Radio and shoulders of giants
I've heard great radio show about history of radio in polish regional public station. It was a program about history of radio because in 2024 is 100 anniversary of Radio Wrocław. And on this station I've heard this program.
What caught my attention? The story of what happened, that the radio was invented.
Radio - like many other things - is an invention. But without few different inventions probably it never wouldn't be created.
What was this mysterious inventions?
- telegraph (Samuel Morse),
- phone (Graham Bell),
- phonograph (Thomas Edison),
- electromagnetic radiation (James Maxwell),
- proved to the existence of the electromagnetic waves (Heinrich Herz),
- development of the first radio wave detector (Édouard Branly),
- invent of device which detect radio waves (Alexander Popov).
When I heard this story, I just remembered sentence from Umberto Eco's book "On the shoulders of giants":
We are dwarfs, but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they. (hup.harvard.edu)
Conclusion: Every inventor and creator is a giant and we can stand on their shoulders using their knowledge. Thanks to them we can see more and discover new things.
--
But who invented the radio? Guglielmo Marconi or Nikola Tesla?
In 1901 the Serbian-American electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla said he had developed a wireless telegraph in 1893; in 1943 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated four Marconi radio patents, citing Tesla’s prior work.
(history.com)