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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.