Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Cornered! Celebrating a century of wireless telephony!
Cornered! Celebrating a century of wireless telephony! | Celebrating a century of wireless telephony! |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Friday, 16 May 2008 | |
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It has also been claimed that Stubblefield invented the radio before either Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi, but, according to his entry in Wikipedia, his devices seem to have worked by audio frequency induction (the electrical signal is an exact replica of the audio signal) rather than by radio frequency radiation for radio transmission telecommunications. (where the audio signal is superimposed, modulated, onto a higher frequency radio signal). Stubblefield's name might not be as prominent in the annals of radio as Marconi or Tesla, but he does have his own website , dedicated to promote a biography It says that he was born in Murray Kentucky in 1860, orphaned at age 14 and married at age 21 and "started life as a farmer but soon turns his attention to tinkering with inventions." Apparently he enjoyed modest success selling and installing telephone systems in Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Mississippi and elsewhere: until a group of his customers in Murray bought a Bell Telephone franchise and competition puts Nathan out of business. After that, Nathan's life went downhill, according to his biographer. He "experiences a series of devastating events. His financial backers sue him; his children sell the family farm; and his wife abandons him. He becomes an eccentric hermit, moving about from shack to shack and subsisting on donations from charitable relatives and neighbours. He dies in 1928 of starvation." Then, a few months a publicity campaign was launched to establish a shrine and to recognize Murray, Kentucky as the 'Birthplace of Radio'. The giant US radio manufacturer, RCA, considered contributing to the effort, but rejected the idea on the advice of a corporate historian who said that Stubblefield's inventions had nothing to do with radio. The modern era of cellular communications dates back to the 1973 when Motorola engineer Marty Cooper famously made the first call from a hand-held cellular phone. Less well known is the fact that the pioneering work by Cooper and his colleagues lead to cellular being adopted for mobile telephony instead of an inferior technology which the dominant telco, AT&T, was determined to foist upon the market. CONTINUED |
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