Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • March 4, 2017 1:54 AM

It needs to br noyed that Marconi brought this upon himself.

He was a trickster, con artist, plagiarist and a lot worse. Examination of his patents show he quite deliberatly deceived the “patent clerks” and stole the ideas of many people of the time.

Thus to see him get a little “comeuppance” in public was a small fraction to redressing his wrongs.

On a technical note, the type of transmitter being used to do thr hack was a “spark transmitter” which has an incredibly broadband output and would be considered a “jammer” these days. Thus even if the receiver used in the lecture had been “tuned”, the close proximity of the spark transmission would still have overcome the limited “pre-selection” of being what we would now call a TRF receiver. True selectivity of the level required did not comeabout untill the Super Hetrodyne receiver was designed some years later.