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I was listening to a news report this morning about a recent hack of a security firm in Texas. Then, by coincidence, I read this article in New Scientist. The article struck me as funny – not just because of the article, but because the news story I had heard earlier was making a big deal about hacking, so I thought I would share it courtesy of Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent for New Scientist.
A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph.
LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.
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