Lights, Camera, Acrimony! - Issue 11: Light
▻http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/lights-camera-acrimony
A crowd of thousands had gathered at St. Mark’s Square in Venice, drawn by the prospect of witnessing a telecommunications revolution. In the warm summer evening of June 24, 2011 they watched a video, projected onto the wall of the medieval Doge’s Palace, explaining a new technology that promised to multiply the volume of data carried by radio waves at a stroke. Some 442 meters across the lagoon, a pair of unusual antennas had been mounted on the lighthouse on St George’s Island. At the flick of a switch, a signal leapt from the antennas, accompanied by a rifle shot—the same signal used by Guglielmo Marconi to confirm the first radio transmission in 1895. An instant later, the message reached its destination and was flashed onto the palace’s gothic facade. “Segnale Ricevuto,” it read. (...)