Abstract
The “official” birth of radar is generally attributed to the patent by Christian Hülsmeyer from Düsseldorf, entitled “Telemobiloskop”, on April 30th, 1904. However, the invention by Hülsmeyer was not accepted, being the environment not yet ready and lacking a definite operational requirement such as the Air defense, whose need would arise only in the 1930s. Therefore, in spite of being, after all, an happy and possibly a lucky person, Hülsmeyer is called “the unlucky inventor”. A kind of counterpart is the more celebrated “lucky inventor” Guglielmo Marconi, who was able (and much helped) to quickly file patents and industrially exploit them, with little attention to science and strong attention to business.
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Notes
- 1.
Bologna, April 25th, 1874—Rome, July 20th, 1937. On Guglielmo Marconi there are several biographies, for example: [Sol 11] and [Par 08], in addition to Web sites www.fgm.it, http://www.radiomarconi.com/ and http://www.marconicalling.co.uk/.
- 2.
A few months later, it was replaced by the equivalent patent DE 169154.
- 3.
Mechanical stabilization of the platform of the antenna is normal in the current naval radar. Exceptions are: the navigation radars, with a wide enough antenna beam in the vertical plane, and the Phased Array ones, where the roll and pitch compensation is done electronically.
- 4.
Vice versa, according to a document found by A.O. Bauer, the company was established on March 15th, a few weeks before the filing of the patent. Anyway, on August 12th, 1904, a banker from Hannover, Hermann Gumpel, joined the society.
- 5.
According to one of the participating persons, Koelner Tageblatt, the demonstration consisted in detecting the reflections of the radio waves by a metal grid, a few dozen meters away from the apparatus; the detection occurred even when the grid was covered by a tent or was behind a wall of bricks, and caused the lighting of a lamp or a mechanism that detonated a cartridge.
- 6.
This bridge, also called Fester Brücke, was replaced in 1911 by Hohenzollern Brücke, cited by Pritchard.
- 7.
As a preliminary condition, the patent had to be extended abroad, with the high cost of 23,000 marks, according to the memories of Hülsmeyer’s daughter, Annelise.
- 8.
In the Proceedings of the second “Nautical Meeting” conference in London, in 1905, there appears the laconic note: “The Telemobiloskop: a new trial at the Hook of Holland has been a failure…” and later it is claimed—without explanations—that the principle of operation of the apparatus is erroneous.
- 9.
This type of problem, in general, exists even today, for maritime transport and for aviation.
- 10.
He is the author of documents of rare completeness and remarkable technical and scientific value, among which [Bau 92] and [Bau 04], as well as a lot of historical material available on websites such as www.cdvandt.org, very rich in information on the history of German technology (radio, radar, navigation).
- 11.
Currently, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the National University of Seoul (comenius@snu.ac.kr).
- 12.
Here, it is not surprising to find the following judgment by A.O. Bauer (hard, but perfectly justified) that follows the quotation: “No further comment is available to prove Marconi’s arrogance and his scientific incompetency”.
- 13.
A further sign of the profound “anthropological” difference between a lucky inventor and an unfortunate one is the following: the 1922 speech by Marconi is cited in most books on radar while the 1917 paper by Tesla on The Electrical Experimenter is almost never mentioned!.
- 14.
According to [Cas 87], the phenomenon was noticed by Marconi in 1932, according to others, in 1933.
- 15.
According to other sources, the gardener did not scythe but, rather, was carrying some gravel with a metallic wheelbarrow. [Swo 86] speaks of the “rhythmic modulation of the monitoring signal” the cause of which is attributed to a steamroller (and then, to an obstacle so much greater than a mower and a wheelbarrow).
- 16.
That is, as much as 11 years before the Marconi’s observations at Castel Gandolfo/Vatican.
- 17.
The first detection of aircraft with this technique, i.e. “Bistatic—continuous wave”, took place in France (Pierre David) on June 27th, 1934, as well as—in the period 1934/1936—in Ukraine (Kharkov) and in the United States. See Chap. 3 for more details.
- 18.
Examined by the author in Milan, in the archives Castioni/SAFAR at the National Museum of Science and Technology “Leonardo da Vinci” in Milano, these photographs (reproduced also in [Cas 74b]) have the date of May 14th, 1935 written on the back.
- 19.
In this regard, the interested reader may see the exemplary explanation of the “Radiotachimetro” in [Tib 45].
- 20.
Soon, a third problem was added, i.e. the use of radar on board an aircraft for defence, attack and bombing.
- 21.
The review Storia Contemporanea (Contemporary History) was founded by Renzo De Felice and published until his death in 1997. The copies of Storia Contemporanea are not available as arrears through the publisher (Il Mulino) and are hard to find even on the used book market. [Cas 87] can be found in http://radarlab.uniroma2.it/stscradar/radar industriali.pdf, in an integral transcription without comments or corrections. However, we must add that in some places, the work reaches unreliable conclusions, which, however, are largely justified by the non-technical education of the author.
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Galati, G. (2016). The Unfortunate Inventor and the Lucky One—The UR-RADAR, Early Apparatus. In: 100 Years of Radar. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00584-3_1
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