You're probably being fooled by the fact that it took those 2 generations for the first useful domestic-scale applications, electrical machinery and - most important of all - generation and distribution systems, to appear. [All of those, BTW, are necessary prerequisites for radio.] The reason that generation is the bottleneck is that primary batteries were - and remain, AAMOF - very expensive - basic electric motors actually predate the telegraph, but couldn't be successfully commercialised because no one could afford to use them. However, the driver for pushing electricity out of the parlour was its application to long-distance communications, which both made it clear that many useful things should be doable and provided reams of data to apply to the doing - and, ultimately, to the analysis of the phenomena involved that lead to the idea of radio.
Radio is the first example in history of the application of scientific theory to the creation of technology. Without a theory of electromagnetism it is very, very unlikely that any set of observations will lead to anybody stumbling over it, simply because the effects are so very subtle. Once the idea appears, it would seem that the Sharonans should be able to run with it, but we don't have any clear evidence that they've made all the enabling inventions in either theory or practice.
n7axw wrote:phillies wrote:Radio?
Hertzian (radio) waves were predicted by Maxwell. The experiment by Hertz and perhaps the Russian fellow confirmed the theory. For decades thereafter, the nonlinear detection device was the *coherer*, a decidedly steampunk creation*. Do these people *have* theoretical physics?
*Yes, I am old enough to have met an electrical engineer who designed a circuit using commercial coherers. I have also seen a Ford trimotor in commercial operation. However, these are a distance away from modern equipment.
Egads, phillies, you sound ancient...![]()
Seriously, the development of radio historically happened side by side with the exploitation of electricity. There is no real reason to believe that this wouldn't be true for Sharona as well, athough it's valid to observe that the voices undoubtedly have had an impact on that.
Don