Radio History - The very early years

The Pre-History of Radio

Jason Tanner has an extensive career covering many subject areas, but he started his career as a UK radio journalist. As an introduction to the history, he suggests the following question:

Where do you start?

AS with anything that's had a  long and significant impact such as medicine for example, its very rare that its the cumulation of one person's work or discovery. The history of radio as we know it today is the result of the discoveries and investment and patience of many.  This article reveals the lesser known Pre-history of Radio

In the words of pbs.org American Experience: 

"The first steps toward inventing radio involved discovering electromagnetic waves and their potential. Hans Christian Oersted was the first to proclaim, in 1820, that a magnetic field is created around a wire that has a current running through it. In 1830, English physicist Michael Faraday confirmed Oersted's theory, and established the principle of electromagnetic induction.  

In 1864, James Clerk Maxwell, an experimental physics professor at Cambridge University, published a theoretical paper stating that electromagnetic currents could be perceived at a distance. Maxwell also boldly postulated that such waves travelled at the speed of light. In the late 1880s, German physicist Heinrich Hertz tested Maxwell's theory. He succeeded in producing electromagnetic waves, and confirmed Maxwell's prediction about their speed. 

Not long after, Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, brought electromagnetic waves out of the laboratory and into the world.

He began with short-distance broadcasts in his own back yard. In September, 1899, he astounded the world by telegraphing the results of the America's Cup yacht races from a ship at sea to a land-based station in New York. By the end of 1901, Marconi had founded his own commercial wireless company and broadcast the first transatlantic signal."

But if you carried on reading this article you might just get the impression that radio is all down to America, but it's not, and they do at least have the decency to mention Faraday and Maxwell's contributions, and of course Marconi.

Marconi was italian although he set up his stool initially in Chelmsford in the UK where some early broadcast experiments took place. 

For a time, wireless broadcasts were limited to coded dots and dashes. But on December 24, 1906, Canadian-born physicist Reginald Fessenden changed that by sending the first long-distance transmission of human voice and music from his station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. His signal was received as far away as Norfolk, Virginia. The stage for commercial voice and music broadcasts was set.

A steady stream of inventions pushed radio forward. In 1907, American inventor Lee De Forest introduced his patented Audion signal detector--which allowed radio frequency signals to be amplified dramatically. Another American inventor, Edwin Armstrong, developed the superheterodyne circuit in 1918, and in 1933 discovered how FM broadcasts could be produced. FM provided a clearer broadcast signal than AM, but RCA's top executive, David Sarnoff, was pushing for the development of television. Sarnoff withheld FM from the public for more than a decade.

Still, the public demand for radio grew exponentially. Entertainment broadcasting began in about 1910, and included De Forest's own program, which he aired from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. An entertainment broadcasting venture based in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, became the first commercial radio station, KDKA, in 1920. The station WWJ, in Detroit, Michigan, also one of the firsts, began commercial broadcasting in the same year. Among the early proponents of entertainment broadcasting was Sarnoff, who used radio to create corporate empires at RCA and NBC.

The Smithsonian Magazine continues the story in American terms very eloquently with a switch from dots and dashes to a night at the opera ...(Click title)... To be continued