Review: Marconi Father of Radio

This is an old book (published in 1965) written by David Gunston. The target audience must be school aged children. It is not a very detailed biography, rather a good overview of his life. Which, I actually enjoy. I love biographies, but sometimes if I am just casually interested in the subject, a children’s book is what I enjoy reading. You get the main facts without all the gory details.

I did not find the book very well written. There were a few typos in the book too. But, the copy I have is a first edition/first printing, so they may have been cleaned up in later printings.

There is a very good time line in the back of the book. Something that I always like seeing in a biography. It is helpful for getting a general overview of how old the person was when major events happened.

Marconi is the man who pioneered radio. Though he did not discover that there were such things as radio waves, he put them into use. Most of his work was pulling together the work of other men and making the jump from theory to practical application. In fact, there were a few of his discoveries that he put into use before science could even prove why it worked. The book stated that there was one of his hunches that he capitalized on and that it took science 30 years to explain why.

He considered himself more of an experimenter than a scientist. He just kept trying different things to see what would work.

The first trans-Atlantic radio communication was in December of 1901. Just 5 years previous he was conducting his first experiments with what we now know as radio and was limited to 2 miles of communication range. Though he did not perfect it into anything near what it is today, he pioneered and discovered the principles that make RADAR possible.

One of the concluding statements in the book that I found interesting was this. “If every form of radio were to be suddenly taken away from us our bustling modern would would instantly grind to an ignominious halt.” That was written more than 40 years ago. How much more true is it today? Telephones and radio would be affected, but also much of our Internet technology would not be possible. Without the work of Marconi, I am sure another person would have made the same discoveries. But what if they didn’t?

Certainly an important person in history.

As a Ham Radio operator, I was interested in the book from a technical standpoint, not so much as a biography. The book was somewhat humorous to me in this light. Many old terms were used in describing the work of Marconi. The author did have a very long section in his concluding pages about the work of Ham Radio operators in his time. I would not, however, recommend the book if you are wanting to learn about ham radio for the first time. Many of the terms used would serve you no purpose.

(Click on the picture of the book to purchase from Amazon.)

Good-Bye Tom Riley

If you are a follower of Adventures in Odyssey, you will know the name Tom Riley. The voice actor who played him was Walker Edmiston (real name: Ed Walker). Edmiston and Hal Smith were the two main actors in the original season of Odyssey who’s characters are still around. Hal Smith played John Avery Whittaker. Smith died in 1994 and was replaced by an amazing vocal twin, Paul Herlinger.

Walker Edmiston died in February. I had learned of his death shortly after he had passed away. But, today I heard a great tribute to him and his voice talents by the Adventures in Odyssey crew. Let me encourage you to take 20 minutes and listen to it. Especially if you were familiar with the Tom Riley character.

What I found out in my reading on him and his life was that he was blind since boyhood. I did not see from what age, but some wording I saw made me think he was not born blind. I did not know that he was blind when I listened to the audio tribute. Knowing that makes one of the lines he says in the program very humorous.

Since they no longer podcast the Adventures in Odyssey (I am not sure they ever officially did), I have not listened to it in a while. I don’t know how they have handled his death, or if they have gotten to it yet. He had such a unique voice, I am not sure if they will be able to replace him like they did with Hal Smith.

Just some interesting reading about Walker Edmiston:
IMDB Entry
Article citing his death
An interview he did in 1974
Wikipedia entry on Walker Edmiston
Wikipedia entry on Ed Walker

I’m sinking!

I have commented a couple of times recently in other blogs and in the podcast that I released this morning about how that digg has brought me pretty good traffic numbers. This has been due, I think, to the fact that I was on page 2 of the religion category for a while and then dropped back to page 3. Today I fell into page 4! Yikes!

The way digg’s system works is that anyone digging the podcast (or story) has to be an active member of digg for their “digg” to count. To be active means that you dugg any story within the last 2 weeks. I think if you comment on the site you also keep your active status.

Though I have had 26 different diggs through the 3 month life span of the service, only 13 of those are currently active.

Use this as a reminder that any show or story that you have dugg in the past will lose their numbers if you don’t use the site. But as soon as you digg any story or podcast, then all your diggs return and those who you dugg will get their diggs back. Don’t just do it for me, do it for someone you love!

My Thought Spot 03: Bread Maker and 10K Race

After missing last weeks podcast, here is episode 3…finally. I ended up locking myself in my Suburban for 20 minutes to record this without the problems that I had in the two previous recordings of episode 3. I guess this would be episode 3.3 technically.

Show Notes:

Thank you for listening. Make sure you tell others about Missionary Talks and My Thought Spot.