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I would like to apologize to Canadian and US readers for this article. It is factually correct, but the target audience is British, so smaller words and an easier to understand, colloquial style was employed.

Hello to all my friends who are members of the Radio Society of Great Britain.

How Radio Got Invented – The Story of Goo
Copyright 2015 – Steve Redgwell



Marconi: He don't look like much, but he was a smart Euro.
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Old fashioned broadcastin’ was accomplished usin’ signals sent ‘over the air’. Radio waves was created by expensive, electrical equipment, and transmitted with huge antennas and towers. At the receivin' end, them signals was captured by much smaller antennas, which channeled everything into an electrical box. Once inside, the signal traveled through some wires and do-dads, on its way to the speaker. The noise that came out – mostly music and people talkin' - could then be heard.

Sorry for gettin’ technical, but you gotta understand that for the rest of my story to make sense.

The best place to start is at the beginnin', so you gotta go back to the dim times. That was before video games, cell phones and television. Yeah, there was such a time, even though people under the age of 50 won’t believe you.

And you also gotta leave North America and travel to Europe. That’s a strange, far away place where a person can find vampires, BMWs and people who don’t speak English. But please, don’t be angry with them for not understandin’ what you’re sayin’. Most of Europe is poor and a lot of the kids don’t learn English in school. It’s a shame. If more English was taught over there, people from England, Ireland and Scotland would be a lot easier to understand.

But I’m gettin’ off track. The people that live there – called Euros – speak a bunch of foreign languages. Hearin’ them talk can be confusin’. It’s kind of like listenin’ to people from Georgia or Washington, D.C. – yeah, you can hear them talkin’, but who can understand what they say?

Don’t think I’m bein’ rude! They are nice folks, and mean well. And if you listen hard enough, you can hear English mixed in there too! You’ll hear things like ‘guitar’, ‘chow’, ‘gesundheit’, ‘piano’, and ‘pizza’. I guess they wanna be like us so bad that they borrowed some of our words.

One of these Euros was a fellow by the name of Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi. See what I mean about them speakin’ funny? That’s a mouthful! To make things easier, they shortened his name down to ‘Gu’, which was pronounced ‘Goo’, because, by the time a person spit out ‘Guglielmo Giovanni Maria’, they forgot what they was gonna say!

Now, ‘Goo’ was a tinkerer. As a young man, he loved playin’ around with electricals like AC/DC, batteries and telegraphs. Telegraphs, or more correctly, electrical telegraphs, was just copper wires on wooden poles, strung up over long distances, that carried electrical signals. There was a pile of guys all over the planet tryin’ to perfect the method of sendin' them signals. The best known, in North America at least, was a system called ‘the telegraph’, and it used Morse Code.

You heard of Morse Code, right? It was invented in the United States, in the 1830s, by a fellow named Samuel Morse, and his assistant Alfred Vail. About the same time as the Euros was workin’ on long range communication there, Morse and Vail was hard at work developin’ the hardware and method to communicate over long distances on this side of the Atlantic. That method – the dits and the dahs – was called Morse Code.

And just so you know, before ham radio operators used Morse Code to communicate through the air, it was sent through wires strung along railway lines. To be technically correct, when you’re dittin’ and dahin’ through a wire, its called electrical telegraphy.

Anyhow, back to Goo. Sendin' 'dit-dah-dits' through a wire was okay, but he figured on sendin' them through the air. The trouble was, he was livin’ in a place called Italy, and there was no opportunities for him to develop his ideas there. Goo needed money and a support network to create his ‘through the air’ broadcastin’, so he went to work in England for a while. While he was there, Goo got the financial and technical assistance he needed. In fact, he actually stayed in England for several years, despite the bad food, strange soundin' people, and the lousy weather.

Then, in 1901, Goo figured it was time to go big! He set up a transmittin' radio at Poldhu, which is on the Lizard Peninsula, in Cornwall, England. (Yeah, it's true! I told you England was an odd place!) If you're geographically challenged, look at a map of the southwest corner of England. He decided to put the receivin' radio in North America, so he hailed a boat and sailed across the Atlantic to Newfoundland. Goo wound up at a place called Signal Hill, which was about 2200 miles away from Poldhu. (Or 3500 km if you are afflicted with the metrication). In them days, Newfoundland was a British dominion*, and not part of Canada.

A lot of British scientists thought tryin’ to send a radio signal through the air was a stupid idea, but they was wrong of course. Goo was a driven man, and on December 12th, 1901, he got his call from the other side of the Atlantic. By golly, it worked! The scientists had egg on their faces, and Goo was in gravy.

The whole world would benefit from Goo’s work. Although there was many other people involved in the improvement of radio, his ideas of large antennas, groundin’ electrical equipment, and creatin’ portable systems put him in the forefront of early radio broadcastin’.

One last thing: If you think about it, we can blame Goo (Marconi) for all them country music stations, opera channels and talk radio. If he had just minded his own damn business, we would be blissfully unaware of yodelin’, bassoons and yappy politicians.

And now you know!
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* A British dominion is a semi-independent state, where the people are allowed to make up some of their own rules, and sort of govern themselves. They still had to follow British law and send lots of tax money back to England though.

In 1949, Newfoundland traded one set of problems for another when they became part of Canada.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Guglielmo_Marconi.jpg

NIKOLA TESLA invented radio.

But Marconi would be most people's answer.

No, he didn't. Tesla was a made up character, invented by a Macy's employee in the late 1890s to sell televisions. Well, originally, he was invented to sell mattresses.

"Sleep like a baby on a Tesla Coil Spring Mattress!"

The ad guys messed up.