Power Over Ethernet Interoperability Guide

Blasts from the Past

To many of us today, the 19th century swirls with names we’ve never heard of, and perhaps don’t care to either. Emile Baudot, Claude Chappe, Cyrus West Field, William Thomson, John Joseph McCarty, Oliver Heaviside, and so on, to name a few. Wait a minute: Doesn’t the term “baud rate” sound very similar to the first name? Indeed, Baud rate did come from Baudot’s work. Similarly, “modern” transmission line equations came from William Thomson and Oliver Heaviside over the period 1855 to 1885. William Thomson and Cyrus West Field were the pioneers behind the early transatlantic cables. Modern transmission-line equations were a direct result of their efforts to understand long-distance propagation of (telegraph) signals across ...