Q: Tell me a little bit about how you got into
wireless and also just how did you learn the code.
PP:
I think it started when I read in the boy scout books, I started to read, I was
a boy scout and a lot of my friends were and I read it in there. I had the home
telegraph and now you can talk without wires. I saw
where Marconi did this and he went further and further without wires and it felt to
you like you were part of it. And I remember Marconi a little later on, came to
the Chicago World's Fair and there was a story about him visiting the amateur
radio station at the fair. And one of the fellows, when they saw the eminent
Marconi come in and they said, "Oh, Mr. Marconi we are only radio amateurs," and I
always remember these words from Marconi he says, "And I am only a radio
amateur too." And that startled the young fellows in the room because he
learned the code, he learned it from, I believe, it was a telegrapher in where
he lived in Italy. And telegraphy was invented about 50 years before Marconi's
time by Samuel F. D. Morse and so on. Had he not known
about the Morse Code, I believe that maybe Marconi name associated with radio
would probably not have happened.
Marconi was very much interested in trying to get some means of communication
for ships. And he says if I can get that Morse thing to work better and make
it more sensitive and make it more powerful with or without what Hertz had
invented, Hertz invented the putting the card from one wire to another. He
said I'll be able to communicate and he did. And he was not disturbed because
he went a little further and a little further and a little further. The
experiments first, of course, started in the backyard a few acres away from his house and
then a year or so later he was already communicating across the English Channel
and people started take notice and first thing you know we're hearing about
him going across the United States, not the United States but from America over
to Europe. He was able to now communicate with ships and people said, well the
earth is round, it won't go around the earth. Oh and he proved that he could
later on go from America to England then to America. And that theory was all
they had to rewrite the science books about that one because it didn't follow a
straight line. It did go up and bounce back and come back to earth again. These
things are fundamentals that cause the greater expansion and use of radio
and people relied on it.
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