Chapter 286 Radio

This year was a fruitful year for Zhang Xingjiu. At the beginning of the year, he first used experiments to prove that high-energy cathode rays can pass through atoms, and based on this phenomenon, he correctly inferred that the space inside the atom is relatively empty.

With this result, he was one step closer to building a correct model of the atom. He presented various features of the cathode ray experiment in his paper and published it in Nature.

When Philipp Lenard, a professor of theoretical physics at Heidelberg University, saw Zhang Xingjiu's paper, he was so angry that he threw a cup, because his experiment had also reached this point, but unfortunately he was still one step too late.

Zhang Xingjiu had no psychological burden at all for taking away his achievements, because this guy had a very bad character. Later, he followed a man with a mustache, regarded the Germans as the most noble race, and discriminated against all other races.

At this point, Zhang Xingjiu had achieved three Nobel-level achievements just by relying on cathode ray experiments, snatching away the opportunities of Professor Thomson of Cambridge University, and Professor and Director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Strasbourg, Karl Ferdinand Braun and Leonard.

They originally won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905, 1906, and 1909, but it is impossible for them to win the Nobel Prize in Physics now, unless they make more important achievements. But how easy is that? It is already amazing for a top physicist to have such a major breakthrough in his lifetime. The three of them are not epic geniuses like Einstein, Yang Zhenning, and Landau, who can have multiple Nobel Prize-level achievements and can get them back with other achievements if they lose one.

Before this, Zhang Xingjiu had been engaged in research in the theoretical field, and now he was finally going to enter the field of applied physics. On the one hand, he had accumulated enough experience in previous experimental research, and on the other hand, even if he didn't do it, another engineer would soon have done it.

So Zhang Xingjiu immediately made a plan and asked the cathode ray experiment group to start radio research.

American Morse invented the wired telegraph in 1835. In the following decades, telegraph lines began to be spread all over the world. Telegraph companies not only erected one telegraph pole after another on various continents, but also laid cables on the seabed, thus making transoceanic telegraph a reality.

Even the conservative Qing Dynasty gradually changed its attitude towards the telegraph. At first, they strictly prohibited the appearance of telegraphs on Chinese soil, removed telegraph lines set up by foreigners, and prohibited them from laying submarine cables.

In 1877, Li Hefei personally tested the role of the telegraph, and he immediately realized that the telegraph played a decisive role in many fields, especially the military field.

With his support, wired telegraph was quickly rolled out across China and has now become an indispensable tool for the imperial court and big businessmen.

However, although the telegraph is convenient to use, it has a huge flaw, which is that telegraph lines must be laid. The investment cost is too high, and the price of sending telegrams is also very expensive.

The charge for each plain text telegram in the Chinese telegraph room was calculated based on seven characters. Characters within seven characters were charged as seven characters, and characters beyond seven were charged separately. For example, the telegraph line from Xi'an to Zijingguan in Henan Province cost 6.6 cents per character, and coded telegrams and foreign language telegrams had to be charged double.

The situation in Europe and the United States is slightly better, but only slightly.

In the United States, it costs $2.70 to send a ten-word telegram from New York to New Orleans.

Such a high price would inevitably affect the wide application of the telegraph, so telegraph companies around the world were in urgent need of a lower-cost telegraph transmission technology, such as wireless telegraph that did not require the construction of telegraph lines.

Many scientists and engineers are engaged in research in this area and have made outstanding contributions:

In April 1820, Danish physicist Hans-Keustian Öster first discovered the magnetic effect of electric current.

On this basis, British physicist Michael Faraday discovered the law of electromagnetic induction in 1831 after many repeated experiments.

Then, the famous British genius James Clerk Maxwell submitted a scientific research paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1846 when he was 15 years old and had not yet graduated from high school. Then, only a year later, when he was 16 years old (1847), he published "General Theory of Electromagnetism", in which he predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves through mathematical calculations, and thus, together with Faraday, "initiated" the electromagnetic theory.

Another 41 years later, German physicist Hertz invented a radio wave ring through repeated experiments. He then used this radio wave ring to conduct a series of experiments, and finally discovered the electromagnetic waves that the world had been waiting for for a long time in 1888.

At this point, humanity was very close to inventing a usable wireless telegraph technology, and the people who originally made the breakthrough were Braun in Germany and Marconi in Italy.

This year, Braun successfully used high-frequency current to transmit Morse signals through water, and further applied closed oscillation circuits to the field of wireless telegraphy.

Three years ago, Marconi had successfully sent radio signals to a distance of 1.5 miles, but this distance was not yet commercially viable. He now planned to increase the distance that radio signals could be transmitted to about 50 miles.

To this end, he founded a radio company and, relying on his success three years ago, raised a considerable amount of investment. Unfortunately, most of his investment was going to go down the drain because Zhang Xingjiu also had his eyes on this achievement.

In Zhang Xingjiu's memory bank, there were drawings of Marconi and Braun's plans. He only made partial changes and got ahead of them, took out a prototype of the equipment, and successfully carried out a radio signal transmission and reception over a distance of ten kilometers.

As soon as the experiment was successful, Lippmann called him over and said to him seriously, "Do you know what this success means?"

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Zhang Xingjiu knew very well that if this matter was not handled properly, his life might be in danger. The current business competition is very exciting. Do you know about the DuPont family's homemade aircraft? He said frankly, "Most of the work I completed before was in the theoretical field, which did not have much commercial value. This time is different. Wireless telegraphy will definitely become the focus of competition among those nobles and wealthy merchants, because the interests contained in it are really huge."

"So what are you going to do?" Professor Lippmann felt a little relieved that his students had not been completely overwhelmed by success.

"Wireless telegraph technology involves economic interests, military interests, and political interests. So many interests are beyond the reach of a Chinese student like me." Zhang Xingjiu lamented in his heart. If his motherland was strong, why would he have to face these problems? Unfortunately, the Qing Dynasty was too rubbish and could not provide him with shelter, so he could only find a way out on his own.

“I plan to register a patent first, then”

Tomorrow's update will be a little later.

(End of this chapter)