ALL OUR
“BLUE 24 – POB – CLEAR IN TEN - OVER...”
Once again we take you on a trip down Memory Lane... we’ve looked at the taxi itself, and its upstart cousin the private hire vehicle; we’ve explored the taximeter in all its glory. In this edition we’ll slip back in time once again, to look at a truly integral part of the industry which was cutting-edge technology in its time, but which is being edged out these days, far more dramatically than was its introduction, by computers and the clouds: the good old radio.
If you really want to go back to the roots of radio broadcast, you’re talking about the likes of Mr Marconi and his associates. Radio is a part of the electromagnetic spectrum - minute variations in electricity and magnetism that, like ripples on a pool, spread out in waves at the speed of light to give us light itself, x-rays and other rays, and radio.
help of 24 ships’ masts standing 200 feet high situated at Poldhu in Cornwall, the first signal was transmitted by radio waves across the Atlantic. At the receiving end, in St Johns, Newfoundland, Marconi waited with kites and balloons to hold an aerial wire aloft. And the signal was...? The three dots of the Morse code letter S.
rely on wireless signals to be receivable around the world and to be free from inter- ference.
Having introduced radio licence fees as early as 1904, the Government established the Wireless Telegraphy Board in 1918, to co-ordinate moves to prevent radio inter- ference in the English Channel. A series of name changes occurred, starting during the Second World War when the WTB became a military organisation and was renamed the British Joint Communications Board.
Poldhu, Cornwall St Johns, Newfoundland
Skeptics shouted, “Big deal!” and all that, but just over twelve months later the fol-
lowing was transmitted by radio waves: “President of the United States to the King of England. In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting the system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American people my most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and the people of the British Empire. Theodore Roosevelt.”
Think about it: the 20th century equivalent of Facebook! Soon the development of this radio wave spectrum business took off big style: radio went on quickly to prove its worth in dramatic ways. Ship-to- shore radio led to the arrest of the notorious murderer Dr Crippen in 1910 while attempting to flee to Canada. And it is said famously that the 700 people saved from the Titanic were “saved through one man, Mr Marconi”.
Suggested theoretically by James Clerk Maxwell in 1873, identified by Heinrich Hertz in 1887 and given practical value by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895, the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum ranges from a frequency of about three thousand cycles per second to thirty billion cycles per second. Marconi’s early experiments were in the lower frequencies.
But Mr Marconi was a true pioneer and visionary, and a salesman to boot: he per- suaded directors of his fledgling firm the Wireless Telegraph Company to finance an experimental transmission to the tune of mega-bucks, the equivalent of millions today. So on 12 December 1901, with the
70
Entertainment wasn’t far behind: the first advertised radio broadcast took place in 1920 with a performance by Dame Nellie Melba. Shortly afterwards in 1922 the Mar- coni Company set up London broadcasting station 2LO, which was sub- sequently taken over by the British Broadcasting Company (now Corpora- tion).
REGULATOR REQUIRED
As with any developing industry or tech- nology, it became apparent from the earliest days that this newfangled radio frequency usage needed to be supervised and regulated, most crucially to be able to
About six name changes later, on 2 April 1990 the regulator of the airwaves was relaunched as the Radiocommunications Agency – which is most likely the name a good majority of our readers will recognise as the organisation to which they had to apply for their licence to operate a radio dispatch system and aerial from their pri- vate hire operator base. Today this regulator comes under the auspices of Ofcom.
But we get ahead of ourselves… After the invention of the taximeter, the first major innovation occurred in the late 1940s, when two-way radios first appeared in taxicabs. Radios enabled drivers and dis- patch offices to communicate and serve customers more efficiently than previous methods, such as using callboxes. (We’ll devote an entire All Our Yesterdays to the telephone side of the business another time.)
If you go back to the days of the British Joint Communications-Electronics Board as it was in the late forties, when private- or professional-mobile-radio (PMR) first started the systems simply consisted of a single base station with a number of mobile two-way units that could communi- cate with this single base station.
And the very first PMR licence issued to any company in the country was issued by that Board, in 1947, to a taxi company: Camtax in Cambridge.
OCTOBER 2015
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