Who invented the radio?

Proclaimed in 2011 by the UNESCO Member States and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012 as International Day, February 13 became World Radio Day (WRD). The Radio is a powerful medium for celebrating humanity in all its diversity and constitutes a platform for democratic discourse. At the global level, radio continues to be the most widely used medium.

This unique ability to reach the widest audience means that radio can shape a society’s experience of diversity, setting itself up as a stage for all voices to be expressed, represented, and heard.

Radio stations must serve diverse communities, offering a wide variety of programs, viewpoints, and content, and reflect the diversity of audiences in their organizations and operations.

On the occasion of World Radio Day 2021 (DMR 2021), UNESCO calls on radio stations to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this event and the more than 110 years of radio.

This edition of the DMR is divided into three main subtopics:

• EVOLUTION. The world changes, the radio evolves. This sub-topic refers to the resistance of radio, its sustainability;
• INNOVATION. The world changes, radio adapts and innovates. Radio has had to adapt to new technologies to remain the means of mobility, accessible everywhere and for everyone;
• CONNECTION. The world changes, the radio connects. This sub-topic highlights the services of radio for our society: natural disasters, socio-economic crises, epidemics, etc.

For this reason, if you want to join this celebration, the recommendation is that you touch or be inspired by any of these three options, and if you need pre-produced material to celebrate this day, I invite you to download it from this site: DMR 2021

All material is copyright-free and can be used to promote World Radio Day.

But, taking advantage of this date, it is good to remember how our preferred means of communication emerged and try to elucidate who its inventor really was.

Who invented the radio?

We all know that Guglielmo Marconi was its inventor … or was he? Let’s see what the story says.

With his newly created coils, inventor Nikola Tesla soon discovered that he could transmit and receive powerful radio signals when tuned to resonate at the same frequency.

When a coil is tuned to a signal of a particular frequency, it literally magnifies the incoming electrical energy through resonant action.

In early 1895, Tesla was ready to transmit a wireless signal from his laboratory in Shoreham, Long Island, to West Point, 80 kilometers away, but that same year a disaster struck: a fire in a building consumed his laboratory, destroying his work.

This tragedy could not have come at a less fortunate time. In England, a young Italian experimenter named Guglielmo Marconi had been hard at work building a device for wireless telegraphy.

The young Marconi had already obtained the first patent for wireless telegraphy in England in 1896. His device had only a two-circuit system, which some said was not capable of “ crossing the pond.

However, Marconi covered their mouths when he organized long-distance demonstrations, using a Tesla oscillator that managed to transmit several signals that did indeed cross the pond.

Tesla filed his own basic radio patent applications in 1897, which were granted in 1900. For his part, Marconi made his first application on November 10, 1900, but it was rejected.

The same happened with new applications from Marconi for the next three years, which were also repeatedly rejected due to the priority of Tesla and other inventors.

In fact, the United States Patent Office said in 1903 that Marconi intended to ignore the use of the Tesla Oscillator which, supposedly, had already ” become a household word on both continents” (Europe and America).

But no patent is truly secure, as Tesla’s career shows. In 1900, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd. began to prosper in the stock markets, primarily due to Marconi’s family connections to the English aristocracy.

Shares in British Marconi soared from $ 3 to $ 22 a share and the young and glamorous Italian nobleman was acclaimed internationally. Both Thomas Alva Edison and Andrew Carnegie invested in Marconi, and even Edison ended up becoming a consulting engineer for American Marconi.

Later, on December 12, 1901, Marconi accomplished the feat of transmitting and receiving signals across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.

Otis Pond, an engineer then working for Tesla, told his boss, ” It seems Marconi beat you to it .” And Tesla replied, ‘Marconi is a good guy. Let him continue. He’s using seventeen of my patents. “

But Tesla’s quiet confidence was shattered in 1904 when the United States Patent Office suddenly and surprisingly reversed its earlier decisions and gave Marconi a patent for the invention of the radio.

The reasons for this have never been fully explained, but Marconi’s powerful financial backing in the United States suggests a possible explanation.

Tesla was embroiled in other troubles at the time, but when Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1911, Tesla was furious. He sued the Marconi Company for infringement in 1915 but was in no financial position to litigate a case against such a large corporation.

It wasn’t until 1943, a few months after Tesla’s death, that the United States Supreme Court upheld Tesla’s radio patent number 645,576.

And although in this way the work and achievements of Tesla were vindicated, the Court had a dark reason to recognize those rights.

It turns out that the Marconi Company was suing the United States government for the use of its patents in World War I, so the Court simply avoided action by restoring the priority of Tesla’s patent over Marconi.

But the history does not finish here…

On May 7, 1945, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow was packed with scientists and officials from the Soviet Communist Party to celebrate the first radio demonstration, 50 years earlier, by Aleksandr S. Popov.

It was an opportunity to proudly honor a Russian personality and try to derail the historical record of the achievements of Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla, widely recognized in most of the world as the inventors of the radio.

And for the record, May 7 was declared Radio Day throughout the Soviet Union. In fact, it is still celebrated on that date in Russia to this day.

Popov’s claim to primacy as the inventor of the radio came from his presentation of an article called ” On the Relationship of Metallic Powders to Electrical Oscillations ” and his demonstration of a radio wave detector apparatus at the University of Saint Petersburg. on May 7, 1895.

A year after his 1895 demonstration, Aleksandr Popov used his radio set to send a message in Morse code.

Popov’s device was a simple cohester: a glass tube with two electrodes a few centimeters apart with metal filings between them. The device was based on the work of the French physicist Edouard Branly, who described that circuit in 1890, and the English physicist Oliver Lodge, who refined it in 1893.

The electrodes would initially have high resistance, but when struck with an electrical impulse, a low resistance path developed that would allow conductivity until the metal filings clumped together and the resistance became too pronounced.

The cohesor had to be tapped or shaken after each use to re-spread the filings.

According to the Central Museum of Communications AS Popov in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Popov’s device was the world’s first radio receiver capable of distinguishing signals by duration.

He used a Lodge cohesion indicator and added a polarized telegraph relay, which served as a direct current amplifier. The relay allowed Popov to connect the receiver’s output to an electric bell or telegraph apparatus, providing electromechanical feedback.

The feedback automatically reset the cohesion: when the bell rang, the cohesion was shaken at the same time and there was no need to hit it after each use.

On March 24, 1896, Popov gave another groundbreaking public demonstration, this time sending Morse code via wireless telegraphy.

Once again at the University of St. Petersburg, at a meeting of the Russian Physical-Chemical Society, Popov sent signals between two buildings separated by 243 meters. A teacher was standing next to the class board in the second building, recording the letters the Morse code spelled. That first Morse code message was ” Heinrich Hertz. “

Coherence-based designs similar to Popov’s became the foundation for first-generation radio communication equipment and remained in use until 1907 when crystal receivers overshadowed them.

Popov was a contemporary of Marconi, but the two independently developed their radios without knowing what the other was working on.

Making a definitive claim as to who the inventor of the radio was is complicated by inadequate documentation of events, conflicting definitions of what constitutes the radio, and national pride.

One of the reasons Marconi gets the credit and Popov isn’t because Marconi was much smarter when it comes to intellectual property.

One of the best ways to preserve your place in history is to obtain patents and publish the results of your research in a timely manner.

Popov did neither. He never sought a patent for his ray detector and there is no official record of his demonstration of March 24, 1896. In fact, Popov eventually abandoned radio to turn his attention to the newly discovered Röntgen waves, also known as X-rays.

Marconi, for his part, applied for a British patent on June 2, 1896, which became the first patent application in radiotelegraphy. He quickly raised capital to commercialize his system, built a vast industrial company, and became known outside of Russia as the inventor of the radio.

Although Popov never sought to commercialize his radio as a means of sending messages, he did see potential in its use to record disturbances in the atmosphere using what would be a lightning detector.

In July 1895, he installed his first lightning detector at the meteorological observatory of the Saint Petersburg Forest Institute that was capable of detecting electrical storms up to 50 kilometers away.

Popov installed a second detector the following year at the All-Russian Art and Industrial Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, about 400 km east of Moscow. In this way, although I cannot take credit for having invented the radio, it could be recognized for having invented the first lightning detector …

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