What would Marconi say about the first wireless phone call and ChatGPT

You may have read and seen it already but it is worth going back to it: 50 years ago, on April 3, 1973, there was the historic first telephone call from a mobile phone. The engineer Martin Cooperwho worked at Motorola and who was 44 at the time, summoned reporters to his office in New York, took to the streets and company rival AT&T called to tell him live that he had lost the race for the first wireless phone call.

It then took ten years to have the first cell phone model on the market; and another 24 before the phone with Steve Jobs became smart, that is, that infinite container of applications that we can’t do without. Here, you will hear a lot about this milestone today. What we forget to remember is that in the history of humanity all the great innovations are due not only to the vision and obstinacy of those who made them but also to the work of those who arrived first, who paved the way. Hence the famous expression: we sit on the shoulders of giants. And in this case the father of wireless, the giant behind the wireless revolution is Guglielmo Marconi: of him, with some approximation, we have studied that he invented the radio. What Marconi surely invented is wireless communication, the transmission of wireless signals. From which radio, television, radar and even the microwave oven were born; and the smartphone. It is good to remember this in these days when an icy wind is blowing on innovation in Italy: within a few days we blocked ChatGPT, banned synthetic meat, opposed electric cars and even the idea of ​​having energy-efficient homes seems to us an abuse. We look a country that is in a hurry to go into the past.

Yet if we really went there, in the past, we would discover that it is full of Italians who weren’t afraid to change the world and try to make it better. Which they experimented instead of forbidding. Instead, they risked becoming entrenched. We should start from there: will we be able to?