By August 1895, Marconi was field testing his system but even with improvements he was only able to transmit signals up to one-half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves.

I suppose beyond the engineering know how required they were looking at possible transmission ranges and thinking it simply wasn't practical, square law and all that.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 0 points 21 hours ago

This.

There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it's really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.

For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn't be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn't fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there's hardly a point).

So when looking at the technology in an early state, it's really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.