Scientific Fact or Engineering Specification? The U.S. Navy's Experiments on Long-Range Wireless Telegraphy Circa 1910

In 1910 and 1913, the U.S. Naval Wireless Telegraphic Laboratory led by Louis Winslow Austin conducted a series of trans-Atlantic tests for the high-power spark-gap and electric-arc dischargers of the navy's Arlington wireless station. The experimental data that were supposed to verify the equipment's engineering specifications led to a scientific fact. Austin and his colleague Louis Cohen synthesized an empirical formula from the data-the "Austin-Cohen formula-that would be an important phenomenological law for the science of radio-wave propagation. The Austin-Cohen formula was transformed from an engineering rule for specific devices into a general fact of nature through the active mediation of the scientifically trained naval experimenters, and such a transformation succeeded because the formula became a crucial empirical reference for the theoretical debate between the surface diffraction hypothesis and the atmospheric reflection hypothesis.