Historical Examples of Misrepresentation, Innovation, and Morality in Physical Science and Technology

The pressures of publication, the desire to be first in innovation, and moral convictions have long been at work in the history of science and technology. Historians think and argue best through stories, so I've chosen three examples that exemplify one or more of these aspects. The first involves the discovery of electric waves by Heinrich Hertz in 1888; the second concerns the controlled production of electromagnetic radiation by Marconi and Fleming in the early 1900s; our final case involves a bitter controversy between the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the astronomer Friedrich Z\"{o}llner in the 1890s.