Two milestones stand out in the development of electrical science and engineering. The first was 1600, when English-born William Gilbert introduced the word “electricus” in his book De Magnete, and the second was 1800, when Italian-born Alessandro Volta announced that a new form of electricity could be generated from alternating disks of zinc and silver separated by cloth soaked either in salt water or sodium hydroxide, namely a battery.

In the years between 1600 and 1800, many scientists and engineers worked on electric phenomena. Those who stand out include Benjamin Franklin, who in 1752 tied a key to a kite and flew it in a thunderstorm to show that lightning is an electrical discharge, and the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, who discovered electrical stimulation by experimenting on dead frogs.

The new era of electricity dawned in 1820, with the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted expressing the theory of electromagnetism. This was followed by the introduction of the electric generator and the transformer by the English scientist Michael Faraday in 1831, which allowed Samuel Morse to build the telegraph.

The creator of the “Victorian Internet”

The inventor of the electric telegraph was a in fact painter. While travelling from Europe to America in 1832, Morse was introduced to the secrets and prospects of electromagnetism by a fellow traveller who was a geology professor. Communication was an issue that preoccupied him from the time he had gone on a business trip and was unable to attend his wife’s funeral due to the long delay in the delivery of correspondence.

Without having the necessary scientific knowledge, but having the passion and imagination of an artist and assistants from Yale University, he built a device in 1837 which used electromagnetism to transmit codified messages at a distance of 12 kilometres. By continuously perfecting the new device, in 1844 he sent the historic message from Baltimore to Washington: “What hath God wrought”.

The father of the telephone

Born in Edinburgh in 1847, he studied in Scotland and immigrated to Boston, where he taught vocal physiology and elocution at university. Bell was more involved in audiology and speech therapy than electricity, and it was this scientific “ignorance” that helped him solve the problem of sound transmission in an original and innovative way. His connections with the scientific world, such as with Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institute, who showed him the telephone device of the German inventor Philipp Reis, helped him form a clear idea of the construction of a “speaking telegraph”.

On 10 March 1876, Bell transmitted the first audio message to his assistant: “Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.”. He had managed to convert sound waves into alternating current that reproduced human speech at the other end of the line.

The dawning of wireless communication

The use of radio waves for the transmission of long-distance messages had already been achieved by a number of physicists (Édouard-Ezen Branly, Oliver Joseph Lodge, Alexander Stepanovich Popov). However, the Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi is considered the inventor of wireless communication, given that he was the first person to send radio waves from England to America, on 12 December 1901, and the first person to realise the financial implications of this new technology by incorporating the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company.

In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun for his contribution to the development of wireless telegraphy. On 15 April 1912, the night that the Titanic sank, his invention helped to save 706 passengers from the disaster, thus establishing the necessity of wireless telegraphy in shipping.

Every time an invention was deemed a commercially successful patent, protracted legal battles followed regarding ownership of the patent by various competitors. In 1837, Morse filed an application with the patent office in Washington, while in the same year William Cook and Charles Wheatstone filed the patent for their electric telegraph in Britain.

On 14 February 1876, Elisha Gray filed a patent for the “telephone” at the US Patent Office, just two hours prior to Graham Bell. At first, she did not believe that the telephone would have an impact on the telecommunications of that era and did not take legal action against Bell. Only when the new invention became a huge commercial success did she proceed with long court battles with the Scottish inventor, all of which she lost.

The most famous “ill-fated” inventor was Nikola Tesla, who accused Marconi of using his wireless telegraphy patents. The Serbian physicist’s claims that he was first to transmit wireless audio messages via electronic vibration were not accepted by the scientific community.