OCR Text |
Show Moderns Owe Debt to Ancients Who j Paved Way for Oar Inventive Genius Absorbed In the recent development develop-ment of radio, the public Is prone to overlook lte indebtedness to tlie hundreds hun-dreds of Inventors who, working over V C.A.OailEN a period ol centuries, cen-turies, have made radio possible, declares Clarence A. O'Brien, Washington Wash-ington patent attorney at-torney and authority au-thority on the history ol Inventions. Inven-tions. ArecelTlng set, for example, contains thousands of feet of copper wire, thfirfl binp 11.- 000 feet of fine wire In an Atwater Kent speaker alone. The Invention of drawing wire, Mr. O'Brien says, Is ascribed to Rodolph of Nuremberg, In about 1410, while mills for this purpose pur-pose were set up in Nuremberg in 1563. Prior to that time wire was hammered ham-mered out. This product would have been wholly Inadequate for the niceties nice-ties of radio, where the wire la frequently finer than human hair. As a reminder of the radio audience's audi-ence's obligation to the Inventors of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell in 1875. Edison, Gray, Blake and others Mr. O'Brien calls attention to the fact that the National Broadcasting Broadcast-ing Company, In Its national networks relies on from 35.000 to 50,000 miles o; telephone wire The microphone, invented by Emll Berliner, is as essen- tlal to the radio as to the telephone. ; Marconi's development of radio, ' Mr. O'Brien points out. has tended to eclipse the work of James Clerk Max- : well, the great British physicist, who In 1866 first promulgated the theory fundamental to radio, demonstrated j by the German scientist Heimlch Hertz In 1887. long before Marconi made his contribution. The U. S. Patent Office lists In the past few years the names of numerous in- ventors without whose work radio j would not nave reached its present perfection. j "The history of the progress ol electrical development so essential to ! radio." says Mr. O'Brien, "includes hundreds of names Michael Faraday. James Watt, James P. Joule. Sir William Wil-liam Watson, Charles A. Coulomb, Andre M. Ampere, G. S. Ohm. Carl F. Gauss, and many others in addition to the long list of American contributors contribu-tors to electrical research. "As far back as 321 B. C, the ancient philosopher Theophrastus mentions the power of amber to attract straws and dry leaves. Pliny. In 70 A. D., writes concerning the same phenomenon, and it Is from 'electron', the Greek name of 'amber,' that we call the phenomenon 'electricity " Mr. O'Brien also calls attention to the fact that the modern radio tube is a vacuum. Evangelists Torrieelli. Italian physicist, claimed to have discovered dis-covered a vacuum In his experiments on the barometer a theory that was further demonstrated by the Frenchman, French-man, Blaise Pascal, in 1646. usir.s glass tubes of mercury fifty leet Ions |