Nice to know ... if it's true.
If our sources are correct, this was a busy day in the history of communication
technologies. Numerous sites tell us, for instance, that it was on this day in,
1905, that Cornelius Ehret of Rosemont, Pennsylvania patented the "radio
fax", and 17 years later, on this same day in 1922, Bradley A. Fiske of Washington,
D.C. patented a microfilm reading device. These seem to be significant steps in
the ongoing march of technology, but there's a bit of a catch. Via the web, at
least, I wasn't able to learn just what a "radio fax" is. What's more,
the only references that seem to exist for "Cornelius Ehret" are those
that repeat this same story, over and over again. No in depth material seems to
be out there - no background material, no biography, pretty much nothing. What's
more, in numerous histories of both radio and fascimilia, Ehret doesn't seem to
get mentioned at all. The same seems to be the case for Fiske. A naval officer
by the name of Bradley A. Fiske who apparently rose in the ranks and was responsible
for a number of naval inventions is mentioned a number of times on the web, but
no direct connection seems to be made anywhere between him and microfilm (if such
a connection exists). And as with Ehret, in the online histories of microfilm,
no mention is made of Fiske.
And all this sort of makes us wonder. Who were these people. Are their patents
real? And if they were, were they important or significant, or perhaps simply
anachronistic bookmarks in history? From the admittedly cursory search I ran in
my attempt to learn more about these people and their inventions, it seems that
the best they've done is earn themselves a place in the folklore of cyberspace.
Go to: Equal in the eyes of cyberspace.