1791

Inventor Guglielmo Marconi [L] with assistant George Kemp in Newfoundland receiving first wireless signals across Atlantic from Cornwall, England, December 12, 1901.

---The Sept. 26 Economist offers a knockout, 14-page report on "Mobile Marvels," or how, "Once the toys of rich yuppies, mobile phones have evolved in a few short years to become tools of economic empowerment for the world's poorest people. These phones compensate for inadequate infrastructure, such as bad roads and slow postal services, allowing information to move more freely, making markets more efficient and unleashing entrepreneurship."

This focuses on three trends: the spread of mobile phones in developing countries and the accompanying rise in home-grown mobile operators that exceed the heretofore Western incumbent firms; the rise of China's two leading telecoms-equipment makers from low-cost, low-quality operators to high-quality and innovative powers; and development of a raft of new phone-based services in the developing world, which go far beyond text messages and phone calls, with new data services including agricultural advice, health care and financial transfers. And whereas government-run phone monopolies do remain in places like Ethiopia, they are being dwarfed in impact and innovation by the real competition one finds in spots like war-ravaged Somalia, a poor nation with no real government where a dozen mobile operators seek market share and explain a far greater "mobile teledensity" (how many phones one finds per 100 people) than Ethiopia. As telling are the many ways in which it's now apparent that the spread of phones promotes economic development, especially money transfers or mobile banking, which derives from the custom in the developing world of using prepaid calling credit as an informal currency far more efficient than physically sending it from one place to another.

"In the grand scheme of telecoms history, mobile phones have made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology. They have spread the fastest and proved the easiest and cheapest to develop. It is now clear that the long process of connecting everyone on Earth to a global telecommunications network, which began with the invention of the telegraph in 1791, is on the verge of being completed. Mobile phones will have done more than anything else to advance the democratization of telecoms, and all the advantages that come with it."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-warren/ithe-week-in-magazinesi-o_b_301425.html

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Woman on ducking stool accused of witchcraft.

James Warren:

July-August Duke Magazine has a terrific look at a Duke history professor's 15 years of research into European witchcraft. "A Witch's Brew" is the tale of Tom Robisheaux's quest to make sense of a rather common practice, with an estimated 100,000 such trials held between 1450 and 1750 in Europe (with about half in Germany).

He finds that women's central role in economies was part of the catalyst. "Witchcraft was women's work that went wrong, then, in areas like pregnancy, childbirth, the health of children, tending cattle, and the fertility of crops." Ultimately, the witch proved a variation on what he deems a bigger term, namely "the other."

"Societies almost always locate their fears, real or imagined, in those who seem to embody the opposite of all that is valued," he says.

An earlier reference to witchcraft here.