《无线通信简史》：从电磁波到5G的科技飞跃

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"《无线通信简史从电磁波到5G》是由Petri Launiainen撰写，蒋楠翻译的一本深入探讨无线通信发展历程的书籍，由人民邮电出版社出版。书中详尽地阐述了无线通信自诞生以来的演变过程，涵盖了从最初的电磁波发现到5G技术的革新。作者通过讲述历史事件、关键人物和公司的故事，揭示了科技发展对社会的巨大影响。书中的章节包括对马海峡事件、无线电技术的起步、战争中的通信作用、黄金时代的发展、电视广播的兴起、卫星通信的出现、近场通信和光学通信的进展，以及现代蜂窝技术的爆发等。此外，书中还讨论了家庭无线网络的普及和技术标准背后的竞争。" 这本书的内容围绕着无线通信的起源和发展展开，首先介绍了早期的火花式发射器，这是无线通信的起点，接着描述了无线电和电视广播的出现，这些技术如何塑造了20世纪的信息传播方式。书中还特别提到了无线电导航和雷达在军事及民用领域的应用，它们在二战期间发挥了重要作用。随着技术的进步，人造卫星的发射开辟了全球通信的新纪元，使得远距离通信变得可能。进入20世纪下半叶，无线通信经历了快速变革，从最初的模拟系统转向数字通信，特别是在移动通信领域，从第一代（1G）到第四代（4G），再到如今的5G技术，这些进步极大地改变了人们的生活方式。5G不仅提供了更快的数据传输速度，还引入了更低的延迟和更大的连接密度，为物联网（IoT）、自动驾驶汽车和智慧城市等前沿领域奠定了基础。书中还探讨了公司之间的竞争，例如标准之争，如3GPP与WiMAX之间的较量，这在决定技术发展方向上起着至关重要的作用。此外，家庭无线网络的兴起，如Wi-Fi的普及，使得人们能够在家中无线上网，极大地便利了日常生活和工作。《无线通信简史从电磁波到5G》是一本全面回顾无线通信历史并展望未来趋势的著作，对于理解无线通信技术的发展脉络，以及它如何塑造现代社会具有深远的教育意义。无论你是IT行业的专业人士还是对通信技术感兴趣的读者，这本书都能提供丰富的知识和启发。

low-frequency infrasound waves created by earthquakes to the high-energy bursts of

gamma rays from collapsing stars in faraway galaxies.

And Heinrich Hertz rightfully deserves the credit.

It took another, totally opposite personality to eventually win the gauntlet of the

moniker, “ The Father of Radio”: this title was earned by an Italian electrical

engineer called Guglielmo Marconi, who spend large parts of his business career in

Great Britain. He started working in this area in 1892, when he was just eighteen

years old: his neighbor, Augu sto Righi, who was a physicist at the University of

Bologna, introduced Marconi to the research of Hertz. Marconi was fascinated by

the idea of wireless communications and started his own research, trying to improve

on Hertz’s earlier experiments.

His breakthrough came when he realized that adding an antenna to his appa-

ratus, both on the sending and the receiving side, was the key to expanding the

range of communications. Marconi also noticed that the effect of grounding the

system, or connecting the electric ground of the equipment to conductive soil,

appeared to help in extending the range.

When you read the biography of Guglielmo Marconi, it depicts an able, pro-

ductive, and, ﬁrst and foremost, a highly opportunistic person. During his long

career, Marconi did not worry about borrowing other inventors’ ideas, as long as

they improved the devices he was working on. Sometimes he ended up buying the

associated patents later in the process, oftentimes not: when Marconi was awarded

the shared Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 with Karl Braun, he admitted that he had

“borrowed” many of the features from the patents that Braun had ﬁled.

Despite these sometimes questionable practices, Marconi was an excellent

integrator of new ideas, and appeared to approach problems from a technical rather

than a scientiﬁc perspective. His improvements came about mainly through

relentless iteration, testing one slightly modi ﬁed prototype after another, not nec-

essarily understanding the underlying physics that were causing the improved

functionality: he just kept on trying until he found something that worked. Creating

a viable business based on his inventions was clearly his main object ive—he strove

to produce the best possible equipment and then moved on to aggressively market

them, trying to extract the highest possible price.

Thanks to his numerous, often incremental patents, he seized the ﬁnancial

opportunities with gusto and proceeded with full-scale commercialization of this

novel technology. In 1897 he set up a company, Wireless Telegraph & Signal Co

Ltd, the initial funding of whi ch was greatly helped by the fact that Marconi came

from a very rich family: his mother, Annie Jameson, was the granddaughter of the

founder of the Jameson Irish Whiskey Company.

Marconi originally tried to get the Italian government interested in his research,

but did not manage to raise any interest, so he explained his wireless telegraph idea

to the British Postal Ofﬁce through the contacts that his mother had provided, and

ﬁnally got the positive feedback he needed to go forward with his business interests.

As often happens, success abroad also brings success at home: after convincing

the Briti sh that his invention was useful, the Italian Navy bought radios from

82“It’s of No Use Whatsoever”

Marconi, and even made him responsible for the Italian military’s radio service

during the First World War.

At this time, his reputation was already well established, both through his

business activities, and due to the fact that he had been awarded the shared Nobel

Prize in Physics in 1909.

Marconi kept a relentless, sharp focus on radio technology throughout his entire

life, changing the company name to Marco ni’s Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd in

1901, and the name “Marco ni” became the synonym for radio in the early decades

of the 20th century.

When Marconi died at the age of sixt y-three, all ofﬁcial radio transmitters on the

British Isles, together with numerous other transmitters abroad, honored him by

being quiet for two minutes on the day of his burial.

A third very notable early radio pioneer was Nikola Tesla:

Tesla appeared to enjoy maintaining an image of a “Man of Wonders”, often

announcing his inventions with a big splash. He had a touch of the “Touring

Magician” in him, and understood the value of putting together a good show with

some hyperbole thrown in, just to advance his cause. He was clearly extremely

intelligent, which explains his ability to bounce so effortlessly from subje ct to

subject.

This inclination to constantly change his focus put him in the same inventor

category as Heinrich Hertz, with an unfortunate side effect: even though he

advanced many, very different techno logies through his numerous inventions, he

never really worked on reaping substantial ﬁnancial beneﬁts from his fundamentally

genial solutions. Some of his patents did generate considerabl e sums of money, but

he spent it all on the prototype of yet another interesting and grandiose concept.

Other patents he relinquished in an almost nonchalant way, letting his business

partners beneﬁt from them, sometimes very generously indeed.

Tesla’s various research areas of interest spanned from power generation to radio

to wireless transmission of energy. He earned his reputation in the late 19th century

by ﬁrst working for another prominent inventor of the era, Thomas Edison, greatly

improving Edison’s Direct Current (DC) generator technology. According to some

historical notes, Tesla was conned out of getting a promised ﬁnancial reward for his

achievements by no other than Thomas Edison himself, and he resigned in anger,

starting a life-long feud against Edison. At the same time, another successful

industrialist, George Westinghouse, had heard of experiments using Alternating

Current (AC) in Europe, and knowing that Tesla was familiar with the subject,

Westinghouse hired him to focus on improving this novel technology.

Tesla’s designs proved AC techno logy to be superior to Edison’s established DC

technology, suddenly causing a direct ﬁnancial threat to Tesla’s former employer,

who had been building a major business around the generation and distribution of

Direct Current. As a result, Edison put his “Genius Inventor ” reputation on the line,

ﬁghting against indisputable technical facts by all means possible. This epoch of

bitter and very public ﬁghting over the two competing technologies was aptly

named The War on Currents. Edison even went as far as publicly demonstrating

and ﬁlming the electrocution of several animals, including an elephant, with the use

2 “It’s of No Use Whatsoever” 9

of Alternating Current, trying to prove the “inherent dangers of this inferior

technology”.

But the poor elephant and numerous other animals died in vain: Tesla ’sAC

power technology, thanks to the ease of transferring it over long distances and the

ability to adapt the voltage to local requirements through transformers, has survived

to this day as the primary means of distributing electric power to users.

Despite this unprecedented victory, but very much in line with his character as a

scientist and not a businessman, Tes la gave up his rights to the royalties gained

from the use of AC generators utilizing his patents. He was driven to this by George

Westinghouse, who was facing temporary ﬁnancial difﬁculties, and managed to talk

Tesla out of his existing, very lucrative agreement. Just a couple of years later, the

patents relinquished by Tesla helped Westinghouse to regain his ﬁnancial footing

and he became very wealthy indeed.

Many of Tesla’s later works were never properly documented, and a lot of his

early research notes and prototypes were lost in a ﬁre in 1895. His surviving notes

are full of extraordinary claims and promises, but lack enough detail on how to

achieve them. Thanks to this large amount of ambiguity, Tesla’s potential inven-

tions seem to be an endless source of various conspiracy theories even today.

The fact that Tesla’s complex research needed a lot of funding makes it almost

incomprehensible to understand his relaxed approach to money issues. At one time

in his life, he even had to resort to working as a ditch digger in New York to support

himself. When he managed to link up with new investors or gained some money

from his consultancy work, he quickly spent his funds on his new experiments, and

without short-term tangible results, the investors stopped funding him further.

Many potential lines of research were cut off due to the lack of funds to complete

them. Tesla’s constant change of focus caused him to work in parallel with multiple

ideas, which resulted in various prototypes with poor documentation.

All in all, Tesla was almost a total opposite to Marconi, who continuously

improved and ﬁne-tuned his products, with clear ﬁnancial and technical focus in

mind, borrowing from other inventors and trying to create monopolies for his

businesses.

These two geniuses came head to head in one of the more controversial patent

disputes of these early days, when in 1904, the U.S. Patent Ofﬁce decided to revoke

Nikola Tesla ’s patents for radio tuning circuitry and ratify the patent s from Marconi

instead. Tesla fought for years to reverse this decision, and whilst the U.S. Patent

Ofﬁce re-established some of Tesla’s patent claims in 1943 right after his death, he

never achieved his lif elong goal of being declared the man who had made the ﬁrst

ever radio transmission. Marconi was able to hang on to this claim with a solidly

written patent from 1896 that includes the words:

I believe that I am the ﬁrst to discover and use any practical means for effective telegraphic

transmission and intelligible reception of signals produced by artiﬁcially-formed Hertz

oscillations.

Tesla had also been working on radio just before the turn of the century, and he

had even demonstrated a radio-controlled model boat, the teleautomaton,at

10 2 “It’s of No Use Whatsoever”

Madison Square Garden in 1898. The demonstration worked so well that Tesla had

to open the model to show that there really was no trained monkey hiding inside.

Even though remote control like this could obviously have several military appli-

cations, Tesla failed to raise interest of the U.S. Army.

Another example of unfortunate timing appears to be when Tesla managed to

take an X-ray image a couple of weeks before the existence of X-rays was

announced by Wilhelm Rö ntgen. Therefore, although Tesla was pioneering the use

of the extreme end of the electromagnetic spectrum in 1895, we refer to pictures

created by X-rays as “Röntgen images”.

In cases like this, along with many others that he consequently worked on, Tesla

was clearly ahead of his time—apart from his groundbreaking work in the gener-

ation and transmission of Alternating Current, for which he had relinquished all his

rights to George Westinghouse, the world was not ready for his inventions.

When Tesla did not manage to get traction with his radio controlled teleau-

tomaton, he soon shif ted his interest to investigating wireless transmission of power

instead of wireless communications, providing some stunning demonstration s in his

laboratories at Colorado Springs and Long Island. These demonstrations were not

only huge but also very expensive, seriously draining even the ample funds that

Tesla had been able to raise from various investors at the time. Tesla kept on

pitching his ideas to his acquaintances in the energy business, but getting external

funding for his ambition of providing “limitless, wireless free energy” did not bear

much fruit—who would fund research for something that would potentially end up

killing their existing, hugely proﬁtable business model?

This shift in Tesla’s interests left the advancement of wireless communications

to Marconi and his competitors. Tesla willfully abandoned a market that was about

to experience tremendous growth, making many of the other participants in this

business very wealthy in the process.

In Marconi’s case, his situation was strengthened by the dual role as both the

patent owner and the owner of a company that produced functional devices based

on those particular patents. With his name on the equipment placards and in

headlines regarding new distance records, there was no doubt who was behind these

new, almost magical devices. Marconi kept on demonstrating the continuous

improvements that he managed to incorporate into his equipment. His worldwide

reputation grew in sync with every new achievement and business deal.

In comparison, Tesla had managed to create ﬂashy demonstrations and lots of

hype in the media, but eventually it did not generate enough cash ﬂow to cover his

overly grandiose ideas.

Tesla was broke.

In 1934, George Westinghouse, having now enriched himself with the original

inventions of Tesla, recognized his former employee’s dire situation and started

paying Tesla a small monthly “consultancy fee” (about 2,200 dollars in current

terms), covering also the cost of his room at Hotel New Yorker.

To make things even worse, Tesla was hit by a taxicab only three years later, and

his health never recovered. He died alone in his hotel room in January 1943 at the

age of eighty-six.

2 “It’s of No Use Whatsoever” 11

All in all, Tesla’s various accomplishments throughout his lifetime are very

impressive, and in many of his designs, he was far ahead of his time. He also made

this eerily accurate prediction in 1926:

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain,

which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.

We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance.

Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as

perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of

miles;

and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple

compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

If you make a link between “the whole earth converted into a huge brain” and

the Internet of today, Tesla not only foresaw the wireless communications revo-

lution, but also the computer revolution that has led us now to be able to check any

detail, anywhere, using our smartphones.

But Tesla could not predict the explosion of conspiracy theory websites that

have sprouted all around this modern version of Tesla’s “huge brain”, caused by

Tesla’s almost mythical reputation: his versatility and the fact that he made

numerous boisterous claims without solid proof has left him with an aura of

mystery, the perceived strength of which is too often directly relative to the

thickness of the reader’s tin foil hat. The number of books and videos that push the

more esoteric and poorly documented research of Tesla is astounding, most of them

naturally claiming that “the evil government” is keeping us from the limitless

beneﬁts that Tesla’s “forcibly hidden inventions” would bring to the mankind.

What probably greatly helped to initiate these rumors was the fact that the

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seize d Tesla’s belongings two da ys after his

death, treating him as if he was a foreign citizen. There was no real reason for this,

as Tesla, although originally an immigrant from Serbia, had become a naturalized

American citizen already in 1891.

The resulting report of a study of Tesla’s ﬁ nal belongings found nothing of

interest, stating that:

[Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a specu-

lative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the pro-

duction and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable

principles or methods for realizing such results.

But naturally, a “nothing to see here”-style report from the FBI for a conspiracy

theorist is like a red ﬂag for a bull…

Tesla ﬁnally got his name in the “Technology Hall of Fame” in 1956, when the

International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) honored his achievements by

choosing tesla (T) as the unit for magnetic ﬂux intensity in the International System

of Units (SI). Hence Nikola Tesla, along with Henrich Hertz, will be remembered

for all eternity.

12 2 “It’s of No Use Whatsoever”

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