The Birth of
British Broadcasting
2022 Celebrating the UK's pivotal role with "The Marconi Wireless Experience"
... an acknowledgement of Chelmsford's
pivotal role in the development of Marconi's wireless and broadcast industry, that
lead to the creation of the BBC and much else...
feedback to ...
marconi2022@m.usp.net
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STORYBOARD IN PROGRESS!! Please Navigate forward using the NEXT link at the bottom right of this page and the back button
The Official 2022 'Festival of Britain' to boost post-Brexit UK
Note that nothing has been announced concerning this investment of £100m of public money since November 2020 ...
Our pitch to the minister in charge,
Caroline Dinenage MP 27FEB2020: Government announces details of new review to protect the future of radio
Our initial take on the future of
the radio review.
The famous hut in Writtle where 2MT – and
broadcasting - was born |
(Image courtesy Simon Franklin, VK4/G1RMB) The story of the signed Marconi picture above is well worth telling. I was operating my ham radio station (G8CYK) on a Sunday afternoon (16th July, 2017), and was in a casual conversation with a Scottish Radio Amateur (EA5/MM0GOR) on holiday in Spain. Up popped a loud voice saying "VK4 ". Now VK4 identifies a ham as coming from Australia, but at that time of day, it is vanishingly rare to get a loud call from Australia - so we both wondered what was going on and if someone else has spotted a weak signal that they were drawing our attention to. So we listened and realised that the loud voice was indeed coming from 10,241miles away. This was a fabulously rare moment where random solar flare activity had created a tunnel in the Ionosphere along which the signal propagated some 10,241 miles - literally halfway around the world - and we were all using 100 watts or less power. By comparison R4 long wave uses 500,000 watts and can only be heard in the UK. As it happen, the Aussie station was expat (Simon Franklin, VK4/G1RMB) with Marconi and Essex connections - and he kindly sent a scan of a signed photo of Marconi that he had bought for his Marconi collection. "The photo -was taken by Walter Girche - who was a 1st World war photographer and was invited by Marconi onto his yacht to take one of the most famous photos in all of Radio history..." Read the story of that contact - and hear it - on my DX Diary website. |
Foreword (July 2017) There has recently been a series of centenaries marking landmark events in the development of radio for communication and broadcasting - where Chelmsford's Marconi Company was front and centre for most of the last century. One that really caught the public imagination was the first transatlantic transmission in 1901. In terms of its global impact on society, the "big one" for many people will be the celebration of 100 years of broadcasting - that began in Chelmsford. This anniversary has the potential to be a major media event, not just nationally but globally; and across the many industries that now combine to deliver the business of broadcasting. Online behemoths such as FaceBook, Twitter and Google all need to deal with awkward image and PR problems involving the stewardship of content ranging from dubious to downright subversive and management of users - where 10 year old kids can trivially send pictures of anything to anyone.
Since Marconi's "Writtle Hut" experiments in 1922 that lead to the
foundation of the BBC, there have been fundamental issues of governance
- setting out what can and cannot be broadcast that have been managed
very closely in the world of regulated broadcasting, and not left up to
the market to determine. When the internet simply overtook the ability
of all politicians to understand what was going on, a degree of anarchy
broke out that has not yet been wholly addressed and contained. And
possibly never will. Ideally, Chelmsford should put as much effort into celebrating Chelmsford's connections with Marconi as Bologna (his birthplace) does - which warns visitors in advance what to expect as they fly into Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport. The BBC – who put up a huge effort in 1972 for the 50th anniversary –
will probably try and take total ownership, but we must resist - or at
least insist in being closely involved. Next --->
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BBB2022.com : 2020 10/07/2021 |