Two Rotarians That Made Our eClub Possible
by John Allman, eClub Rotarian
Technology touches our lives in many ways. Simply reading this means that you have access to and use some form of technology. Being part of a Rotary e-Club means that technology is what forms the bond between you and the others in the club.
It is interesting to reflect on the fact that the technology that brings us together is a relatively new phenomenon. Equally interesting is that some of most fundamental developments that make all this possible were the result of the work of two men, contemporaries separated by half a world, and yet both Rotarians.
Thomas Alva Edison
Thomas Edison was born on Feb. 11, 1847 to middle-class parents in the bustling mid-western town of Milan, Ohio.
Thomas' father was an exiled political activist from Canada. His mother, a school teacher, was a major influence in boyhood years.
Early in his life, scarlet fever left him with hearing difficulties in both ears, a malady that would eventually leave him nearly deaf as an adult.
Tom, who was the last of seven children in his family, did not learn to talk until he was almost four years of age. But once he did, he begged every adult he met to explain the workings of just about everything he encountered.
In 1854, the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where Edison attended public school for all of 12 weeks. He was prone to distraction, and was deemed "difficult" by his exasperated teacher. After spending those three months in a noisy one-room schoolhouse with 38 other students of all ages, his mother pulled him from school and taught him reading, writing, and arithmetic at home
Although he was well taught by his mother, Tom was always a very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own.
At age 12, Edison set out to put much of that learning to work. He talked his parents into letting him go to work selling newspapers, snacks, and candy on the local railroad and he started an entirely separate business selling fruits and vegetables.
Tom's ventures netted him more than ten dollars per day. Because this was enough to provide for his own support, he had a fair amount of extra income, most of which went towards outfitting the chemical laboratory he had set up in the basement of his home. But when his usually patient and tolerant mother finally complained about the odors and danger of all the "poisons" he was amassing, he transferred most of them to a locked room in the basement and put the remainder in his locker room on the train.
One day, while traveling over a particularly bumpy section of track, the train lurched causing a stick of phosphorous to roll onto the floor and it ignited the baggage car. The conductor was so angry he struck Tom on the side of his head. As the story goes, this may have aggravated some of his hearing loss from the scarlet fever.
Ultimately, Tom became totally deaf in his left ear, and approximately 80% deaf in his right ear. He once stated that the worst thing about being deaf was that he was unable to enjoy the beautiful sounds of singing birds.
While he worked for the railroad, Edison saved a child from being run over by an errant train. The child’s grateful father rewarded him by teaching Tom how to operate a telegraph. By age 15, he was good enough to be employed as a telegraph operator.
For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, filling in for those who had gone to fight in the Civil War. He read voraciously, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science.
At age 16, after working in a variety of telegraph offices he came up with what he called an "automatic repeater." It transmitted telegraph signals between unmanned stations, allowing virtually anyone to easily and accurately translate code at their own speed and convenience.
In 1868 with a reputation for being a rather flamboyant and quick witted character who enjoyed playing "mostly harmless" practical jokes - he returned home and to find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out of work. The family was almost destitute.
Tom accepted the suggestion of a friend to move east and apply for a permanent job as a telegrapher with the Western Union Company in Boston. His decision was at least partly influenced by the fact that he had been given a free rail ticket by the local street railway company for some repairs he had done for them. The most important factor for Tom, however, was the fact that Boston was considered to be the hub of the scientific, educational, and cultural universe at the time.
Working12 hours a day and six days a week for Western Union, Tom continued "moonlighting" on his own projects and, within six months, had applied for and received his very first patent. A beautifully constructed electric vote-recording machine turned out to be a disaster.
When he tried to market it to members of the Massachusetts Legislature, they thoroughly denigrated it, claiming "its speed in tallying votes would disrupt the delicate political status-quo." The real issue was that political groups regularly relied upon the brief delays that were provided by the process of manually counting votes to influence and hopefully change the opinions of their colleagues. "This is exactly what we do not want" commented a crusty politician.
Deeply in debt and about to be fired by Western Union, Edison borrowed $35.00 from a fellow telegrapher to purchase a steamship ticket to the more commercially oriented city of New York.
As Tom wandered through some of the offices in New York's financial district, he noticed that the manager of a local brokerage firm was in a panic. He found that a critically important stock-ticker in his office had just broken down.
Noting that no one in the crowd that had gathered seemed to have a clue on how to fix it, he elbowed his way into the scene and grasped a momentary opportunity to have a go at addressing what was wrong himself.
After spending a few seconds confirming exactly how the stock ticker was intended to work in the first place, Tom reached down and manipulated a loose spring back to where it belonged, and the crowd’s astonishment the device began to run perfectly.
The office manager hired Edison to make all such repairs for the company for a salary of $300.00 per month. During his free time, Edison soon resumed his habit of moonlighting with the telegraph and other devices. Shortly thereafter, he was absolutely astonished when he was paid $40,000 for the rights to one of his devices, the Universal Stock Printer
Edison was only 22 years old. With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing.
In 1874 he opened his first complete testing and development laboratory in Newark, New Jersey. Menlo Park became the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement. With Menlo Park, Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application.
Shortly after Edison moved his laboratory to Menlo Park, N.J. in 1876, he invented the first phonograph. In 1879, he was extremely disappointed by the fact that Alexander Graham Bell had beaten him in the race to patent the first authentic transmission of the human voice. At age 29, he ultimately made Bell's new "articulating" telephone audible enough for practical use.
Edison then invented the first commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb.
The 1880s were a busy time for Thomas Edison. After being granted a patent for the light bulb in January 1880, Edison set out to develop a company that would deliver the electricity to power and light the cities of the world. That same year, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company—the first investor-owned electric utility—which later became the General Electric Corporation. In 1881, he left Menlo Park to establish facilities in several cities where electrical systems were being installed.
In 1883 and 1884 he introduced the world's first economically viable system of centrally generating and distributing electric light, heat, and power.
In 1890, Edison immersed himself in developing the first Vitascope, which would lead to the first silent motion pictures. By 1892, his Edison General Electric Co. had fully merged with another firm to become the great General Electric Corporation, in which he was a major stockholder.
Up until obtaining his last (1,093rd) patent at age 83, he worked mostly at home where, though increasingly frail, he enjoyed greeting former associates and famous people such as Charles Lindberg, Marie Curie, Henry Ford, and President Herbert Hoover.
Thomas Edison died of complications of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, "Glenmont," in West Orange, New Jersey. He was 84 years old. Many communities and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights or briefly turned off their electrical power to commemorate his passing.
Recognizing that his death marked the end of an era in the progress of civilization, countless individuals, communities, and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights or briefly turned off their electric power in his honor on the evening of the day he was laid to rest at his beautiful estate at Glenmont, New Jersey.
Over his desk, Edison displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous quotation: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." This slogan was reputedly posted at several other locations throughout the facility.
In 1929, Edison's close friend, Henry Ford, completed the task of moving Edison's original Menlo Park laboratory to the Greenfield Village museum in Dearborn, Mich. In 1962 his existing laboratory and home in West Orange, N.J. were designated as National Historic Sites.
Thomas Alva Edison was a member of the Rotary Club of Orange, New Jersey.
Guglielmo Marconi
The second son of a wealthy Italian father and an Irish/Scots mother, Guglielmo Marconi was born April 25, 1874, in Bologna, Italy. He was educated by private tutors and attended the Livorno technical institute for a short time.
In 1894, Marconi began to conduct experiments, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home in Pontecchio, Italy, with the help of his butler Mignani. His goal was to use radio waves to create a practical system of "wireless telegraphy; the transmission of telegraph messages without connecting wires as used by the electric telegraph.
This was not a new idea—numerous investigators had been exploring wireless telegraph technologies for over 50 years, but none had proven technically and commercially successful.
In the summer of 1894, he built a storm alarm made up of a battery and an electric bell, which went off if there was lightning nearby. Soon after, he was able to make a bell ring on the other side of the room by pushing a telegraphic button on a bench. Marconi woke his mother up and showed her what he had created. The next day he also showed his father, who, when he was certain there were no wires, gave his son all of the money he had in his wallet so Guglielmo could buy more materials.
In 1895 he began laboratory experiments at his father's country estate where he succeeded in sending wireless signals over a distance of one and a half miles. By the end of the year he was able to detect wireless signals at ranges greater than a mile and out of the line of sight. 
Marconi was unable to interest the Italian government in wireless communication, so in 1896 he went to England, where he aroused official interest and received support from the British Post Office. Later that year was granted the world's first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy.
His work on the development of shortwave wireless communication constitutes the basis of nearly all modern radio broadcasting. His improved aerials greatly extended the range of radio signaling.
Marconi was a founder of The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in Britain in 1897 which became the Marconi Company. He succeeded in making a commercial success of radio by innovating and building on the work of previous experimenters and physicists. In 1899 he established communication across the English Channel.
In 1900 he took out his patent for "tuned or syntonic telegraphy" and, he was determined to prove that wireless waves were not affected by the curvature of the Earth.
In 1901, Marconi had built a station near South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. On 17 December 1902, a transmission from the Marconi station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the world's first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America.
In January 1903 sent a message of greetings from Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States, to King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, marking the first transatlantic radio transmission originating in the United States.
Marconi began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic to communicate with ships at sea, in competition with other inventors. In 1904 a commercial service was established to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers.
This station also was one of the first to receive the distress signals coming from the RMS Titanic. The two radio operators aboard the RMS Titanic were not employed by the White Star Line, but by the Marconi International Marine Communication Company.
In 1909, Marconi shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with K. Ferdinand Braun.
During World War I, when Italy joined the Allied side of the conflict, Marconi was placed in charge of the Italian military's radio service. He attained the rank of lieutenant in the Italian Army and of commander in the Italian Navy. The year 1917 saw him as a member of the Italian mission to the United States on its entry into the war and in 1919 he was a signatory to the Paris Treaty for Italy.
Marconi died in Rome on 20 July 1937 at age 63, and Italy held a state funeral for him. As a tribute, all radio stations throughout the world observed two minutes of silence on the next day.
Guglielmo Marconi was a member of the Rotary Club of Bologna, Italy.
