Then ascended to become pure EM spectrum as his final Gigahertz form.

He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior, and much too young, wasn't he in his late-30s or early-40s?

In fact, I believe that had Hertz remained alive and won his prize, the Nobel Committee would not have felt obliged to give it to Marconi a few years later.

Marconi was a back-stabbing asshole who became one of the wealthiest men in the world by abusing the gentlemanly trust of others, and coasting on someone else's technology - particularly the way crystals oscillate, and some of them serve nicely as a sort of "translation point" between electromagnetic waves and the physical apparatus that transmits and/or receives the signal.

Transistors were mostly developed for telephone systems (the ones with wires) as a replacement for tubes. And the modern tech used for radios is very different from that used for computers.

Even more than that, just proving Maxwell was right was a key stepping stone to all of modern physics. Maxwell, not Einstein, was the first to show that the speed of light is invariant, and Einstein's Relativity was a framework for explaining how tf physics works if that's actually true. Prior to Einstein, physists all just kind of assumed there was some flaw in Maxwell's theorems to lead to this crazy speed invariance, but as the evidence just kept piling up in favor of Maxwell, they started having to wrestle with the uncomfortable thought that this could actually be true. In this sense, Hertz can also be thought of as an important step to Einstein and beyond, and almost all of our modern technology.

Two inventions:

• Internet
• Computers

are independent of each other, but go together nicely.

You could have an internet (sort of) without computers. Consider Teletypers, FM Radio broadcasts, or Telephone.

Everything I've ever heard about Franklin makes him a boss. This is a new one.

Sounds like Faraday understood the... potential.

That's a really cool Franklin quote. Visionary.

"Mr. Franklin, of what use is this hot air balloon contraption?"

"You can take ladies up in it with a bottle of wine and a blanket and you know, they can’t refuse, because of the implication. Think about it. She's floating up in the middle of the sky with some dude she barely knows. You know, she looks around, and what does she see? Nothing but open air. 'Ahhhh! There’s nowhere for me to run. What am I gonna do, say ‘no?’"

That last bit is me when dealing with people who "aren't impressed" by today's AI.

I'm sure someone thinks it's perfect for their use case, semi relevant xkcd:

Fun fact: The german word for using a radio is "funken"; literally "to spark". A radioman is, or was, a "Funker". When you are talking over the radio, you are doing it "Über Funk".

So like Bluetooth?

Those practical methods would never have existed if not for Hertz' experiments. Those were 25 years of other scientists, having seen that this new concept exists, refining his contraption into what eventually would become the machine that we know as a radio.

Whatever you do, love Hertz

which is about the frequency that the heart (german Herz) is beating with.

I suppose it's like asking a biologist what type of dishes would they do with a plant species they just discovered

She didn't envision a lot of things

Planet Money has some really good episodes. Unfortunately, a lot of filler as well.

Oh yeah. No one appreciates blue sky research. We don’t know where the question will take us, which is why governments fund the research. They can take on the 0.1% chance something useful is created 20 years later.

When talking with libertarians you should keep in mind they have completely different axiomatic values. It is often the case that they understand a certain policy would be on net bad for everyone, they simply don't care. They are rarely utilitarian about those issues.

I get along much better with libertarians who justify libertarianism with values extrinsic to just "muh freedom" -- they are usually much more willing to yield ground in places where I can convince them that a libertarian policy would be net negative, and they have also moved me to be more open minded about some things I thought I would never agree with.

Bullshit. Lasers have been intended to gain interplanetary superiority since the dawn of time. We just didnt know how to make them or that they could also be used to read music from a circle

His customers lamented that driving was so boring and they wished there was some magical way for the cars to play music.

Oh well. Nothing to be done there.

I always thought it stood for "pepperoni." So, you're saying "PET" stands for "Positrons, Endives, and Tomatoes"?

I absolutely detest the equivocation of "benefits society" and "marked for profit".

Plenty of things have been discovered to have practical applications which can benefit society yet are shelved or have its implementation frustrated because it cannot be exploited for profit or threatens the profits of a preexisting application which it would replace.

It's not always immediately obvious to what end you can use a new innovation. For instance, the Romans discovered and built a steam engine. But nobody connected the dots that it could be used to power a train.

To me, it showcases the main reason why we need to collaborate. Only together, we can exponentially increase the potential of everything we build.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio

By August 1895, Marconi was field testing his system but even with improvements he was only able to transmit signals up to one-half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves.

I suppose beyond the engineering know how required they were looking at possible transmission ranges and thinking it simply wasn't practical, square law and all that.

Half of the field is viable thanks to a single algorithm: FFT

ME TOO!

I feel like the signal processing community is really passionate about their work. It comes out in their books. I know I can talk for hours and hours and hours about signal processing. And my DSP professor was like that too. That was such a fun class.

I had that during my second year of master's. I barely understood it and the rest of the class couldn't understand it at all. I wrote my exam and forgot 99% of it a week later.

Because of car radio? Vertical integration, you know.

I thought he was a baker. When I was a kid people would always be talking about "Hertz donuts". Then they'd punch me. I never knew why.

I mean it's kind of bizarre that he couldn't think of a practical application. We literally use invisible waves to communicate already, these ones move at light speed, how could that not be useful?

I still like the fact that the guy that invented super glue was very annoyed by how sticky it was.

And Mantis Shrimp still continue to baffle me in the amount of EM range they can sense/see.

Aw, cheer up; someone will apply you in thirty to forty years.

Not really, he's not stealing something his dad made, using modern tech to smooth over the 60s parts and presenting it as his own invention.

No, Hertz never lived to see applications of his discovery. Guglielmo Marconi (was a fascist) started working on radio telegraphy in 1894, shortly after Hertz' death.