Thunderstruck: The Birth of Wireless and Other Industry Births

On the one hand, you have the dandy Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian-born inventor and entrepreneur who took wireless radio from a parlor trick among the English scientific elite to a practical business application, building a company to provide ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication, when nobody imagined that such a feat would be possible, and along the way, becoming known as the Father of Wireless.

On the other hand, you have the story of Dr. Hawley Crippen, a brow-beaten milk-toast of a man who murdered his wife in the most sensational murder of the day. The murder was such a sensation that it inspired no less than Alfred Hitchcock to craft his suspense thriller masterpiece Rear Window years later.

After murdering and dismembering his wife, Dr. Crippen flees England with his mistress aboard an ocean liner to the United States. Unbenownst to the couple, their whereabouts are discovered by the ship captain and thanks to the modern miracle of wireless, their progress across the Atlantic, together with their pursuit by a police detective from Scotland Yard, on a trailing ocean liner, are tracked by the press, creating a global sensation.

That drama is juxtaposed by Larkin with the business drama of the invention of wireless, which demonstrates the famous quotation of Thomas Edison regarding the invention of the lightbulb: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!" The invention of wireless, like that of the lightbulb, was characterized by numerous failures, challenges from competitors, personal tragedies, and most importantly, dogged determination on the part of its inventor, Marconi.

I'll have to tackle Larkin's other bestseller, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America next. It describes the incredible World's Fair in Chicago, which was lit up by thousands of light bulbs. Imagine. People drove for miles across farm lands, just to look at light bulbs and experience electricity! You may detect a pattern here, as Larkin's tale weaves in visits from such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison, along with the sinister Dr. Holmes, a serial killer active in the area at the time. Oh, how we love a good murder mystery to spice up our history lessons!

On that note, I also enjoyed reading about the birth of the electric industry last year Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, by Jill Jonnes. It described, more from a business stand point, the competition to win the World's Fair bid, whose volume purchase of light bulbs and electricity would go a long way in providing competitive advantage to competing electric generation models.

We all take for granted the electricity that runs everything we use to enjoy our "modern" lifestyle, but it was no guaranteed outcome from the perspective of these great men. There's no doubt this story helped me to better understand the fascinating intrigue behind the creation of the modern electric industry, and there are remarkable parallels to what we see during this period of transition in the telecom and wireless industry today. For a better treatment than I can give on the parallels between the development of municpal electric utility industry and the rise of municipal wireless, see this interview with Jim Baller from 2003 captured here on Broadband Reports.

As for a background on a more modern industry, to understand the rise of our digital lifestyle, a good bet is David Kaplan's Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams, which details the rise of the great high tech digital companies that are now household names, but just one or two generations ago did not exist. You might also enjoy Tom Wolfe's turn-of-the-millenium anthology of short articles, Hooking Up, which includes a piece on the origins of Silicon Valley and HP, in a biographical sketch of the father of the silicon chip and Intel, Robert Noyce.

From Publisher's Weekly review on Amazon.com:

Fans of his character sketches will relish "Two Young Men Who Went West," a revelatory profile of Robert Noyce, a key innovator of the microchip who founded Intel in 1968, where the midwestern Congregationalist values he shared with his former mentor, William Shockley (founder of the original Silicon Valley startup, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory), grew into a business philosophy that's now so pervasive it's practically in the ether.

A long time ago, I read Daniel Yergin's The Prize : The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, perhaps the granddaddy of this genre. It's hard to imagine a more fascinating tale than how we went from rendering whale oil to manufacture kerosene for lamps, to soaking up petroleum in rags from surface pools in Pennsylvania as whales began to run in short supply, to adapting water well drilling technology to drill oil wells. Then with the advent of the electric light, which threatened this new industry, along came the automobile and the need for gasoline. On the tale goes, to the creation of Standard Oil, to its division into the "Seven Sisters," to the discovery and exploitation of Middle Eastern oil fields and the creation of Aramco, and all along the way, a biographical sideline of the fascinating individuals who drove the industry and the geopolitical impacts of such a huge industry.

If you seek some historical depth and still harbor doubts on the rationale for the war in Iraq, take a look at this book and the impact of the oil industry on wars throughout our modern history.

To gain perspective on today's events, I have found it helpful and enjoyable to read history books and go deep on a subject. It's amazing how many patterns get repeated and recycled. With every new discovery and invention, there is a challenge to the old guard, and a familiar pattern unfolds, because we are indeed, all human. Sometimes, the eclipse is rapid, sometimes it's a long slow death. But progress based on human ingenuity rolls on.

From my position as a metropolitan broadband consultant in the budding Municipal Wireless industry, all I can say is "Thank goodness for change and innovation, for where would be the need for consultants to chart a path through the fog without such disruptions, eh?"