Technology and Culture

Technology and Culture 42.3 (2001) 595-596

Book Review

Die "Tönenden Funken": Geschichte eines frühen drahtlosen Kommunikationssystems, 1905-1914

In 1903 the big German electrotechnical companies AEG and Siemens launched their subsidiary Telefunken to handle the young wireless technology. From the beginning, this completely dependent firm had to do its duty not only toward its private owners but in the national cause, for the Kaiser himself: the Telefunken saga had its inception with the Kaiser wishing to send a telegram to his wife when his ship passed Borkum Island and the British Marconi station there refusing to do so. At his behest, Siemens and AEG came together to found the German wireless company; before that, some German companies and even the German military had had contracts with Marconi.

Count Georg von Arco, former assistant to the German radio pioneer Adolf Slaby--who was close to the Kaiser--became the technical director [End Page 595] of Telefunken. The business director was the agile Hans Bredow, who was also an admirer of the Kaiser and who would be put in charge of all wireless systems at the Reichspost after the war. His memoirs, which were published in 1954, are still valuable.

In this book, Michael Friedewald tells how Telefunken brought the so-called Tönender Löschfunkensender, the quenched-spark transmitter, to manufacturing and market maturity on the basis of research by Max Wien, then a professor at the Technische Hochschule Danzig. In contrast to Marconi´s transmitter, electromagnetic waves were generated as a permanent sequence of very short sparks that were situated in frequencies between 300 and 2,000 hertz. The Morse characters were transmitted as continuing sounds and not with interruptions between them, as in Marconi´s system. Besides the design and function of Telefunken's equipment, Friedewald also describes its sluggish efforts to make sales. He discusses the role of the military and governmental departments but unfortunately fails to address the distribution of responsibilities. Hence, the reader cannot locate the new Telefunken system in the economic and political context of the German Kaiserreich and its literature. The system was eventually introduced to the German army and navy, but it took much longer to get it installed on passenger liners, where the German commitment at international radio conferences became crucial. (The necessity of radio had become obvious with the Titanic disaster in 1912.) In his last chapter, Friedewald considers why the new Telefunken system was not used for the long wireless lines to the German colonies in Africa.

Overall, Friedewald has succeeded in constructing a narrative of the interaction of innovation and entrepreneurship. But he does little to explain the role of emerging radio technology and electronics in the Kaiserreich before the First World War, largely because he has not gone beyond semiofficial publications in his research, not gone to the archives, and not considered much of the relevant historiography, such as the work of Daniel Headrick.

Hartmut Petzold

Dr. Petzold is curator for mathematical instruments, computers, and time measurement at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

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