🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10143@vice.ICO.TEK.COM> hall@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Hal Lillywhite) writes:
>In article <1992Aug10.202413.10772@pollux.lu.se> magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson) writes:
>
>>"If you had been a contemporary of Maxwell's, would you have seen any
>>practical relevance of his equations to engineering (or to medicine)?
>>Woudln't you rather have said 'this is theoretical playing around with
>>maths; let's do something *useful* instead'?" 
>
>Assuming you understood Maxwell's work *and* were interested in
>practical applications, I suspect you would have invented the radio
>in short order.  After all, that's essentially what Hertz did when
>he experimentally verified Maxwell's work.  His apparatus was
>basically a radio.  Hertz, however, was interested in "pure"
>science, not engineering.  The world had to wait for Marconi to give
>it the "wireless telegraph."

     I am not sure that this is true.  Maxwell's work had undergone 
     alot of development in the intervening years.  He rarely talked about
     waves except in the context of light, and there is absolutely
     no indication in his work of how to produce or detect long
     wavelength radiowaves of the type Hertz dealt with.  Also in about
     1879 (the year after Maxwell's death) Lodge started trying to 
     figure out where electromagnetic waves
     might pop up.  His and Fitzgerald's next 10 years of development
     of these ideas basically led to Hertz 'discovering' them.

                                dale bass
-- 
C. R. Bass                                           crb7q@virginia.edu
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia                            (804) 924-7926