Radio The wireless TECHNOLOGY that everyone’s tuned in to
By sending signals using invisible waves instead of wires, radio reached around the world.
Marconi’s 1902 magnetic detector radio used an iron-wire band wound around two pulleys to pick up signals.
Marconi’s radio Guglielmo Marconi, a 19-year-old Italian, was fascinated when he read about the discovery of radio waves by German scientist Henrich Hertz. Hertz showed that radio waves were a kind of energy, just like light, that traveled in waves and could be made to carry information. Many inventors were excited by this information. Marconi found that radio waves could be used to send Morse code through the air, without using wires. In 1897, he started his own company and began to develop his ideas further.
Marconi’s funeral in 1937 was marked by two minutes of silence on all radios across the world.
Saving lives At first, Marconi’s “wireless telegraph” could send signals only a few miles, but his waves were beaming across the Atlantic Ocean by 1901. Soon, there were transmitters on both sides of the ocean, and wireless equipment on ships. When the Titanic struck an iceberg and began to sink in 1912, frantic calls for help from the radio operators on board the ship helped save 705 lives.
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HeinricH Hertz discovered radio waves in 1888, but he did not see their potential uses.
nikola tesla was the first to generate and transmit radio waves in 1895.
