La mostra su Marconi e i primi anni della sua radio non è ancora aperta e cominciano le ovvie polemiche sull'attribuzione dell'invenzione. Ecco una lettera pubblicata dal Times di oggi:
Letters to the Editor
The Times
24 April 2006
Sir, It is indeed fitting that the collection of equipment and artefacts of Guglielmo Marconi is soon to be on permanent display in Oxford.
However, to call Marconi the inventor of radio (report, April 18) is at odds with the facts. Popular myth, coupled with Marconi's huge entrepreneurial flair, have perpetuated this idea, but there are many others more worthy of that title. Of course, there is no doubting that Marconi certainly turned what was just a laboratory curiosity into one of the great industrial success stories of the last century when he showed that it was possible to send wireless signals across the Atlantic in 1901. That feat alone must earn him the highest accolades - but not as the inventor of radio.
Radio, like its equally illustrious successor radar, was not invented by one man. For its theoretical justification in 1864, two decades before its existence was proved experimentally, we have to credit the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The evidence that radio waves existed and behaved precisely as Maxwell's mathematics had indicated that they should came from the German, Heinrich Hertz, in 1887, while it was Oliver Lodge, a Liverpool University professor, who transmitted the first message by radio in 1894 - a feat he performed, incidentally, during a lecture he gave in Oxford. The first transmission of the human voice by radio must be credited to the Canadian, Reginald Fessenden, in 1906.
Incidentally, it was Lodge who developed what we now call tuning (he called it syntony), a significant development that allowed numerous radio signals to co-exist and not to interfere with one another. Lodge patented that discovery in 1897 and Marconi only acquired the patent rights from the Lodge-Muirhead syndicate in 1911. This fact formed the basis of a ruling in the United States Supreme Court as late as 1943 that the only valid patent held by the Marconi Company in the field of tuning was that acquired from Oliver Lodge in 1911.
Marconi undoubtedly had the foresight and the connections to lay the foundations of what became a telecommunications revolution. Those others whose contributions were equally as important must never be forgotten.
Dr Brian Austin
West Kirby, Wirral, England
Ringrazio Mike Terry del British DX Club per aver riportato tempestivamente questa lettera che ricorda il ruolo di un semisconosciuto (in Italia) Oliver Lodge. L'immagine che vedete in alto a destra è quella pubblicata nell'articolo di Wikipedia dedicato allo scienziato britannico. Dalla stessa fonte, intendo dire il BDXC, vi invito a collegarvi al link della trasmissione di stamattina di BBC Radio 4, con una breve intervista alla mostra marconiana di Oxford. Al momento l'audio della breve intervista è conservato nella pagina sulla programmazione di oggi da Radio 4, da domani bisognerà cercarla negli archivi.
Tags: radioascolto, radiofonia, radio, dxing.
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