Guglielmo Marconi turned a laboratory curiosity, what we now call “radio,” into a useful communications technology, altering the course of humanity. Scientists had already demonstrated the fundamental attributes of radio waves: they could be created by mankind, they could radiate through space, and they could be detected at a distance.
Marconi had a larger vision about the application of scientific knowledge for social and economic benefit. He successfully pursued that vision by selling its promise to investors and its practicalities to customers.
Like many inventors, he encountered resistance and skepticism. Reactions to Marconi’s radio technology were similar to those that greeted later efforts by Motorola, in the 1960s and 1970s, to introduce a handheld, portable telephone. I had the good fortune of being at Motorola in those years, and I distinctly remember the two claims made by skeptics when I explained what we were trying to do:
- “It won’t work!”
- “Even if it did work, few people will find it useful.”
Marconi realized that the only way to prove his point was to demonstrate his vision, to send information wirelessly over a distance—a long distance. He did so in December 1901, transmitting a Morse “S” between England and Canada. I used a similar approach in 1973 in defiance of the naysayers who doubted our work at Motorola in pursuit of a new vision of personal communications. A public demonstration of our technology was the only way to prove its viability.
It’s presumptuous of me to compare myself to Marconi in any respect. While we were both engineers and tinkerers, Marconi called himself an “ardent amateur student of electricity.” I was fortunate to attend a modern engineering institution, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the R&D resources at Motorola were superb. The study of electricity in Marconi’s time was primitive compared to what was available to me at Motorola in the mid-twentieth century. Transistors, integrated circuits, and a variety of tools for sharing radio frequency spectrum were on offer.
Marconi and I both benefited from colorful cultural heritage. While Marconi’s father was Italian and he was raised in Italy, his mother was from Ireland and insisted that Marconi learn English. His teachers called him the “little Englishman.” Marconi would spend most of his adult life in England, with frequent trips to Canada and America in pursuit of transatlantic radio signals.
During the first decade of my life, I was shuttled back and forth between Chicago and Winnipeg, to which my parents had immigrated (separately) from Ukraine to escape ethnic bigotry and violence. I attended a technical high school as well as IIT. My time in the U.S. Navy exposed me to Americans from all walks of life and ingrained in me an appreciation of the need for discipline (mostly for other people; I needed the freedom to dream), while continuing to stoke my engineering interest.
Additionally, Marconi and I were both persistent—especially regarding our competitors. Even after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1909, Marconi was in a race. Several different individuals and organizations were jockeying to gain traction in the emerging and fiercely competitive business of radio communication. Marconi faced competitors in Germany, the United States, and England, his adopted homeland. Many leading figures didn’t want to see him succeed and former associates even betrayed him.
The contributions of my team and me to wireless communications, graciously recognized by the Marconi Society, arose out of a similar competitive battle. During the same years that Marconi was racing to succeed at sending long-distance wireless signals, a monopoly in wired communications was taking shape. The Bell System dominated wired telephony for most of the 20th century. By the time I arrived at Motorola in the 1950s, Bell was an inescapable and immovable part of everyday life.
Motorola was the upstart company, smaller but more entrepreneurial than Bell. It was just the right setting for a daydreaming engineer like me. While it had been my personal fantasy to work at Bell Labs, I didn’t have the requisite Ph.D. Through the 1950s and 1960s, I worked on pagers, police radios, cryptographic devices, and more at Motorola. Mobile phones were just hitting the market—but they were exclusively car phones. The Bell System, and the prestigious consulting firms they hired, saw the future of mobile communications through a copper wire; car phones were an extension of Bell’s monopoly.
Motorola manufactured car phones for Bell, but we approached the future of mobile communications from a different perspective. Based on our development of pagers and police radios, we knew that people wanted to be free of wires. They didn’t want to be confined to their cars any more than they wanted to be confined to their desks when talking on the phone.
When Bell was close to succeeding in an audacious play to dominate mobile phones and two-way radio systems, Motorola acted. I barged into the office of my boss, John Mitchell (who later became Motorola’s COO) with a proposal to “out-Bell Bell.” We needed to develop something totally new to convince the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) not to extend Bell’s monopoly. I proposed that we create a cellular phone—not a car phone, but a portable, handheld phone. Motorola had already created a working cellular system; we could create the phone, too.
In three months, the team I assembled from across Motorola invented and successfully tested the DynaTAC, the first handheld, portable cell phone. While it didn’t become commercially available for another decade, it was enough to demonstrate to the FCC that there was an alternative to the monopoly of the Bell system that offered a better route to innovation. That was competition. In addition, the public demonstration of the DynaTAC effectively told our story: people need to be free to communicate everywhere and all the time.
We’re still coming to grips with both these lessons. In the United States, the telecommunications market is competitive, but uncompetitive attributes of their Bell origins still remain. Our methods of managing spectrum and assigning spectrum rights are in dire need of updating.
One result of that market structure is we continue to struggle with a digital divide that denies millions of people access to the most critical tool of the 21st century, the Internet. Insufficient and unaffordable access characterizes various parts of the country. The consequences have been most harmful during COVID-19 as students with inadequate Internet have failed to keep up with peers. Some schools and districts closed their buildings in the spring but didn’t even offer a virtual option because they knew their students wouldn’t be able to get online.
Many solutions to closing the digital divide have been proposed, but they are mostly geared toward fixed broadband, meaning that we will once again restrain people in what George Gilder called “the copper cage.” The lesson that Motorola taught the FCC—that people are mobile and must be free of wires—still hasn’t fully permeated our consciousness.
Digital inclusion must be achieved through wireless broadband. We don’t need to spend billions on wiring people’s homes. Everyone, including students, is on the go. They access the Internet mostly through their phones: why would we force them back to wired devices?
I’ve proposed one potential way to do this, but in the spirit of competition I know there are many more ways to close the digital divide wirelessly. If Marconi were around today, he would be laser focused on solving the problem in the most efficient way possible—and without wires. He would probably help support new entrepreneurs and startups to compete to close the digital divide, rather than turning to the established oligopolies. He would want us to tinker and experiment toward a solution, not impose one from the top down.
