Today I sat in a meeting and listened to a fellow named Craig Mathias delve into what the wireless and mobile enterprise landscape looks like today. Craig is a wireless analyst that writes for NetworkWorld and is a principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless advisory firm.
He had some very interesting things to say, but one fact really stuck out and caused me to remember a story I had once read.
About a year ago my book club read Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. It’s a non-fictional tale of two unrelated men brought together by the unlikely pairing of innovation and murder. Typically I avoid non-fiction books when reading for pleasure, but I was surprised at how good this story was.
Guglielmo Marconi was the grandfather and inventor of wireless communication. Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was a cold hearted murderer who killed his wife and neatly disposed of her bones. The hunt across the sea for Crippen and justice ran from Europe to Canada, and received incredible media attention, due mostly in part to the Marconi wireless transmissions sent back and forth between the law enforcing vessels and the mainland. As the chase for the criminal ensued, the entire world was kept abreast of the story’s development. It was one of the first exercises in truly ‘breaking news’ and the globe was collectively gripped with enthusiasm and suspense.
Capturing lightening and sending electrical currents across the Atlantic through expanses of cable was a tangible reality; scientists could both physically and psychologically grasp a wire and its conductive properties. Wirelessly transmitting messages, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. The idea of harnessing a lightening bolt must have sounded utterly ridiculous. But after years of constructing ludicrously tall towers, spending tons of money, failed patent applications, experimenting with boats on the water, sheer luck and trial and error, Marconi the perseverant Italian finally achieved the impossible in September 1895.
Throughout Craig’s brief tutorial, he mentioned that we are all use the same big wireless in the sky. It dawned on me that this was the very same wireless that Marconi toyed with over 100 years ago and caused the world to unite and watch a murder chase develop in real time.
We’ve come a long way since then. To think that Marconi’s faint morse code messages traveled across a very narrow-band signal, which today has been broadened and can transmit speech and even music at an incredibly quick pace.
So much has changed in 100 years – yet despite technological advances -it is still the same big wireless up there. Which I find oddly comforting.
