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That one was intended as a nightlight at 4 watts but is actually brighter than any nightlight suitable for allowing operations in the engine bay of the firehouse it was installed in. Chailet used carbon filaments and a mixture of gases that is still not known precisely. What is known is that their bright lights were used by air fields and a few community's street lights because of their long life and brightness but he never got the attention of the public, Edison was a promoter of first order. Same sort of thing happened with superior radio systems were around but Marconi had a bigger bankroll and squads of lawyers ready to squash any technology of the time. That held radio development back years, such that the main development arena for early radio was the non-commercial amateur radio sphere. History is not kind to the losers of court battles even if their contribution to the knowledge base was much more significant than the "house-hold-name".
Marconi successfully edited books, particularly school books to eliminate mentions of prior applications or discoveries. Little did the US school kids know that while Marconi was building his promotion machine and struggling for minor improvements in his very crude system used in public demonstrations used to raise money, others around the world had furthered the art with original designs that were more sophisticated and effective. For example A.C. Popov, a researcher and professor of electricity here is St Petersburg had set up a fully functioning system used by the Imperial Navy in 1896 that was being used for emergency and rescue communications for ships in the Baltic Sea. It was used to great effectiveness in the rescue of a stranded ship, relaying 400 messages from sea to the Admiralty headquarters in St Petersburg. There were others in the US and Europe who were doing work about that time that was more advanced than Marconi's experiments. But now, history of course favors the winners of politics and courts. In any field where general knowledge is presented to kids in school it is safe to bet that the REAL story and history as actively suppressed by either courts or money using media.
For that reason, I concluded long ago, if "everybody knows it" is the proof of an idea, there is a extremely unlikely possibility that it is the whole story or even the most relevant part of the story. We see history even in the last couple years completely rewritten to suit money interests, things we lived through have been redefined to general acceptance to mean just the opposite.
At the same time the belief by many in grand conspiracies is just as likely to be false as "common knowledge".
Marconi successfully edited books, particularly school books to eliminate mentions of prior applications or discoveries. Little did the US school kids know that while Marconi was building his promotion machine and struggling for minor improvements in his very crude system used in public demonstrations used to raise money, others around the world had furthered the art with original designs that were more sophisticated and effective. For example A.C. Popov, a researcher and professor of electricity here is St Petersburg had set up a fully functioning system used by the Imperial Navy in 1896 that was being used for emergency and rescue communications for ships in the Baltic Sea. It was used to great effectiveness in the rescue of a stranded ship, relaying 400 messages from sea to the Admiralty headquarters in St Petersburg. There were others in the US and Europe who were doing work about that time that was more advanced than Marconi's experiments. But now, history of course favors the winners of politics and courts. In any field where general knowledge is presented to kids in school it is safe to bet that the REAL story and history as actively suppressed by either courts or money using media.
For that reason, I concluded long ago, if "everybody knows it" is the proof of an idea, there is a extremely unlikely possibility that it is the whole story or even the most relevant part of the story. We see history even in the last couple years completely rewritten to suit money interests, things we lived through have been redefined to general acceptance to mean just the opposite.
At the same time the belief by many in grand conspiracies is just as likely to be false as "common knowledge".
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