Radio

1933 Philco floor model radio

The specific inventors of most devices and technologies are somewhat easy to pinpoint and identify, this is unfortunately not the case for the humble radio.

Radio can refer to either the electronic appliance that we listen with (such as a modern am/fm receiver) or the content (such as news or music) that we listened to. It all started with the discovery of “radio waves”; they were revealed in 1887 by a German physicist named Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.  Electromagnetic waves, or radio waves, have the capacity to transmit music, speech, pictures and other data beyond site through the air. Many electronic devices work by using these waves, and that’s not just true for the radio.  In fact, microwaves, cordless phones, remote controlled toys, television broadcasts, and others can be built-in to the mix.

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, is credited with having sent and received his first radio signal in Italy in 1895. By 1899 he had flashed the first wireless signal across the English Channel and in 1902 received the letter "S", which was telegraphed from England to Newfoundland; this action is generally believed to be the first successful transatlantic radiotelegraph message. He had a US Patent issued for radio in 1904 (this action reversed the Patent Office’s earlier position in issuing a similar patent to Nikola Tesla). For these accomplishments he is often considered the inventor of radio.

In addition to Marconi, two of his equals in such research and development during the era, Nikola Tesla and Nathan Stufflefield had applied for patents for wireless radio transmitters as well. Nikola Tesla, a naturalized American citizen from Austria was an electrical engineer; he is now credited by the U S Patent Office with being the first person to patent radio technology in 1897; the Supreme Court overturned the validity of Marconi's 1904 U S patent in June of 1943 in favor of Tesla’s. Ironically, that was the same year of his death, (Tesla passed in January, the Court’s ruling was in June) at the age of 86.

The Tesla coil, which he invented in 1891, is still used in radio and television sets and other electronic equipment.

Claims have been made that Murray, Kentucky farmer and self made electrical engineer, Nathan Stubblefield developed radio between 1885 and 1892, before either Tesla or Marconi, but most radio technicians and specialists, consider his work to be something  all together different from radio as we know it.

On the other hand, Alexander Popov, a Russian scientist, appeared before the Russian scientific community with his “lightning detector” turned radio receiver to demonstrate radio technology as early as 1895. The date of his demonstration before the Russian scientific community (May 7) is still celebrated in Russia as “Radio Day”.

The first time the human voice was transmitted by radio is also a topic of debate. Claims for that distinction range from the phase, “Hello Rainey” spoken by Nathan B. Stubblefield to a test partner located near Murray, Kentucky, in 1892, or alternatively to an experimental program of talk as well as music by Reginald A. Fessenden, in 1906, while aboard a ship.

By 1915, speech was transmitted across the continent from New York City to San Francisco for the first time and that same year speech traveled across the Atlantic Ocean from Naval radio station NAA at Arlington, Virginia, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

It became possible in the early 1900’s, with improvements by Lee De Forest, to amplify the radio frequency signals picked up by the antenna before application to the receiver detector; thus, much weaker signals could be utilized than had previously been possible and the age of AM radio was born. De Forest was in fact the person who first to use the word “radio” to describe the overall process. Amplitude-modulated or AM radio allowed for a multitude of radio stations, which was also a new concept.  FM was born in 1933 which offered a higher quality of sound.

Radio became more useful following the invention of electronic devices such as the vacuum tube and several years later the transistor, which made it possible to amplify weak signals. Today’s radio systems are used for multiple applications ranging from walkie-talkie’s for children’s toys to the control of space vehicles; there’s amateur short wave radio, and lets not leave out broadcasting, as well as lots of other applications that I can’t think of right now. 

What would we do without it? After all unless you throw in that new fangled satellite radio programming that’s primarily used in autos that will not work at all inside an enclosed / covered area such as a garage , it’s free.

 

Sources …                                                             http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/radio.htm                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_radio                            http://answers.ask.com/Science/Physics/who_discovered_radio_waves http://www.freewebs.com/wa6dij/consoleradios.htm#