government and research activities at universities and in private
industry (thus URL's ending in "gov", "edu" and "com" plus some additional
ones ending in "org").
... Or
[snip]
radios
Hmmmmm . . . better read more history.
Radio has its roots in: James Faraday (laws of induction), James Clerk
Maxwell (electro-magnetic radiation theory) and Heinrich Herz (experimental
verification of Maxwell's radiation theories). But, before them and
Marconi was Dr. Mahlon Loomis, a Wash. D.C. dentist, who successfully
transmitted a signal from one mountain top to another 18 miles distant in
1865. All Marconi did was create a practical application of the
principles, and he was a profoundly excellent marketeer. Mahlon is
credited with giving the name "aerial" to what we now call an antenna, and
he used "aerials" 25 years before anyone else did.
One name really pops out at me with the development of "radio" as we know
it today. He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during WWI. His name
was Major Edwin H. Armstrong. Not that he didn't stand on the shoulders of
other giants. What Major Edwin H. Armstrong did was create the
regenerative receiver, superregenerative receiver, heterodyne receiver,
superheterodyne receiver and the complete frequency modulation system
(receiver and transmitter). He created the heterodyne and superheterodyne
receivers for the U.S. Army Signal Corps during WWI in an effort to
intercept enemy radio communications from greater distances. The
superheterodyne concepts Armstrong invented are used in very nearly every
radio and television receiver manufactured today! (If it's the less than
~1% that's not a superheterodyne, it's a simple superregenerative, and
credit still goes to Armstrong.)
The more immediate giants on whose shoulders he stood were J.A. Fleming
(Fleming Valve; diode vacuum tube) and Lee deForest (triode vacuum
tube). His creations had more to do with the demise of "spark gap" and the
rise of "continuous wave" (c.w.) than any other person.
-- John
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