Marconi Museum |
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visits: Sunday at 10 am
working days on reservation
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 info visits
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The transistor was the first electronic amplifying device, capable of substituting De Forest's Vacuum tube with equivalent or superior performance and definitely smaller in size. It was developed in the Bell Labs, the famous laboratories of the American telephone company, in 1947-48. In 1954-55, while the transistor was being tested in the field of computer science, still limited to few pioneers, the American company Texas Instruments was experimenting, and then marketed, a new use for the product which proved to be much more for the “masses”: a transistor radio charged by batteries, decisively smaller and lighter (less than 1/2 a kilo) than the portable radios available at the time. Also in 1954, the physicist Edwin Armstrong, inventor of frequency modulation radio, committed suicide because he was convinced that his invention would not have been applicable commercially due to the opposition of the big companies in the sector. In the years that followed, frequency modulation did affirm itself thanks as well to the diffusion of portable radios.
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| In 1945 Arthur Clarke, one of the most renowned science fiction writers (author also of 2001: A Space Odyssey), was still a young English physicist: he published an article, relatively unnoticed, in which he hypothesized the possibility of launching a “geostationary” satellite, that is to say one that revolves at the same velocity of the earth and thus in a stable position with respect to the planet, and to make of this satellite an instrument for telecommunications, obviously via radio, at long-distance.
In 1962 the first satellite for intercontinental telecommunications was launched: the Telstar, which guaranteed both television broadcasts between Europe and America as well as a continental telephone channel in alternative to the costly and unsafe underwater cables. By 1966 a system of three geostationary satellites was in place, capable of connecting all continents and allowing for a simultaneous “worldwide vision”. Beginning in the early Seventies, some countries with vaster territories, first and foremost USA and USSR, introduced the use of the satellite to simultaneously transmit the same television signal in areas that were very distant from one to the other. By mid decade, broadcasts via satellite began and they were received by homes with special antennas (parabolic satellite dishes); today the satellite is, with the traditional broadcasting systems via air and via cable, the third channel for diffusing television signals. Beginning in the Eighties, the use of satellites for telecommunications noticeably increased, thanks also to the growing request on the one hand of instruments for managing global telephone traffic, on the other of instruments for real time monitoring of vehicles in motion.
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Wireless telegraphy (then telephony) was initially conceived to connect two distant points, possibly without interference of a third party. But wireless communication essentially became the radio, allowing millions of users all over the world to simultaneously receive the same message even if in separate places: this, in synthesis, is what we call broadcasting. Broadcasting involves various prominent innovations in the evolution of modern media:
a. The radio is not, in absolute, the first form of broadcasting, because already prior to Marconi's invention significant experiments of circular telephony had already been carried out. It was, however, the means that marked the success of this way of communicating, reaching millions of people, and paving the way to an ulterior form of broadcasting: the television. b. Broadcasting allows messages to arrive directly inside homes, without the mediation of a distribution apparatus that is generally necessary for more traditional media, like the press or the cinema. In this way, the radio, and successively the television, fostered, with respect to the traditional one, a more variegated audience, which included women, adolescents, and even preschoolers: it became a powerful tool of socialization and relatively difficult to control, an issue which often produced recurring alarm in society, which for many decades legitimated the public monopoly (in Europe) on the two mediums. c. Broadcasting does not propose a script, and not even a simple succession or a mosaic of texts, as a book does, as well as a film or newspaper; it offers a program, that is systematically accompanied with messages that calibrate the rhythm of its existence. A broadcast, unlike a book or a film, does not have a beginning nor an ending, it is there and continues irrespective of the fact that we choose to “tune in” or not.
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© 2013 - Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi - Villa Griffone - via Celestini 1 - 40037 Pontecchio Marconi (BO) - C.F 80063250379