Talk:Valdemar Poulsen

Untitled

wasn't he the first person to create the answering machine???

Yngvelindblom 20:39, 17 June 2007 (UTC): To my knowledge he was not an engineer as pointed out in the article. He actually failed to pass the qualifying test for the (in danish) Polytekniske Læreanstalt. This was mostly due to his problems with mathematics. The word inventor may be more correct. Or maybe it is just a language thing since english is not my native language?

And by the way. Yes. His first idea when inventing the Telegraphone was to create an answering machine. Little did he know of the great prospects of his invention.

User:MauriceM3 It would be helpful to state where the recording is stored today. Rumor has it that is Denmark (Technical Museum). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.247.194.134 (talk) 09:56, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Recording available online?

Hello, everyone.

The fourth item in the article's "External links" section is to a now nonexistent page at the website of the University of San Diego. Has anyone here saved the recording from the website, and would he or she be willing to email it to me? I have found no other source online; and, throughout several days, I have received no answer to the inquiry I directed to the university. I'm very eager to hear a copy of a magnetic recording made eleven decades ago.

Thanks for your help.

President Lethe (talk) 01:57, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Got it via archive.org, and stored it on Commons -- DS (talk) 13:27, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Arbitrariness of importance ratings

How can an article on Valdemar Poulsen be rated "low importance"? The patent he took out described a "Method of, and apparatus for, effecting the storing up of speech or signals by magnetically influencing magnetisable bodies" (see http://www.amps.net/newsletters/issue27/27_poulsen.htm). Even the worst dunce among Wikipedia editors/contributors should have at least a vague idea, in this age of information technology, what this phrasing entailed: had the patent been universally upheld to this day, any heirs of Poulsen would have been entitled to royalties whenever a reel-to-reel tape, cassette tape, DAT tape, video tape, diskette or hard disk (etc.) was produced/sold/used. Surely this inventor's life and career cannot fairly be said to be of low importance? And why not discuss his arc transmitter. Its invention is, after all, recognized as one of the milestones in the history of radio. You can just google the guy or you could check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_converter . As is often the case with Wikipedia its entry on Valdemar Poulsen is actually worse than nothing: it gives the unsuspecting reader the impression that Poulsen did little worth remembering and that his inventions were of little consequence. Why don't Wikipedia contributors stick to topics they actually know something about? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.89.33.37 (talk) 19:09, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

You've a good point about the importance. Why don't you be bold and take on the job of writing at Wikipedia about what you know about and changing the description of Poulsen's importance? — President Lethe (talk) 01:37, 30 January 2011 (UTC)