the.com/wireless
a tangle of wires you simply moved into thin air and called freedom
means working or connected without physical wires, typically by radio waves — as in wireless internet, phones, or early radio itself.
from A plain English compound: "wire" + the suffix "-less" (Old English -leas, meaning "without"). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "wireless" was the word for radio telegraphy — communication that needed no telegraph wire strung across the land — and in Britain "the wireless" long meant the radio set itself. The word slept for decades, then woke up again with networks and devices, freshly literal: still, simply, without a wire.
- radio roots
- Marconi called early radio the wireless telegraph
- hidden cables
- WiFi still rides oceans of undersea fiber
- crowded air
- WiFi shares spectrum with microwave ovens
- charging too
- wireless power uses magnetic induction coils
- never free
- every device secretly begs for a charging cable
wifi — ieee 802.11 standard adopted 1997, now in ~19 billion devices globally
cellular networks — 2g gsm launched 1991 in finland, now 5g deployed in 180+ countries
bluetooth — version 1.0 released 1999, named after harald bluetooth, in ~3 billion devices
satellite internet — starlink launched 2019, now 7,000+ satellites providing global coverage