The Tortuous Pathway of Innovation

Federico De Giuli

Preparing a kite for flight at Newfoundland to raise the antennas in 1901
photos © Marconi Archives UK

Wireless is the “in” technology. The latest car models integrate Bluetooth connections; clothes and new wearable accessories communicate without wires; mobile phone, palms and laptops talk to each other in Wi-Fi: the world of objects is connecting over taking the physical boundaries of wires.

The chosen subject of Cluster’s second issue is also a good example of the complexity of the innovation process: paying special attention to the different wireless technologies, one realizes that the basic concepts have been around for over a hundred years. Since Guglielmo Marconi’s first experiments there haven’t actually been any real revolutions, rather a series of technical perfections, commercial intuitions and agreements made on standards that paved the path to success now experienced by radio communications.

The telephone was invented in the eight hundreds and sixties. The first radio transmission effected by Marconi, goes back to 1895, but the change in things happened, when in 1901, Cornwall and the island of Newfoundland were connected.

Marconi’s problem, was how to pass from a sort of broadcasted communication like that of the radio directly to a point to point such as a telephone, the original message being picked up by the receiver alone.

At the beginning of the XXth Century it was difficult to predict the success that the radio and the television would have had. It took decades to pass from a technological discovery to a coherent application capable of taking advantage of its full potential. With a strange symmetry, the same thing occurred years before with the telephone, its first marketable application being a kind of transmission by cable that brought opera to people in their homes.

When we speak of wireless today we refer to technologies that transmit signals by air, in which the radio transmission is associated to the use of digital codes. In analog transmissions it was the voice itself that acted as a code, converted from the microphone in electric signals of different modulations and reconverted in auricular and loudspeaker sounds.

The introduction of more sophisticated electronics made converting the analog signal into digital possible, transforming the voice in a binary code and reconverting these impulses in sounds or images perceivable to our senses. Even communicating through binary codes is far from new: the Morse code didn’t use 0 and 1, but dots and lines, and even the telegraph principal isn’t that
far off from the one used by the computer to carry out operations. This makes of Samuel Morse the ancestor of digital communication.

Wireless technologies open up a world crossed by hundreds of data, potentially always online, with the possibility of accessing information accumulated in digital archives, but also to communicate with other individuals. To a system of relations organised by networks made up of knots and backbones, Wi-Fi replaces the concept of a territorial coverage allowing a distributive access to information. Even objects: computers, peripheral devices and electro domestics will be able to communicate between themselves without unnecessary physical ties, opening up the dreams and anxieties of the magic world.

In the meantime, in a relatively brief period respect our adaptation capacities, the patents, the inventions and the
applications following the Maxwell, Hertz and Marconi discoveries have completely transformed our social environment. The opening articles by Andrea Bosco and Davide Casale in this issue of Cluster, explore the extremity of this transformation, stating the potentials and the risks of the wireless world.

The features that follow investigate, in a more episodical method typical of our magazine, the expectations, fears, visions and metaphors on different scales connected to this new technology. Funnily enough, today the step from the digital networks connected to Wi-Fi and the introduction of the faster connections in mobile phones seems to pose similar problems to those of the past.

In the future new contents and new services will be fundamental in determining the characteristics of the interfaces which will give us access to information that we will be able to exchange among ourselves. At the end of the topic section, with three interviews we will attempt to understand what the near future of telecommunications holds in store for us: a match played by different technologies (the digital terrestrial, the cable television and satellite) that, whatever happens in the end, will profoundly transform the internet, the radio and last but not least the television.