By History of Radio Broadcasting

Interesting Facts

  • In 1899 radio stations were installed in Kotka (Finland) and on the new icebreaker “Ermak”. In November 1899, thanks to the Ermak radio station, people were saved for the first time – a group of fishermen, who were carried away on an ice floe near the island of Gotland.
  • Heinrich Hertz, professor of physics at the Technical University in Karlsruhe, discovered electromagnetic waves propagating at the speed of light in 1887, and conducted and described experiments to transmit them over a distance without wires using a generator and resonator he created. Hertz did not think about the use of the discovery, stating: “It is absolutely useless. We just have mysterious electromagnetic waves that we can’t see with the eye, but they are there.
  • Nikola Tesla, by then working in the United States, invented the grounded mast antenna in 1893 while researching atmospheric electricity, and later experimented successfully with transmitters and receivers of his own design.
  • Oliver Lodge on August 14, 1894, at Oxford University demonstrated the transmission of a radio signal from one building to another at a distance of 40 meters. For practical use, the equipment had to be improved, but Lodge did not do it, ceding the palm to Popov and Marconi.
  • Guglielmo Marconi, an engineer and inventor from Bologna, began constructing radio transmitters and receivers in December 1894 and filed an invention application on June 2, 1896, that is, two months and eight days after Popov’s first radio broadcast.
  • On September 2 in Salisbury, near London, he publicly demonstrated his apparatus, transmitting not two words but a whole text, and to a distance of 3 km, i.e. 12 times farther than Popov.
  • Marconi became a major entrepreneur, received the Nobel Prize (1909) and the title of Marquis of the Kingdom of Italy.

Chronology of radio

  • In 1897 Marconi established The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in Britain and built the first stationary radio station on the Isle of Wight, and in 1898 he opened a radio factory in England with 50 employees.
  • In January 1898, the world first heard the sensational news on the radio – about the grave illness in his home in Wales of former British Prime Minister William Gladstone (the telephone line was cut by a snowstorm).
  • The first transatlantic radio communication session occurred on January 14, 1906.
  • In April 1909, Californian inventor Charles Herrold patented technology that allowed not only Morse code signals but also human voice and music to be transmitted by radio, and coined the term broadcasting (public broadcasting).
  • The death toll of the Titanic on the night of April 14-15, 1912, would have been much higher if the ship’s radio had not broadcast the SOS signal and the coordinates of the wreck. Soon a law was passed in the United States requiring all seagoing vessels to maintain radio contact with shore, and a year later the International Conference for the Safety of Life at Sea made this rule worldwide.
  • On August 20, 1920, Edward Scripp received the first license to open a private commercial radio station in Detroit, still in operation today.
  • In 1924, the BBC began broadcasting accurate time signals over the radio.
  • In 1930, Motorola produced the first car receiver.
  • In 1933, police patrol cars in Bayonne, New Jersey, were equipped with two-way radios for the first time.
  • Participants in Umberto Nobile’s polar expedition (1929) and the wintering on drifting ice led by Ivan Papanin (1938) were rescued thanks to radio amateurs.
  • In 1937, the first FM radio station in the United States began operating.
  • In 1954, the American firm Regency launched the first commercial transistor radio.
  • In the 20th century, authoritarian regimes widely practiced the jamming of “undesirable” radio broadcasts from abroad. This practice now persists in China, North Korea, Iran, and Cuba.
  • There are now over 50,000 public and commercial radio stations and about three million radio amateurs communicating on the shortwave band around the world, and the number of receivers is uncountable. All modern information technologies, including mobile communication, wireless Internet and satellite navigation, are based on the inventions of the founders of radio.
  • In recent decades, radio has given way to television and the Internet as the main medium, but hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to listen to it regularly, especially while driving. In 1984, Queen recorded the famous song “Radio Gaga” with the lyrics “Radio, what’s new? Someone still loves you” (What’s new, radio? Someone still loves you).