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England Was Almost Destroyed By Radio Waves – Lessons from History

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday April 28 2019, @09:44PM   
from the signals-in-the-aether dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass

In 1940, Britain had retreated back to their island fortress after being throttled in mainland Europe by invading Nazis. They would hide behind the sea and hope that their navy and air force could stop the possible German invasion of their island.

As the Battle of Britain raged on, the German and British air forces went head to head. Something strange happened, the Germans pulled of[sic] a series of highly effective night bombing raids. It's strange because night bombing was incredibly ineffective for the most part.

[...] This German bombing was much more effective than what the British could do at night. As a matter of fact, it was more accurate than what typical bombing could do in the day time.

Source: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/england-was-almost-destroyed-by-radio-waves-df70830e8593

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Original Submission

• Re:Interesting they picked Coventry (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 29 2019, @08:54PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 29 2019, @08:54PM (#836391)

  In 1903 and 1904, however, a German engineer, Christian Hulsmeyer, learned that by using a spark-gap transmitter and coherer-equipped receiver, he could detect echoes from barges passing along the Rhine River. Convinced that such a phenomenon could be employed to detect ships in fog or at night, he developed and patented the idea in both Germany (patent 165,546, issued April 30, 1904) and England (patent 25,608, issued November 1904). The equipment he built was too crude to interest private industry or the German Navy, and it played no role in stimulating later developments, but his work does indicate the general awareness that radio waves could be reflected and that those reflections could perhaps be put to use.

  A general revival of interest in higher frequencies occurred among radio researchers in World War I, due to the potential of using them for secret point-to-point communications. This interest, fueled by the enthusiasm of radio amateurs, continued to grow after the War. Wave reflection soon became a subject of discussion once again. Marconi himself, in an address to a joint meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1922, stressed the importance of short-wave research and, almost incidentally, pointed to one possible use of the reflective property:

  As was first shown by Hertz, electric waves can be completely reflected
  by conducting bodies. In some of my tests I have noticed the effects of
  reflection and deflection of these waves by metallic objects miles away.

  It seems to me that it should be possible to design apparatus by means
  of which a ship could radiate or project a divergent beam of these rays
  in any desired direction, which rays, if coming across a metallic object,
  such as another steamer or ship, would be reflected back to a receiver
  screened from the local transmitter on the sending ship, and thereby
  immediately reveal the presence and bearing of the other ship in fog or thick weather.

  One further great advantage of such an arrangement would be that it
  would be able to give warning of the presence and bearing of ships,
  even should these ships be unprovided with any kind of radio.

  These remarks were published in August 1922-a month before the experiments of Taylor and Young. Whether they were aware of Marconi's suggestions, however, is unclear.

  Parent