While some say that it was Nikola Tesla who invented
the radio, others say it was Guglielmo Marconi. But the best version of these
stories is that our own Jagadish Chandra Bose was the one who invented it. JCB
demonstrated radio transmission in 1896 in Calcutta in front of the British
Governor General and had solved the problem of waves not travelling through
walls or water through his ‘Mercury Coherer with a telephone detector’ device.
Marconi’s Coherer, which he used in 1901, was an exact replica of it.
The story goes that Marconi stole JCB’s notebook in which the Mercury Coherer was drawn, and so when asked how he came up with the design, he fumbled like a snotty little boy and lied that he got it from someone else, but this lie was also found out. We’d like to believe that JCB met Marconi outside wherever scientists meet and made him regret that he did anything like that, but we can safely assume that JCB was a bigger man that. He even declined to file a patent for his device, believing in information to be free to allow more research, and only filed a patent by 1904 on the insistence of his friends. By then, slimy Marconi had already received his patent and international recognition, leading us to conclude that he was either very smart or that history is just trying to make us lose hope in humanity.
The story goes that Marconi stole JCB’s notebook in which the Mercury Coherer was drawn, and so when asked how he came up with the design, he fumbled like a snotty little boy and lied that he got it from someone else, but this lie was also found out. We’d like to believe that JCB met Marconi outside wherever scientists meet and made him regret that he did anything like that, but we can safely assume that JCB was a bigger man that. He even declined to file a patent for his device, believing in information to be free to allow more research, and only filed a patent by 1904 on the insistence of his friends. By then, slimy Marconi had already received his patent and international recognition, leading us to conclude that he was either very smart or that history is just trying to make us lose hope in humanity.
