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The 23rd Cycle: Learning to Live with a Stormy Star

By: Sten F. Odenwald | Book details

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Page 171
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Notes

The story of how scientists came to understand solar activity and its geophysical effects is a long and complicated one. Here are a few short essays that provide a bit more insight into some of the issues covered in this book. For more details visit the Astronomy Cafe web site atwww.theastronomycafe.net


Chapter 3. “Hello: Is Anyone There?”
While Benjamin Franklin was flying a kite hoping to entice a lightning bolt into a jar, Sir William Watson in England sent another kind of electrical discharge from a battery down a wire some two miles long. It wouldn't have amounted to more than an odd laboratory curiosity if it hadn't been for a Frenchman named Lesage some twenty-five years later who found a rather odd application for it. He arranged a set of wires and batteries, one for each letter of the alphabet, and a distant reader could tell what letter was being sent by seeing which wire was charged or not. It was a comically strange way to send a message, but it was the first attempt at sending information that didn't use the centuries-old methods of smoke, mirrors, lanterns, or flags.

Marconi fully expected that radio broadcasting would be resilient to solar disturbances compared to telegraphy and telephony, because it used a very different medium to transmit its signals. While disturbances from the September 1909 Great Aurora were recorded worldwide in a variety of telegraph and telephone systems, he considered this storm and its impacts a lesson to

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