Radio broadcasting. This timeline is provided to help show how the dominant form of communication changes as rapidly as innovators develop new technologies. The printing press was the big innovation in communications until the telegraph was developed. Printing remained the key format for mass messages for years afterward, but the telegraph allowed instant communication over vast distances for the first time in human history.
Telegraph usage faded as radio became easy to use and popularized; as radio was being developed, the telephone quickly became the fastest way to communicate person-to-person; after television was perfected and content for it was well developed, it became the dominant form of mass-communication technology; the internet came next, and newspapers, radio, telephones, and television are being rolled into this far-reaching information medium.
Experiments by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz between 1880 and 1890 proved the existence of electromagnetic waves. His successful work took place after earlier scientists explored and theorized about a potential connection between electricity and magnetism. Hertz’s work showed electromagnetic radio waves could be transmitted through free space and detected over a short distance.
This discovery motivated scientists and inventors in many corners of the world to find new applications for this new knowledge. Guglielmo Marconi HeadshotItalian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (pictured at right) became known across the world as the most successful inventor in applying radio waves to human communication in the 1890s.
In 1895 he sent a wireless Morse Code message to a source more than a kilometer away. He continued to work on his new invention, and in 1896 he took out a patent for the first wireless telegraphy system in England. Other inventors in Russia and the United States were working on similar devices, but over the next decade Marconi made the right political and business connections to gain the first real global acclaim for his development of radio. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the great leap in global communications in 1911.
There were at least four companies developing radio by 1900. Marconi’s success in funding his further research and development of radio to the point of widespread public adoption is said to be due to the fact that his family was well connected with the British aristrocracy. He became a popular public figure globally. Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie invested in his company.
Marconi had applied luck and ingenuity to jump to the head of the line against many other accomplished inventors. Foremost among them was Nikola Tesla. In the early 1890s Tesla had also begun researching uses of electromagnetic waves. He filed a basic radio patent application in the U.S. in 1897. However he was first most interested in a system he proposed that would use the Earth itself as the means to conduct long-distance signals.
Between 1901 and 1906 he developed an experimental wireless-transmission station at Shoreham, NY, called Wardenclyffe Tower. The facility was built to transmit messages, telephony and facsimile images across the Atlantic Ocean to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth as a conductor. But it never got off the ground. He lost the support of the project’s financier, J.P. Morgan, when he asked for more funding to expand the plant in order to compete with Marconi’s new system by switching to the use of wireless power transfer using electromagnetic waves. Tesla could find no new investors and the plant was abandoned in 1906.
In the years just before World War I, scientists at companies such as American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, and Westinghouse and inventors – including Reginald Fessenden, Lee De Forest and Cyril Elwell – were mapping out ways they could develop the potential of wireless communication so it could broadcast more sophisticated messages than the dots and dashes of Morse Code.
By 1914, Fessenden, a Canadian who was once employed in Thomas Edison’s labs, had worked with General Electric to build alternators that could sustain a consistent broadcast wave powerful enough to transmit voices and music over thousands of miles. Radio was developed for its military applications in the pre-World War I years, and the U.S. Navy held the patents.
Wireless Telegraph In 1919, Marconi’s resources were sold to General Electric and with that Radio Corporation of America (RCA, which spawned NBC Radio) – led by former Marconi employee David Sarnoff – was formed. The radio boom began, as people found it indispensable for receiving news and entertainment programs. RCA’s stock price went from $85 in early 1928 to $500 by the summer of 1929. The stock market crash of 1929 dropped it down to $20 per share, but tough economic times of the 1930s couldn’t stop the well-developed NBC network. The development of a vast array of programming choices in the 1930s brought the “Golden Age of Radio,” and by 1939 nearly 80 percent of the United States population owned a radio.
Historians say Guglielmo Marconi would not have been successful without taking advantage of Nikola Tesla’s inventions to develop and implement his communications systems. For example, Marconi was known to have had to use a Tesla oscillator to boost his gear enough to transmit the first signals across the English Channel. Some historical records claim that Otis Pond, an engineer who worked for Tesla, once said, “Looks as if Marconi got the jump on you.” And Tesla is said to have replied, “Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents.”
Tesla was granted the first U.S. patent on radio-related equipment in 1900, but in 1904 the U.S. Patent Office awarded Marconi a patent for the invention of radio, possibly due to his fame and connections. That decision was reversed during World War II in an interesting twist. When the Marconi Company filed suit against the U.S. government in the 1940s for using its patents during World War I, the U.S. Supreme Court restored Tesla’s 1900 radio patent, thus voiding the Marconi Company’s complaint.
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