Radio Broadcasting, History Of
No single person in the colorful history of radio can be credited with inventing radio. Radio's "inventors" almost all refined an idea put forth by someone else. Wireless communication became a theoretical proposition in 1864 when Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of invisible electromagnetic waves. More than twenty years later, German physicist Heinrich Hertz conducted experiments in 1887 to prove that Maxwell's theories were correct. The fundamental unit of electromagnetic wave frequency, the hertz (Hz), is named for him, though Hertz never promoted wireless communications.
Early Development of Technology
In the 1890s, four inventors simultaneously worked on wireless transmission and detection. French physicist Edouard Branly invented a signal detector called a "coherer" that consisted of a glass tube filled with metal filings that reacted when a signal was detected. English physicist Oliver Lodge worked on the principle of resonance tuning, which allowed the transmitter and receiver to operate on the same frequency. Russian Alexander Popoff developed a better coherer and a vertical-receiving antenna.
The fourth and best-known inventor-innovator was the twenty-year-old Italian Guglielmo Marconi, who began wireless experiments in 1894.Within two years, Marconi created a wireless system that was capable of sending and detecting a signal.
This page contains 201 words.
Radio Broadcasting, History Of article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 3,175 words
(approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our AM broadcasting Article
