Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

The lost souls of telecommunications history

We've all heard the phrase "ahead of their time" to describe famous inventors …

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, he'd been hired to help replace the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. Almost immediately, the inventor of the modern Web page noticed a problem: thousands of people were coming and going from the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. 

"The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," he later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads."

In his spare time, Berners-Lee was working on some software that might alleviate this fragmentation and spread more useful information around. It was a little program he named Enquire, and it allowed users to create "nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. 

Berners-Lee was pleased with what he eventually produced, but the PASCAL application ran on CERN's obscure and proprietary operating system, so he didn't take it with him when his contract expired.

"I gave the eight-inch floppy disk to a systems manager, and explained that it was a program for keeping track of information," Berners-Lee recalled, and told CERN staff to deploy the program as they saw fit. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea, but no one used it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and with it, the original Enquire."

Four years later, Berners-Lee returned to CERN. This time his innovation took on a life of its own and gradually morphed into the World Wide Web. But for now, let's stay with the Enquire story. Let's stay with that eight-inch floppy sitting in a circular file in the back corner of somebody's office—a great communications technology idea that got lost in the shuffle.

Why focus on the the dustbin? Because from the dawn of telecommunications history through the present, that's where most innovations actually wind up.

Wholly unnecessary

Take Sir Francis Ronalds. In 1814, it occurred to the British meteorologist that Europe's widely used semaphore telegraph system could be improved by sending signals electronically, rather than visually through sign post towers. So he put together an elaborate gizmo in the garden of his Upper Mall house in London. 

Can you imagine Jack Dorsey inventing Twitter, then offering it to the State Department? That's pretty much the equivalent of what Francis Ronalds did.

I've never been able to find a description that adequately explained Ronalds' contraption, but the device centered around a glass tube encasing a wire linking two synchronized clocks. Each station had a pair of pith balls ready to bounce into each other in response to an electrical signal, then the receiving clock would rotate to the specific character prompted by the electrically charged sending clock.

By 1816, Ronalds had demonstrated the machine to his satisfaction. What did he do next? Something that is completely unthinkable in our time, so far as I can tell. He offered to hand his gadget over to the Crown.

"Why should not our government govern at Portsmouth almost as promptly as at Downing Street?" Ronalds wrote to Viscount Melville, Lord of the Admiralty. "Let us have electric conversazione offices, communicating with each other all over the kingdom, if we can."

Can you imagine Jack Dorsey inventing Twitter, then offering it to the State Department? That's pretty much the equivalent of what Francis Ronalds did. And what did Lord Melville say in response to this patriotic largesse? He turned Ronalds down. 

Since the war with Napoleon had concluded, Melville's secretary wrote back, there was no particular reason to improve on the semaphore system. "Telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary. No other than the one now in use will be adopted."

Not being able to give away your masterpiece; can it get any worse than that? Sure it can. At least Ronalds noticed that he had built a world-changing invention. The same couldn't be said for Reginald Fessenden.

A song for the ships at sea

In 1906, the Canadian engineer was experimenting with high frequency alternators to send wireless Morse code across the Atlantic Ocean. But he also saw that his continuous wave technology could be used to transmit the human voice. And so on Christmas Eve of that year, Fessenden broadcast live to the ships sailing by his Brant Rock, Massachusetts wireless station. He played his violin, some phonograph records, sang a few tunes himself, then made a speech. 

Amazed shipboard wireless operators wrote back to say that they had heard Fessenden's performance. "The Christmas Eve program is still considered the first radio broadcast in American history," notes the communications historian Susan Douglas, "and a truly dramatic demonstration of the alternator's capabilities."

So what did Fessenden do then? About radio broadcasting—nothing. He saw his innovation only as a way to improve wireless communications between individuals. "It is important to note that Fessenden was not proposing that the wireless telephone be used for broadcasting," Douglas adds. He was "still trying to improve point-to-point communication." 

Bottom line: either Fessenden didn't notice that he'd invented modern radio, or he just didn't care.

Just about every innovator in history has been described as "ahead of their time." But the trick is not to be too ahead of your time. You don't want to invent the telegraph in 1816 when hardly anyone had access to electricity and railroads, telegraphy's natural partners. You want to be Charles Wheatstone or Samuel Morse twenty years later, when both Britain and the United States were more technologically developed and it was clearer that semaphore telegraphy couldn't keep pace with the economy.

Similarly, you also don't want to be Reginald Fessenden in 1906, when radio receivers were still not a popular consumer item. You want to be innovator and broadcast radio booster Lee De Forest just a half decade down the road, when amateur wireless had become all the rage and the possibilities for broadcasting were more obvious.

And you definitely don't want to be entrepreneur Cyrus Field, mid-19th century developer of the Trans-Atlantic Cable.

Listing image by Photo by Digger/ATL

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