Abstract
DURING the year 1947 we are celebrating in Great Britain two important jubilees, one technological and the other scientific. It was in 1897, fifty years ago, that Marconi, the young Italian inventor, gave a decisive demonstration of ‘telegraphy without wires’ to Sir William Preece, who was then engineer-in-chief of the British Post Office. It was also in 1897 that the Cambridge professor of experimental physics, Prof. J. J. Thomson, made the first public announcement, at an evening discourse at the Royal Institution, of the existence of the electron as an independent entity. The technological development of radio from those early beginnings has had most important scientific consequences. Correspondingly, the scientific discovery of the electron, although important in the first instance because of its bearing on atomic theory, has had profound technological consequences. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to cite better examples of the mutual influence of fundamental science and technology than the developments which have sprung from those two great events of fifty years ago. These developments form the subject of the presidential address by Sir Edward Appleton to Section A (Physical Sciences).
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Summaries of Addresses of Presidents of Sections; Earth, Stars and Radio. Nature 160, 283–284 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160283a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160283a0