On Tue, 8 Nov 2005 14:11:07 -0600, (Richard
Harrison) wrote:

All radio communications were in code until Reginald Fessenden invented
wireless telephony in 1906. In the early wireless days a lidtener had to
understand code to make sense of wireless.

Hi Richard,

Oddly enough, just before a Nanotechnology seminar, I was recently
browsing:

"The Radio Amateur's Handbook
A Complete, Authentic and Informative
Work on Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony"

by A. Frederick Collins
Inventor of the Wireless Telephone, 1899

To William Marconi
Inventor of the Wireless Telegraph

"The wireless telephone was invented by the author
of this book at Narberth, Penn., in 1899, and his first
experiments the human voice was transmitted to a
distance of three blocks."

Awarded Gold Medal for same, Alaskan Yukon Pacific Exposition [now the
campus of the University of Washington from which I have just returned
from minutes ago], 1909.

....

"After Marconi had shown the world how to telegraph without
connecting wires it would seem , on first thought, to be an easy
matter to telephone without wires, but not so, for the electric
spark sets up damped and periodic oscillations and these cannot be
used for transmitting speech. Instead, the oscillations must be
of constant amplitude and continuous. That a direct current arc
light transforms a part of its energy into electric oscillations
was shown by Firth and Rogers, or England, in 1893.

"The author was the first to connect an arc lamp with an
aerial and a ground, and then to use a microphone transmitter
to modulate the sustained oscillations so set up. The receiving
apparatus consisted of a variable contact, known as a pill box
detector, which Sir Oliver Lodge had devised, and to this was
connected an Ericsson telephone receiver, then the most sensitive
made. A later improvement for setting up sustained oscillations
was the author's rotating oscillation arc."

This volume is available at Project Gutenberg as an e-book. Collins
goes on to describe the "boys" who monitored shipping transmissions
and often joined in:

"boys began to get great fun out of listening in to what the ship
and shore stations were sending and, further, they began to do a
little sending on their own account. These youngsters, who caused
the professional operators many a pang, were the first wireless
amateurs, and among them experts were developed who are the
foremost in the practice of the art today."

It should be noted that "hackers" of a decade ago now fill much the
same description, and have been similarly elevated.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC