We stand on the shoulders of giants etc etc. But it seems odd to me that they wouldn’t think about using this for communication at least.
It’s not always immediately obvious to what end you can use a new innovation. For instance, the Romans discovered and built a steam engine. But nobody connected the dots that it could be used to power a train.
To me, it showcases the main reason why we need to collaborate. Only together, we can exponentially increase the potential of everything we build.
Imagine industrial revolution Roman Empire, thank fuck they didn’t connect the dots.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio
By August 1895, Marconi was field testing his system but even with improvements he was only able to transmit signals up to one-half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves.
I suppose beyond the engineering know how required they were looking at possible transmission ranges and thinking it simply wasn’t practical, square law and all that.
This.
There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it’s really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.
For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn’t be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn’t fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there’s hardly a point).
So when looking at the technology in an early state, it’s really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.
Faraday, after demonstrating how moving a magnet through a coiled wire induced a current in the wire was asked by a visiting statesman what was the use of this.
Faraday responded, “In twenty years, you will be taxing it”
Similarly, at a demonstration of hot air balloons in France, Benjamin Franklin was asked “Of what use is this?”
Franklin replied, “Of what use is a newborn baby?”
Sounds like Faraday understood the… potential.
Funnily enough, Faraday seemingly also understood that the Electric Field only possesses a potential in the absence of changing magnetic fields. Because only in the absence of changing magnetic fields, the rotation of the Electric Field is zero, and only then it has a potential.
That’s a really cool Franklin quote. Visionary.
Everything I’ve ever heard about Franklin makes him a boss. This is a new one.
Here’s a little known fact that is not true, which will bring some nuance to the previous anecdote, Benjamin Franklin ate babies.
Another one that is true but sounds like an onion.
He enjoyed the company of GILFS
Benjamin Franklin fucks
Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress (1745)
Its a good read and many points are still valid today.
Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc’d may be attended with much Inconvenience.
I didn’t need to know Benjamin Franklin fucks old ladies because they can’t have babies, but I appreciate the honor of carrying this information.
also the idea of a genius putting a bucket on the head of a grandma he fucks and telling her to act like she’s 21 is HILARIOUS to me
And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.
That’s my favourite part to quote.
When the lights are out. Pussy is pussy. And old pussy is often better. 😉
It’s dangerously close to “In the dark a hole is a hole.”
British children! Maybe a few Prussians too.
The British were John Paul Jones, but Franklin taught him.
Was he the guy that started that rental car company?
/s
His customers lamented that driving was so boring and they wished there was some magical way for the cars to play music.
Oh well. Nothing to be done there.
Just straight lazy… Shame.
Hertz donut
This post tickles a fond memory of mine. I was talking to a right-wing libertarian, and he said there should be no research done ever if it couldn’t prove beforehand its practical applications. I laughed out loud because I knew how ignorant and ridiculous that statement was. He clearly had never picked up a book on the history of science, on the history of these things:
- quantum mechanics. It would be a shame if the poor libertarian didn’t have semiconductors in his phone, or if he didn’t have access to lasers for his LASIK surgery (which he actually did have), both of which are technologies built by basic research that didn’t have practical applications in mind.
- electromagnetism. It would be a shame if the poor libertarian was having his LASIK surgery and the power went out without there being a generator, a technology built by basic research that didn’t have practical applications in mind.
- X-rays. It would be a shame if the poor libertarian didn’t have x-rays to check the inside of his body in case something went wrong, a technology built by basic research that didn’t have practical applications in mind.
- superconductivity. It would be a shame if the poor libertarian didn’t have superconductors for an MRI to check the inside of his body in case something went wrong, a technology built by basic research that didn’t have practical applications in mind.
- radio waves. It would be a shame if the poor libertarian didn’t have radio waves for his phone and computer’s wifi and bluetooth to run his digital business, technologies built by basic research that didn’t have practical applications in mind.
Bullshit. Lasers have been intended to gain interplanetary superiority since the dawn of time. We just didnt know how to make them or that they could also be used to read music from a circle
When talking with libertarians you should keep in mind they have completely different axiomatic values. It is often the case that they understand a certain policy would be on net bad for everyone, they simply don’t care. They are rarely utilitarian about those issues.
I get along much better with libertarians who justify libertarianism with values extrinsic to just “muh freedom” – they are usually much more willing to yield ground in places where I can convince them that a libertarian policy would be net negative, and they have also moved me to be more open minded about some things I thought I would never agree with.
Those are much rarev in my opinion.
I feel like I hear about this guy once every second
which is about the frequency that the heart (german Herz) is beating with.
Whatever you do, love Hertz
He probably would have figured it out had he had time to evolve into Megahertz.
He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior, and much too young, wasn’t he in his late-30s or early-40s?
In fact, I believe that had Hertz remained alive and won his prize, the Nobel Committee would not have felt obliged to give it to Marconi a few years later.
Marconi was a back-stabbing asshole who became one of the wealthiest men in the world by abusing the gentlemanly trust of others, and coasting on someone else’s technology - particularly the way crystals oscillate, and some of them serve nicely as a sort of “translation point” between electromagnetic waves and the physical apparatus that transmits and/or receives the signal.
Then ascended to become pure EM spectrum as his final Gigahertz form.
With great power comes great corruption and tyranny. So begins the dark era of Terahertz
Only can Petahertz rise from the ashes of darkness and re-engineer the Universe before the incoming Heat Death
"Hello, is that DarkHorse comics?
Boy, do I have an epic 5-phase graphic novel for you!"
Darkahortz
This thread hurts.
The laughing? Yep!
If you think about it, almost all computer-technology is radio. Wifi, bluetooth, GPS, radar, and cellular are literally radio. Meanwhile everything else runs on transistor tech developed and refined… for radios.
Our modern economy couldn’t exist if people like Hertz and Maxwell didn’t get to toy with their useless hobbies. But we can’t rely on the curiosity of the leisure class anymore. Basic research is expensive, necessary, and a public good. I’m afraid that the Trump regime has already spoiled the secret sauce that makes America the technology leader of the world.
Two inventions:
- Internet
- Computers
are independent of each other, but go together nicely.
You could have an internet (sort of) without computers. Consider Teletypers, FM Radio broadcasts, or Telephone.
Even more than that, just proving Maxwell was right was a key stepping stone to all of modern physics. Maxwell, not Einstein, was the first to show that the speed of light is invariant, and Einstein’s Relativity was a framework for explaining how tf physics works if that’s actually true. Prior to Einstein, physists all just kind of assumed there was some flaw in Maxwell’s theorems to lead to this crazy speed invariance, but as the evidence just kept piling up in favor of Maxwell, they started having to wrestle with the uncomfortable thought that this could actually be true. In this sense, Hertz can also be thought of as an important step to Einstein and beyond, and almost all of our modern technology.
It’s getting pretty drafty up here. Giants on shoulders of giants all the way down. I can’t even see the bottom anymore.
Transistors were mostly developed for telephone systems (the ones with wires) as a replacement for tubes. And the modern tech used for radios is very different from that used for computers.
Ithink you could be more charitable in your reply. Transistors were developed to replace tubes in telephone systems… Okay but the tubes had been developed to where they were because of their usefulness in radio.
And while computers don’t inherently rely on radio, it’s radio communication that’s taken computers from one in every office to one in everyone’s pocket. Right? The main thrust of the previous commenter is true.
I LOVE SIGNAL PROCESSING
ME TOO!
I feel like the signal processing community is really passionate about their work. It comes out in their books. I know I can talk for hours and hours and hours about signal processing. And my DSP professor was like that too. That was such a fun class.
i would like to hear about it :)
I had that during my second year of master’s. I barely understood it and the rest of the class couldn’t understand it at all. I wrote my exam and forgot 99% of it a week later.
Half of the field is viable thanks to a single algorithm: FFT
FFT was a DARPA project. It alone probably makes all their funding worth it.
I mean, it would be some 25 years until the radio was invented. And Hertz’ machine required a 30kV spark on a 2.5m meter long antenna with 2 solid 30cm zinc spheres, and his transmission range was something like “barely down the hall”.
Not the most practical method.
I’m sure someone thinks it’s perfect for their use case, semi relevant xkcd:
At least physics will never get patched. The spark device with zinc spheres will always do that thing.
FCC: And get you arrested
Fun fact: The german word for using a radio is “funken”; literally “to spark”. A radioman is, or was, a “Funker”. When you are talking over the radio, you are doing it “Über Funk”.
ooh i always guessed the word “Funk” comes from function, i.e. the radio is a useful tool that has a function to whoever is using it.
Pretty much the first type of commercially viable radio transmitter was the spark-gap transmitter (“Knallfunkensender” in German). It worked by charging up some capacitors to up to 100kV and then letting them spark. This spark sent a massive banging noise on the whole radio spectrum, which could then be turned into an audible noise using a very simple receiver. That was then used to send morse codes (or similar encodings).
They went into service around 1900, and by 1920 it was illegal to use these because they would disrupt any and all other radio transmissions in the area with a massive loud bang.
Those practical methods would never have existed if not for Hertz’ experiments. Those were 25 years of other scientists, having seen that this new concept exists, refining his contraption into what eventually would become the machine that we know as a radio.
So like Bluetooth?
But somehow more reliable.
Yes, except you need to buy each bit in a big glass jar.
Edit: only half joking, they used big Leiden Jars, which were basically giant glass batteries. There was no such thing as people with power at home, unless you were crazy rich
There were electrochemical cells (invented in 1800) that provided a constant current for some time.
Idk the details. Look up Galvanic cell, Volta cell.
Sure, but those are still “big glass jars full of electricity”
I feel like this is a very “scientisty” thing - the theoretical aspect is so fascinating and being able to fit all the pieces into a model that is mathematically accurate is the reward.
Considering the practical application of the model and how it can benefit society (or in other words, be marketed for profit) takes a different set of skills.
I absolutely detest the equivocation of “benefits society” and “marked for profit”.
Plenty of things have been discovered to have practical applications which can benefit society yet are shelved or have its implementation frustrated because it cannot be exploited for profit or threatens the profits of a preexisting application which it would replace.
There’s a good NPR podcast in the same vein as this: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/21/533840751/episode-779-shrimp-fight-club
It’s about congressman talking about government waste and targeting the sciences. It’s like, you don’t get the “cool” applications without the “weird” research. I’m doing a horrible job describing it, but I thought it was a good listen.
Planet Money has some really good episodes. Unfortunately, a lot of filler as well.
this type of science-discovery to usefulness-realization latency is the norm, pretty sure Curie didn’t envision nuclear power plants
I suppose it’s like asking a biologist what type of dishes would they do with a plant species they just discovered
Is that not what drives biologists, trying to eat new discoveries before someone else
Darwin ate every damned thing he came across.
That’s gross.
Recycled protein.
How?
Just like how anthropological archeologists compete to eat the oldest thing they find
most likely other humans eat it first, they just didn’t write it down and publish it
She didn’t envision a lot of things
This may be an even better example than the positron. Originally a theoretical antimatter form of the common electron, with no practical application.
Turned out to be a vital tool for medical imaging. If you or someone you know has ever had a PET scan, now you know what the P stands for.
I always thought it stood for “pepperoni.” So, you’re saying “PET” stands for “Positrons, Endives, and Tomatoes”?
No it stands for animals you keep at home.
PET scan, its powered by hamsters.
I guess they decided CAT scan wasn’t inclusive enough.
Cats were originally used for their curiosity, but training hamsters and eventually parakeets led to much smaller machines.
And this is why science shouldn’t be beheld to the whims of politicians and capitalists
ApertureScience! We do what we must because we can!
