From diode to triode
From Fleming to De Forest and From diode to triode. John Ambrose Fleming (1849–1945) was born in Lancaster, a town in the north-west of England. In 1885, he became Britain’s first Professor of Electrical Engineering, at the newly created department in…
Thomson: From monocle to mirror
How a renowned physicist speeded up telegraphy? William Thomson was born in Belfast in 1824 and moved to Scotland with his family at the age of nine. His father had been appointed Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow University, and William studied…
Gutta percha
Gutta percha = Wonder material of the mid-19th century. The trees that produce gutta percha can grow up to 30 metres tall. They have glossy, evergreen leaves and white flowers. What tropical tree connects telegraphy and golf? The answer to…
Nikola Tesla: Harnessing the storm
150 years ago this July, a scientist was born in the Balkans at the stroke of midnight during a thunderstorm. He ended his career working on a “death ray.” Who was he? In answer to the question above, it was…
Making a difference
When was the computer invented? Among possible answers to this question, the credit for designing the earliest precursor to modern machines goes to 19th-century British mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage (1791–1871). Born the son of a wealthy banker, Babbage spent his…
Pictures via a pendulum
Sending images through telephone lines to be reconstructed at the receiver’s end as a facsimile of the original — or fax — is nowadays being overtaken by other forms of electronic communication. But remotely printed paper messages still have many…
Precursors of programming
Inputting information into machines in binary form (on or off) is not new. In the late 14th century, in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, the first mechanisms were made for church bells to play simple tunes automatically. Large,…
Typewriter: Remote writing
In the question above we asked when the typewriter was first patented. It happened much earlier than you might think. In 1714, an Englishman, Henry Mill, was granted a patent which said he had «lately invented… an artificial machine or…
Sending out an SOS
How a famous disaster spurred agreement on international rules was born. The year 2006 marks the centenary of the International Radiotelegraph Conference held in Berlin in 1906, where 29 countries signed a convention on wireless communication for ships at sea.…
Telegraphy and television
If things had happened differently, we might now be watching the screens of “electrical telescopes” in our living rooms. That was one of the terms coined a century ago for what, today, we call television sets. But when was the…
