Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 4

theory, by its fascinating hold on the imagination, has stifled creative effort in the wireless art and retarded it for twenty-five years.”

By the time Tesla wrote his article, wireless telegraphy had been a business for nearly 20 years — and had grown into a very big one at that. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company of America (American Marconi) had outfitted 582 wireless stations on ships and possessed 45 coastal stations for ship-to-shore and international communication.⁹ The Navy took these over at the beginning of the war. At the cessation of the war, British Marconi was eager to buy exclusive rights to the Alexanderson alternators from General Electric; these were powerful and efficient successors to the spark gap and arc transmitters used earlier in wireless telegraphy. Initially, they planned to spend over $3M on 24 alternators and employ them both in their own corporation and in American Marconi.¹⁰ If, as Tesla alleges, the big business of wireless telegraphy did not employ Hertzian waves, how did it operate? He specifically denies that the “disturbances” (a name he uses in lieu of Hertz’s waves) emanating from an oscillator “were ether vibrations akin to that of light.”

It is interesting to examine the language of his paper. He speaks of “some kind of space waves” and “transversal vibrations in the ether,” and except to disparage them, he does not refer to Hertz’s (or Hertzian) waves. By 1919, his words and thinking were archaic.

The terminology in the discourse of radio and wireless telegraphy engineering had evolved since Hertz’s work and the growth of international wireless telegraphy.

We now employ the Google Book’s Ngram Viewer, a piece of free Internet software that quantifies how frequently a word turns up in a large number of books during a specified time period. The output of this software is a graph showing the number of mentions in books versus time (in years) for a word or phrase supplied. The frequency of use of the term Hertzian waves over more than a century is shown in Fig. 1. We see the term gaining currency beginning with Hertz’s famous experiments and reaching a peak at about the time of Tesla’s paper. It is not hard to understand that it subsequently lost popularity. A search of the term electromagnetic waves, which ultimately replaced Hertzian waves, is shown in Fig. 2.

As it became clear to the engineering community that the waves generated by Hertz were merely a part of the electromagnetic spectrum — one which was to become increasingly exploited by broadcast AM radio, television, and FM broadcasting — the locution Hertzian waves would have seemed anachronistic. It is evident that at the time of Tesla’s writing, the term “Hertzian waves” had already been eclipsed by “electromagnetic waves.” Incidentally, an Ngram of the term “radio waves” displays a curve much like that for electromagnetic waves. Both gained favor at the same time.