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There's no doubt that recent events have created uncertainty in the economy. Witness the revised profit forecasts and market jitters. There have been significant layoffs in some sectors, and strategic regrouping in others. And yet, for all that, there's still a strong buzz about the future of wireless, as applied to both PDA* communication, and the Internet. Companies like AOL, IBM and Sprint PCS have all recently made significant commitments to future developments, and other players are swarming the sector too.

Sometimes, to see the future, you need to look back. And December is a timely month to do so, because exactly one hundred years ago, a very remarkable man, who almost single-handedly invented "wireless", carried out his most famous experiment. There's a Canadian connection too, because he did it in St John's, Newfoundland (all right, Newfoundland wasn't part of Federation in 1901).

Guglielmo Marconi was born in Italy in 1874, the second son of an Italian country gentleman and an Irish mother. Educated privately, at the age of 21 he began experimenting with "the new electricity" on his father's estate. Within months, he managed to transmit a radio wave over a distance of two kilometres, across the Tuscan hills near Bologna. He instructed a servant out of sight in the next valley to fire a rifle when he received the letter "S", transmitted in Morse Code. With that gunshot. the age of wireless was born, although it took time for its importance to be appreciated.

A year later, Marconi moved his apparatus to England and within six months had set up The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Co. Ltd. (later renamed Marconi's Wireless Telegraph). In 1899 he established wireless communication between France and England across the English Channel. We're accustomed these days to the rapid rate of scientific progress, but a century ago, the speed at which the young engineer moved was nothing short of miraculous. Politicians and military strategists were quick to grasp the potential of this new invisible medium. In 1900 he filed for his famous patent on "tuned telegraphy" and set out to prove that wireless waves were not affected by the curvature of the Earth. On an historic day in December 1901, Marconi transmitted the first wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean, between Poldhu in Cornwall, and St. John's, Newfoundland. It was a distance of 3,400 km.

A year later, Marconi transmitted the first complete message to Poldhu from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. The technology expanded rapidly, and in 1903 US President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII of Great Britain exchanged greetings across the airwaves. Many honours followed, including Marconi receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909.

So much for the past. The question today is: whither wireless?

Well, some things have changed. Unable to get financial backing for his start-up company, Marconi had been forced to move to England, where risk capital was more plentiful. That's certainly not the case today. Despite the current stock market gloom, venture capital is firmly part of the economic picture.

One segment of Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd. was subsequently spun off to form the British Broadcasting Corporation, where it took on a life of its own. Public radio is still a dynamic force world-wide.

Marconi predicted the principle of radar, using radio waves, as early as 1922, and actually demonstrated the technology shortly before his death in 1937. No one thought it very interesting, until World War II. Today, radar is as ubiquitous as air travel.

Perhaps the most important lesson to come out of the birth of wireless is that there's no way to predict where technology will lead. History shows we are often unaware even of the need, far less the solution. No one in 1901 would have foreseen that what the world needed was to transmit large amounts of information across enormous distances. It was simply impossible, so why even wish for it?

So, as we roll into the new age of wireless, what is it we want most? Faster data transfer? Cleaner transmission packets? Lower power requirements? Better encryption? The list is long, and the companies vying for dominance are many. But they are merely refinements of a basic principle. Oh well, if the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi can't deliver, there's always Santa Claus on Christmas Day.

* Personal Digital Assistant

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