Marconi’s story has a lesson for the AI age: Tech sharing drives innovation

livemint.com:

Towards the end of 1901, Guglielmo Marconi set out to conduct an ambitious experiment. At the time, it was believed that since electromagnetic waves (like light) travelled in straight lines, radio waves could not be used to transmit messages across large distances—much like how even the most powerful telescope could not catch visual signals from places located beyond the earth’s horizon.

Marconi set out to prove them wrong. He installed a massive (70-metre high) cone antenna on the Poldhu Cove in Cornwall, UK, from which he planned to transmit a message in morse code to receiving equipment he had set up at Signal Hill in Newfoundland on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

At 12:30pm on 12 December 1901, Marconi heard three faint but distinct clicks over his headphones at the receiving station at Signal Hill (corresponding to the letter ‘S’ in morse code). With that he proved that it was, in fact, possible to communicate wirelessly across the Atlantic Ocean, and in doing so, launched the modern telecommunication revolution.

Even though he is widely credited as the inventor of radio communication, Marconi’s Grand Transatlantic experiment would not have been possible without the contributions of Jagdish Chandra Bose, one of India’s finest scientists. In 1899, Bose invented the ‘iron-mercury-iron coherer,’ the first device that was capable of continuously detecting radio frequency signals.

While coherer technology had been around for a while, Bose’s coherer was the first that was self-restoring, allowing for the continuous detection of radio signals without the need to manually reset the device after each signal is detected. This continuous signal processing capability remains, to this day, a critical feature of modern