Say it ain't so, Guglielmo!
(With apologies to "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, the Chicago White Sox, and Major League Baseball.)
I report and link. You decide. - J :)
From a Globe and Mail [Canada] article, Scientists aim to debunk Marconi:
Scientists aim to debunk Marconi [/] Canadian Press
St. John’s - It was a technological milestone that laid the groundwork for today's cellphones and BlackBerries. [/] On Dec. 12, 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi made history by claiming he had used a kite and some copper wire atop Signal Hill in St. John's to receive a wireless signal from across the Atlantic Ocean.
More than a century later, a group of radio scientists in Newfoundland are conducting a series of tests that could debunk Mr. Marconi's claim to fame. [/] "We're essentially setting out to prove it wrong," said Joe Craig, a physicist and director of the Marconi Radio Club. [/] Mr. Craig and several other researchers are using a combination of modern computer technology and vintage equipment to determine whether the inventor actually heard three faint, electromagnetic clicks - the letter S in Morse code — that were transmitted from 3,470 kilometres away in Poldhu, England.
"We can never recreate his exact equipment, because to do that would be to interfere with all sorts of essential radio communication that's going on all the time," said Len Zedel, a physics professor at Memorial University who is also working on the tests. [/] A station has been set up in the St. John's area, using a 150-metre antenna attached to a receiver the size of a pocketbook. A transmitter station in Poldhu began sending its call letters, GB3SSS, in Morse code Wednesday at 15-minute intervals. [/] The experiment, which ends in February, is being conducted at a time when sunspot activity is as low as it was when Marconi carried out his tests.
[...] Mr. Marconi garnered global acclaim for the incredible feat. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909 and became known as the "father of radio." [/] "I had been absolutely right in my calculation," Marconi wrote at the time. "The electric waves . . . had traversed the Atlantic, serenely ignoring the curvature of the Earth, which so many doubters considered would be a fatal obstacle."
But in recent years, a growing number of skeptics have come forward to question Marconi's claim, saying it's more likely that he heard static or distant lightning. [/] "As far as I'm concerned, he never heard a #### thing on Signal Hill, but he imagined he did," said John Belrose, a semi-retired radio scientist at the federal Communications Research Centre in Ottawa. [/] "I'm not a Marconi guy. Sorry about that."
While the experiment is an attempt to settle the controversy, Mr. Zedel said questions surrounding the accomplishment will never go away. [/] "Because he was the only who heard it, there's a little bit of mystique involved there," Mr. Zedel said, adding that he believes the Mr. Marconi's place in history will remain intact, regardless of what the experiment uncovers. [...] [My ellipses and emphasis]
