Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

Theoreticians devised equations to explain phenomena; Marconi cut wire, coiled it, snaked it, built apparatus, and flushed it with power to see what would happen, a seemingly mindless process but one governed by the certainty that he was correct.

The group’s most prominent and eventually most infamous member was the painter Walter Sickert,

Wireless is all very well but I’d rather send a message by a boy on a pony.”

for Holloway Gaol with its turrets, battlements, and jutting chimneys was the kind of place that stole the warmth from a sunny day.

She was always trying to save the pence, but scattering the pounds.”

“malignant Marconiphobia”

scientific hooliganism

“Sir,” Maskelyne wrote, “The matter referred to in your columns, yesterday, by Professor Fleming has a public importance far greater than he appears to imagine. It is a case in which members of the public are driven to take extreme measures in order to obtain information to which they are justly entitled.”

“If this be described as ‘scientific hooliganism’ and the like, what epithets must we apply to the action of those who, having publicly made certain specific claims, resent being taken at their word?

Old term for Hacking!

Supposing Faraday had been alive, whom would he have accused of disgracing the Royal Institution—those who were endeavouring to ascertain the truth or those who were using it for trade purposes?”

He accused Fleming of giving two lectures that afternoon. “The first was by Professor Fleming the scientist, and was everything that a scientific lecture ought to be; the second was by Professor Fleming, the expert adviser to the Marconi Company.”

Kaiser Wilhelm II and his international conference on wireless. The conference had taken place the previous August in Berlin, and the nations in attendance had agreed in principle that every station or ship should be able to communicate with every other, regardless of whose company manufactured the equipment involved.

“A man cannot live on glory alone.”

He established a station to listen for signals from Mars and instructed its operators, “Listen for a regularly repeated signal.”