IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB000650659

Marconi's Error: The First Transatlantic Wireless Telegraphy in 1901 (2005)

Social Research
Volume: 72
Pages: 107--124
Publication date: 2005
Language: English

Publication Date: 2005
Edition Details: Special Issue: Errors: Consequences of Big Mistakes in the Natural and Social Sciences

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

This article focuses on the error committed by Guglielmo Marconi pertaining to his discovery of the transmission of wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901. On the twelfth and thirteenth of December 1901, in St. John's, Newfoundland, Marconi received an "S . . . S . . . S ..." on the wireless. On the fourteenth, he called a press conference to announce a groundbreaking event in the history of communication; the transmission of wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean. In spite of initial skepticism on the part of some famous British scientists and engineers, Marconi's announcement was welcomed and quickly accepted as true. Marconi became the hero who had spanned the Atlantic without cables. Although he could not have imagined it, the world is now saturated with radio waves, from television and global positioning system to cell phones, their messages traveling vast distances and binding us all in an invisible information network. However, it was not long before Marconi's idea of surface transmission was shown to be in error, for the electron was soon identified with real particles, and it was also shown that the earth could not guide waves as Marconi believed. It is now known that the electromagnetic waves that Marconi received in 1901 did not get there by traveling along the surface of the earth but by reflecting off the upper ionosphere.

...More

Included in

Article Holton, Gerald (2005) Guest Editor's Introduction. Social Research. unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB000650659

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Toscano, Aaron Antonio; (2006)
Positioning Guglielmo Marconi's Wireless: A Rhetorical Analysis of an Early Twentieth-Century Technology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561451/)

Article Guagnini, Anna; (2002)
Patent Agents, Legal Advisers and Guglielmo Marconi's Breakthrough in Wireless Telegraphy (/p/isis/citation/CBB000501250/)

Article Paoloni, Giovanni; (2016)
Guglielmo Marconi e l’Istituto di Fisica della Regia Università di Roma. (/p/isis/citation/CBB827989495/)

Article Satia, Priya; (2010)
War, Wireless, and Empire: Marconi and the British Warfare State, 1896--1903 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001230631/)

Article Liu, Bo-jie; Li, Yan-ping; (2008)
Marconi's Journey to China in 1933 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000952332/)

Article Guagnini, Anna; (2009)
John Fletcher Moulton and Guglielmo Marconi: Bridging Science, Law and Industry (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022693/)

Chapter Bruton, Elizabeth; (2010)
Collaboration then competition: Marconi and the British post office, 1896--1906 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001180911/)

Article Mario Calamia; Monica Gherardelli; (2018)
Exact Time: the First Scientific Application of Radiocommunications (/p/isis/citation/CBB003143486/)

Article Gerard Gilmore FRS; Gudrun Tausch-Pebody; (2020)
The 1919 Eclipse Results That Verified General Relativity and Their Later Detractors: A Story Re-Told (/p/isis/citation/CBB772698936/)

Article Landini, Gregory; (2013)
Typos of Principia Mathematica (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320871/)

Article Pilpel, Avital; (2007)
Statistics Is Not Enough: Revisiting Ronald A. Fisher's Critique (1936) of Mendel's Experimental Results (1866) (/p/isis/citation/CBB000830396/)

Chapter Nickelsen, Kärin; Graßhoff, Gerd; (2009)
Concepts from the Bench: Hans Krebs, Kurt Henseleit and the Urea Cycle (/p/isis/citation/CBB001020628/)

Article MacDougall, Robert; (2006)
The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030918/)

Book Torsten Kathke; (2017)
Wires That Bind: Nation, Region, and Technology in the Southwestern United States, 1854–1920 (/p/isis/citation/CBB727083446/)

Article Salustiano Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Neto; (2020)
Inteligência de sinais no Estado Novo: ciência e tecnologia aplicadas à intercepção telefônica (/p/isis/citation/CBB103115309/)

Article Armando López Rodríguez; (2016)
De la "Central Rotondo" a "Rotondo y Compañía": los avatares en Marruecos de unos pioneros españoles de la telefonía (/p/isis/citation/CBB099747140/)

Book Kerim Yasar; (2018)
Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945 (/p/isis/citation/CBB990144338/)

Article Noakes, Richard; (2014)
Industrial Research at the Eastern Telegraph Company, 1872--1929 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001321056/)

Article Gansky, Paul; (2014)
Privacy's Waste Products: Touch, Contagion and Public Telephone Design (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201114/)

Article Yu Hao; Yuanzhe Li; John V. C. Nye; (2022)
Wiring China: The impact of telegraph construction on grain market integration in late imperial China, 1870–1911 (/p/isis/citation/CBB523366773/)