Today in Technology History

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January 16

A few months ago, we mentioned a "little-known German inventor" who had created a forerunner to radar. That inventor was Christian Hülsmeyer (1881-1957), and he is our subject today.

After a friend died in a ship collision, Hülsmeyer was inspired to create a device that used radio waves to detect metallic objects. When mounted on a ship, that device could detect other ships straight ahead -- even in the dark or the fog -- in time to warn the crew and prevent a crash.

Hülsmeyer quit school and gave up a job to work on his invention. He obtained his first patent in Germany in 1904, when he was just 22 years old. Strangely, Hülsmeyer's invention -- the "Telemobiloskop," as he called it -- aroused little interest. He performed several successful demonstrations, but the German navy was unimpressed, and none of the European shipping lines he approached wanted to use his invention. Apparently, the device suffered from technical limitations; perhaps it was too difficult to operate, or maybe its range wasn't great enough.

While perfecting his invention, Hülsmeyer encountered a difficult problem: in a river full of ships all using his device at once, the radio waves might get jumbled and the ships could receive false warnings. He found a way to work around that problem, and it was exactly 97 years ago -- on January 16, 1906 -- that Hülsmeyer received a U.S. patent for his technique for making machines respond only to signals "from the proper transmitter."

In this patent, Hülsmeyer intriguingly suggested that his invention could even be used as a remote control -- "for actuating mechanism placed at a distance, for instance closing circuits and releasing clockworks [and] for the purpose of turning on and off all kinds of lights" or activating railroad switches and signals.

Tantalizing, yes, but nothing came of it. Hülsmeyer's invention never caught on -- leaving us to wonder how history might have been different if radar had been around decades earlier, in time for the Titanic, and in time for World War I.

Related link:

• Click here to read more about Hülsmeyer.

 

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