Remember the story of Italian engineer and Nobel Prize winner G. Marconi, inventor of radio. As radio equipment began to get more powerful, he could transmit signals across greater distances. He thought that if he had strong enough equipment, he could beam signals across entire countries, possibly across continents and oceans.
I’ll tell you ’bout Texas radio and the Big Beat. Soft, driven, slow and mad, like some new languages
The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat) – song by The Doors
The first “border blaster” radio station was the legendary XED located across the Mexican border from McAllen, Texas. In the 1920s as broadcast technology became more powerful, the American FCC put a cap on the power levels of radio stations. In response, some enterprising broadcasters moved south across the border and set up shop in less-regulated Mexico. In 1930, XED broadcast with a power of 10,000 watts which was the most powerful transmitter in Mexico at that time.
Soon other stations popped up all across the Mexican border, increasing their broadcasting power to 250,000 watts and more. Their signals were so powerful they could be heard emanating from wire fences and bed springs by listeners across North America, often overpowering the signals of local stations whose broadcast power was capped by regulators.
Border blasters helped introduce country music to Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, and John Brinkley’s fake goat-gland cure for male impotence to a generation of flaccid consumers. During the Cold War the US government funded the border blaster Radio Free Europe to bombard the Soviet Union with Western messsaging and anti-communist propaganda.
Rewind the tape to the time before border blasters, to the early days of radio when signal-generation was limited to short ranges. Marconi said if he had equipment that was strong enough and precise enough, he could transmit across the Atlantic. Other scientists ridiculed him, saying it would never work. The curve of the earth would cause his transmissions to veer off into space, they argued.
But that’s not what happened. As amplification became strong enough to broadcast over longer and longer distances, the signals did in fact reach their receivers, seemingly bending around the slope of the earth’s surface. How could this happen? It happened due to one of the earth’s properties that was unknown at the time of Marconi’s early broadcasts: the ionosphere. When radio waves reached the upper layer of the earth’s atmosphere, this ionized layer reflected them back down to be received on the earth’s surface.
In other words, Marconi’s theory was correct, but for the wrong reasons. Inverting the saying, “I’d rather be approximately right than precisely wrong,” Marconi ended up being approximately wrong and precisely right!
History is filled with similar examples.
Alfred Wegener claimed the earth’s continents had previously all been joined together, and proposed a mechanism that pushed them apart. As it turns out, his mechanism was incorrect, but he paved the way for the accepted geological theory of plate tectonics.
Gregor Mendel’s conclusions from breeding pea plants were incorrect, but his work gave rise to the scientific laws of inheritance that form the basis of modern genetics.
Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms led to his mistaken belief that colors were inherent properties of light. This led to his discovery of the color spectrum and created a foundation for our understanding of optics.
The Marconi story illuminates the idea of “failing but not quitting.” When on the hunt to find new ideas, we have to be prepared to make mistakes. Mistakes are proof of effort. Embrace the imperfections. They may lead to unexpected discovies.
Fail forward.