Digital Libraries as Information Source on the Evolution of Telegraph

The century before last saw revolutionary changes in the transmission of information. For the functioning of the optical telegraph, which appeared at the end of the 18th century, cumbersome towers were necessary for the line of sight of the semaphore signals. One hundred years later, telegraph lines were hundreds of thousands of kilometers long; at the turn of the century, the first experiments with the use of a wireless telegraph began. This is reflected in numerous brochures, books, periodicals of that time. A hundred years later, many of these materials became publicly available thanks to the development of the Internet and electronic libraries, which made the appearance of this work possible. Its goal is to trace the evolution of technologies and processes of information transfer in the 19th century using a wide variety of electronic libraries - from the grandiose projects of the Library of Congress and Google Books with their millions of digitized books to modest private collections dedicated to local topics. Used materials from 20+ electronic libraries.

Marconi’s legal battles: Discursive, textual, and material entanglements

The paper offers an account of how the meaning of the concept of “invention” and “inventorship” is not stable and predefined but rather constructed during patent disputes. In particular, I look at how that construction takes place in adversarial settings like the courts of law. I argue that key notions of intellectual property law like invention and inventorship are as constructed as technoscientific claims are in laboratories. Courts should thus be seen as sites of construction through processes framed by specific discursive and evidentiary technologies like bureaucratic paperwork, literary technologies, historiographic accounts of inventorship, and models of artifacts and devices. I draw my examples from the British disputes of the Marconi Company concerning the patenting of wireless telegraph and radio communication technologies in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper tracks Marconi’s circulation of publications, models, historical reconstruction of inventions, and expert witnessing. It unravels the material, discursive, textual, and evidentiary constructions of legality.

Little wireless magazines

Chapter Six examines how Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph in 1895, which eventually enabled the widespread use of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, challenged avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada to develop new modes of print production and distribution that would allow them to communicate faster and farther. Instead of using a single magazine model to consolidate their movements, the Futurists and Dadaists relied on the wild proliferation of magazine titles in many different locations all at once (110 for the Futurists in Italy between 1910 and 1940; 175 for the Dadaists around the world between 1916 and 1926). In doing so, they made the magazine function like a wireless transmitter capable of sending and receiving information quickly, and, in the process, they established expansive communication networks that were not bound by the infrastructure of the postal system.

John Fletcher Moulton and Guglielmo Marconi: bridging science, Law and industry

Several Fellows of the Royal Society had a role in the achievements of Guglielmo Marconi. Among them was John Fletcher Moulton. An outstanding undergraduate mathematician at Cambridge who maintained a lifelong interest in electricity, Moulton went on to become one of the most formidable lawyers practising in the London courts. His collaboration in the preparation of Marconi's first UK patent in 1897 marked the beginning of an important association with Marconi and the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.