On a chilly evening early in 1922, in an old army hut located in a small Essex village, a small, ragtag band of men had gathered. It was St Valentine’s Day but romantic thoughts had been pushed to the back of their minds. They were preoccupied with something else; something far more important. As the hands of the timepiece on the wall inched slowly forward to 8pm, they scurried around tweaking and adjusting their equipment. Last-minute checks completed, the men waited eagerly to proceed.
This wasn’t a crack team of military personnel about to embark on a secret mission. They were a disparate bunch of engineers brought together by an enterprising Italian called Guglielmo Marconi. Under the auspices of his company, they were about to launch Britain’s first regular radio broadcasting service. At the appointed hour the transmitter and aerial crackled into life.
This experimental station, named 2MT and based at Writtle, a small village near Chelmsford, was the first British radio station to make regular entertainment broadcasts. Transmissions emitted from a hut near to the Marconi laboratories. Initially the station only had 200 watts and transmitted on 428 kilohertz on Tuesdays from 8pm to 8.30pm.
The first transmission was far from a triumph. The signal was weak and the sound was muffled. However, things did gradually improve. These early tests consisted mainly of gramophone records but a live concert was broadcast later.
The station, fronted by the eccentric Captain Peter Pendleton Eckersley, a Marconi engineer, was a surprising success. Eckersley, known as ‘Captain’ or ‘PPE’ by his friends, was no shrinking violet and never suffered from the dreaded disease of microphone shyness. His light-hearted enthusiasm effervesced across the ether and pervaded each broadcast.
The station was required to read out its allocated call sign ‘2MT’ at regular intervals. The British Army phonetic alphabet was widely used by radio amateurs in 1922; consequently ‘M’ was ‘Emma’ and ‘T’ was ‘Toc’, so ‘2MT’ became ‘Two Emma Toc’. The humorous and glib manner in which Eckersley read out the phonetic version of ‘2MT’ resulted in the station being affectionately known as ‘Two Emma Toc’.
PPE liked to experiment with sound and would use whatever was lying around to make unusual noises. He would perform spontaneous comedy sketches and improvise operatic parodies. His regular announcement, ‘This is Two Emma Toc, Writtle testing, Writtle testing,’ delivered in his jocular style, became extremely well known in a very short space of time.
The medium of radio had been established but its genesis had been a prolonged affair. In the late nineteenth century it was clear to numerous scientists that wireless communication was possible. Various theoretical and experimental advancements led to the development of radio and the communication system we know today. The key invention for the beginning of ‘wireless transmission of data using the entire frequency spectrum’ was the spark-gap transmitter. These devices served as the transmitters for most wireless telegraphy systems for the first three decades of radio.
During its early development, and long after widespread use of the technology, disputes persisted as to the person who could claim sole credit for the invention of radio. Many experiments were running concurrently and across continents. Some scientific theories were merely notional and later verified as unworkable, but they also helped fuel other ideas that did advance technology. There are several men who have been proclaimed the ’father of radio’, but perhaps one simple way to sort out the parentage is to place events in a rough chronological order.
Numerous scientists had posited that electricity and magnetism were linked in some way, but while both are capable of causing attraction and repulsion of objects, they remain distinct effects. In 1802 Gian Domenico Romagnosi proposed the relationship between electric current and magnetism, but his reports were largely ignored.
In 1820 Hans Christian Øersted publicly conducted an experiment that demonstrated the relationship between electricity and magnetism in a very simple way. He established that a wire carrying a current could deflect a magnetised compass needle. His initial interpretation was that magnetic effects radiate from all sides of a wire carrying an electric current, as do light and heat. Three months later he began more thorough investigations and subsequently published his findings. Øersted’s work influenced André-Marie Ampère’s theory of electromagnetism.
The British physicist Michael Faraday had discovered the existence of electromagnetic fields in 1845. After becoming interested in science, Faraday began working with Humphrey Davy, the renowned chemist and inventor. Davy gave Faraday a valuable scientific education and also introduced him to important European scientists.
Faraday’s greatest contribution to science was in the field of electricity. In 1831 he began a series of experiments in which he discovered electromagnetic induction. Faraday developed the theory that a current flowing in one wire could induce a current in another wire that was not physically connected to the first.
Although Faraday was the first to publish his results, the American scientist Joseph Henry had been working with electromagnetism. Henry had invented a forerunner to the electric doorbell, in particular a bell that could be rung at a distance via an electric wire.
James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist, was fascinated by Faraday and Henry’s work on electromagnetism. He noticed that electrical and magnetic fields could couple together to form electromagnetic waves. Neither an electrical field such as the static which forms when you rub your feet on a carpet, nor a magnetic field like the one that holds a magnet onto a refrigerator will go anywhere on their own account. Nevertheless, Maxwell discovered that a varying magnetic field would induce a varying electric field and vice-versa.
An electromagnetic wave subsists when the changing magnetic field causes another changing electric field, which then causes yet another changing magnetic field, and so on in perpetuity. Unlike a static field, a wave can’t exist unless it is moving. Once produced, an electromagnetic wave will carry on forever unless absorbed by matter.
In 1864 Maxwell published his first paper that showed by theoretical reasoning that an electrical disturbance resulting from a change in an electrical quantity, such as voltage or current, should propagate through space at the speed of light. Maxwell finally published this work in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873.
In 1866 Dr Mahlon Loomis described a system of signalling by radio. He proposed the theory that the Earth’s upper atmosphere was divided into separate concentric layers, and these layers could be tapped by metallic conductors on hills and mountain tops. This was to provide long-distance wireless telegraph and telephone communication, as well as draw electricity down to the Earth’s surface.
Dr Loomis claimed to have transmitted signals between two Blue Ridge Mountain tops 22km apart in Virginia, using two kites as antennas. The kites had 180-m-long wires attached to them. Both ends were grounded; one through a galvanometer. When he disconnected and reconnected one end, the amount of current flowing through the other end changed. He therefore claimed to be the first person to achieve wireless, electronic communication. His idea of conductive atmospheric layers has since been discredited.
Mahlon Loomis received a patent for a ‘wireless telegraph’ in July 1872. This patent claimed to eliminate the overhead wire used by the existing telegraph systems by utilising atmospheric electricity. It didn’t contain diagrams or specific methods and didn’t refer to, or incorporate, any known scientific theory. It is markedly similar to William Henry Ward’s patent that was issued a few months earlier. Neither patent referred to any known scientific theory of electromagnetism and could never have received and transmitted radio waves. It’s widely assumed that Loomis exaggerated his achievements to sustain interest in a system that he undoubtedly believed would work.
Towards the end of 1875, while experimenting with the telegraph, Thomas Edison described a phenomenon that he termed ‘etheric force’, which would later be known as high frequency electromagnetic waves. He announced it to the press on 28 November but cancelled this avenue of research when Elihu Thomson, the engineer and inventor, ridiculed the idea. It was not based on the electromagnetic waves described by Maxwell.
In 1879 David Edward Hughes was the first to claim to have transmitted and received radio waves. He spotted what seemed to be a new phenomenon during his experiments. He realised that sparking in one device could be heard in a separate portable microphone apparatus he had installed nearby. He demonstrated his discovery to the Royal Society in 1880, nine years before electromagnetic radiation was a proven concept. It was most probably radio transmissions, but others convinced Hughes that his discovery was simply induction. Hughes was so demoralised he didn’t publish the results of his work and though he continued experimenting with radio, he became diffident and left it to others to document his findings.
In 1884 the Italian Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti demonstrated a primitive device that would later be developed to become the first practical radio detector. He placed metal filings in a glass box or tube, and made them part of an ordinary electric circuit.
In 1890 Frenchman Edouard Branly demonstrated a much-improved version of Calzecchi-Onesti’s device. He called his version a ‘radioconductor’ (based on the verb ‘to radiate’: in Latin ‘radius’ means ‘beam of light’). His device would later be known as a ‘coherer’. Branly demonstrated that such a tube would respond to sparks produced at a distance from it.
In 1885 Edison took out a patent on a system of radio communication between ships. However, the patent was not based on the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves. He later sold the patent to Marconi.
James Clerk Maxwell’s theoretical prediction that electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light was verified in 1888. German physicist Heinrich Hertz made the amazing discovery of radio waves, a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths too long for our eyes to see. He demonstrated the transmission and reception of the electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell and thus was the first person to intentionally transmit and receive radio.
Hertz created a transmitting oscillator, which radiated radio waves and detected them using a metal loop with a gap at one side, which he called a resonator. This consisted of a 1m length of thick copper wire, with a small metal circle soldered at each end. The wire was twisted into the shape of a ring with the spheres almost touching each other. When the loop was placed within the transmitter’s electromagnetic field, sparks were produced across the gap. Hertz showed in his experiments that these signals possessed all of the properties of electromagnetic waves.
With this oscillator Hertz solved two problems. The first was timing Maxwell’s waves. He had physically demonstrated what Maxwell had only theorised: that the velocity of radio waves was equal to the velocity of light. This demonstrated that radio waves were a form of light. Second, Hertz found out how to make the electric and magnetic fields detach themselves from wires and go free as Maxwell’s waves. These waves became known as ‘Hertzian Waves’ and Hertz managed to detect them across the length of his laboratory. This simple resonator was the world’s first wireless receiver. Famously, Hertz couldn’t see any practical purpose for his discovery. However, his detection led to an increase of experimentation with this new form of electromagnetic radiation.
Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor, began his research into radio in 1891. Two years later he gave a detailed description of the principles of ‘wireless’ radio communication to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Tesla’s contribution involved refining and improving his predecessor’s work. A most important innovation was the introduction of the coupled tuned circuit into his preliminary transmitter design. This was the ‘Tesla coil’, with its primary and secondary circuits both synchronised to vibrate together in harmony.
Tesla’s apparatus contained all the elements that were integrated into radio systems before the early vacuum tube – known then as an oscillation valve – was developed. He first used sensitive electromagnetic receivers, which were different to the less responsive coherers later used by Marconi. Tesla’s modifications meant his transmitter could have signalled across the Atlantic, had he thought of such an enterprise. Supplementary work resulted in the development of wireless receivers that also included two synchronised circuits.
After 1890 Tesla experimented with transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil. He endeavoured to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling. He conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit incandescent light bulbs from across a stage. In 1893 at the National Electric Light Association, Tesla told his audience that he was certain a system like his could eventually convey ‘intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires’ by conducting it through the Earth.
Tesla would spend most of the decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors. Despite this, none of the enterprises succeeded commercially. Afterwards, the principle of radio communication was publicised widely from Tesla’s experiments and demonstrations. Various scientists, inventors, and experimenters began to investigate wireless methods.
Claims have been made that Nathan Beverly Stubblefield, an eccentric farmer from Murray, Kentucky, developed radio between 1885 and 1892, before either Tesla or Marconi. He received widespread attention in early 1902 when he gave a series of public demonstrations of a battery-operated wireless telephone, which could be transported to different locations and used on mobile platforms such as boats.
Stubblefield was convinced other people were stealing his ideas but his devices seemed to have worked by induction transmission rather than radio transmission. Nonetheless, Stubblefield may have been the first to simultaneously transmit audio wirelessly to several receivers, albeit over moderately short distances, while envisaging the eventual development of broadcasting on a national scale.
Stubblefield later became a recluse and lived in a rudimentary shelter near Almo, Kentucky. He died around 28 March 1928 and his body was not discovered until a few days later, having been ‘gnawed by rats’. While many later reports state that the cause of death was starvation, at the time of his death a coroner was quoted as saying ‘he apparently was a victim of heart disease’. The citizens of Murray, Kentucky, were highly affectionate towards their ‘mad radio genius’, calling him ‘The Father of Radio’ and even erecting a monument to him in the town in 1930.
Between 1893 and 1894 a Brazilian priest and scientist, Roberto Landell de Moura, who was commonly known as Roberto Landell, conducted experiments in wireless transmissions. He didn’t publicise his achievement until 1900, when he held a public demonstration of a wireless transmission of voice in São Paulo on 3 June. He was granted a Brazilian patent in 1901 before securing three more for a Wave Transmitter, a Wireless Telephone and Wireless Telegraph.
A lack of technical details makes it uncertain which sending technology was being utilised, but if radio signals were employed, then these would be the earliest reported audio transmissions by radio. Although Landell secured patents in Brazil and the United States during the early 1900s, he was unable to acquire enough financial support to further develop his devices.
The Indian physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose publicly demonstrated the use of radio waves in Calcutta in November 1894. Bose set fire to gunpowder and activated a bell using electromagnetic waves and therefore was the first to send and receive radio waves over a significant distance. Bose progressed swiftly with remote wireless signalling and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio signals. However, he wasn’t interested in patenting his work and allowed others to further develop his research.
Oliver Lodge transmitted radio signals on 14 August 1894 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University. This was one year after Tesla, five years after Heinrich Hertz and one year before Marconi. On 19 August 1894 Lodge demonstrated the reception of Morse code signalling via radio waves using a coherer. He had upgraded Edouard Branly’s coherer radio wave detector by adding a trembler, which displaced clustered particles, thus restoring the device’s sensitivity. Lodge had initiated a new system of communication by means of electrical waves that became known as wireless telegraphy.
In August 1898 Oliver Lodge patented ‘Electric Telegraphy’, which made wireless signals using Induction or Tesla coils for the transmitter and a Branly coherer for the detector. By making the antenna coil or inductance variable, Lodge had made it possible to tune in and select a desired frequency.
In 1895 the physicist Alexander Stepanovich Popov developed a practical communication system based on the coherer. His invention was capable of detecting electromagnetic waves that indicated the presence of electrical discharges, specifically lightning, in the atmosphere. The design of Popov’s lightning detector was similar to that of Marconi’s wireless telegraph, but Popov’s invention focused on receiving rather than transmitting signals. He didn’t apply for a patent for this invention.
Popov had expanded upon the work of earlier physicists, such as Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge, but he was the first to incorporate an antenna. Another significant discovery of Popov’s came in 1897, when he found that metallic objects could interfere with the transmission of radio waves, a phenomenon known as wave reflection.
On 7 May 1895 Popov demonstrated the transmission and reception of radio waves used for communication at the Russian Physical and Chemical Society. Around March 1896 he reportedly demonstrated the transmission of radio waves between different buildings to the Saint Petersburg Physical Society. This would have been before the public demonstration of the Marconi system. However, other accounts state that Popov achieved these results in December 1897, after publication of Marconi’s patent. He later experimented with ship-to-shore communication. Popov died in 1905 and the Russian government didn’t press his claim until 1945.
In 1895 the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford arrived in England. The First Baron Rutherford of Nelson was a keen innovator and inventor. He began using wireless waves as a method of signalling. Sir Robert Ball, who had been scientific adviser to the body maintaining lighthouses on the Irish coast, championed Rutherford’s work and hoped he would be able to solve the onerous problem of a ship’s inability to detect a lighthouse in fog. Rutherford increased the sensitivity of his apparatus until he could detect electromagnetic waves over a distance of several hundred metres.
Karl Ferdinand Braun made two major contributions to the development of radio. The first was the introduction of a closed tuned circuit in the generating part of the transmitter, and its separation from the antenna by means of inductive coupling. Around 1898 he invented a crystal diode rectifier or ‘Cat’s whisker diode’. Braun’s invention bridged a much longer distance.
Our chronological path now leads us to the person who is widely recognised as the true father of radio. Guglielmo Marconi was fascinated by Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of radio waves, and realised that if they could be transmitted and detected over long distances, wireless telegraphy could be developed for commercial purposes. He started experimenting in 1894 and installed rough aerials on opposite sides of his family’s garden in Bologna, Italy. His aerials were tin plates mounted on posts. Marconi managed to receive signals over a distance of 100m, and by the end of 1895 had extended the distance to over a mile. Marconi offered his telegraph system to the Italian government, but they turned it down.
The British Post Office was more receptive and Marconi moved to London. In February 1896 he constructed his transmitter on the roof of the Central Telegraph Office, and a receiver on the roof of a building called ‘GPO South’ in Carter Lane, 270m away. His later transmissions were detected 2km away, and on 2 September at Salisbury Plain the range was increased to 12km.
Marconi received the first wireless patent from the British government. In part, it was based on the theory that the communication range increases substantially as the height of the aerial above ground level increases. On 12 December 1896 Marconi gave his first public demonstration of radio at Toynbee Hall, London.
In 1897 Marconi established the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company at Chelmsford and the world’s first radio factory was opened there, employing fifty people. On 11 May 1897 tests were carried out to establish that contacts were possible over water. A transmitter was constructed at Lavernock Point, near Penarth, and the transmissions were received on the other side of the Bristol Channel, at the Island of Holm, a distance of 6km.
In November 1897 the first permanent radio installation, ‘Needles Hotel Wireless Station’, was installed at Alum Bay, on the Isle of Wight, by the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company. Alum Bay was an isolated but striking strip of coastline that provided open water straight to the mainland just as far as Marconi’s equipment’s top range.
Marconi managed to transmit to two hired ferryboats and to another station in Bournemouth. Alum Bay may have helped launch wireless but this didn’t impress the inventor’s landlord. The Royal Needles Hotel subsequently raised Marconi’s rent so he dismantled the station at the end of May 1900 and moved further down the coast.
The Daily Express was the first newspaper to obtain news by wireless telegraphy in August 1898. In December 1898 Marconi installed radio equipment on the Royal Yacht Osborne, which was moored at Cowes. Regular messages were relayed from the yacht and from Osborne House, also on the Isle of Wight. The messages were then passed on to Buckingham Palace. The Queen received 150 bulletins on the Prince of Wales’ health from the yacht, where he was convalescing. The Prince operated the equipment on the Royal Yacht while Marconi operated the equipment in Osborne House. Around the same time wireless communication was established between the East Goodwin Lightship and the South Foreland Lighthouse.
In 1899 Marconi was on board the HMS Defiant and observed proceedings as the ship’s captain gave orders to three cruisers in controlled manoeuvres via radio for the first time. The first telegraph message was sent across the English Channel on 27 March 1899. It was sent from South Foreland to Wimereux, in France, by Marconi. The success of the demonstration resulted in lighthouses throughout the UK being fitted with wireless sets.
On 17 March 1899 Marconi garnered a lot of publicity when wireless telegraphy was used to save a ship in distress in the North Sea. The three-masted ship Elbe was sailing to Hamburg with a cargo of slates. A thick fog was prevailing at the time when the ship went ashore on the Goodwin Sands. The East Goodwin Lightship heard the signals and communicated by wireless telegraphy to the South Foreland Lighthouse. From there telegraphic messages were sent to the authorities, and lifeboats at Ramsgate, Deal and Kingsdown were put on standby. Fortunately, the lifeboats weren’t required as the Elbe was able to refloat eight hours later. Nevertheless, this was the first occasion in which lifeboats had been alerted by the means of wireless.
About this time Marconi began to develop tuned circuits for wireless transmission so that a wireless could be tuned to a particular frequency. He patented this on 26 April 1900, under the name of ‘Tuned Syntonic Telegraphy’. His next project was to send a signal across the Atlantic. He convinced investors to spend £50,000 on the transatlantic project and purchased land in Poldhu, Cornwall. This site was chosen by Marconi because it stood directly opposite Cape Cod, where its sister radio station was to be built. The site was also chosen for its remoteness, to keep the project out of the public eye and out of the newspapers.
It was a massive undertaking that dwarfed anything he had built before. Construction work began in October 1900 when around 400 wires were suspended in an inverted cone shape from twenty masts. Infuriatingly, the system was blown down during a storm, so a temporary aerial was hastily assembled, using two surviving masts, to let the transatlantic experiments carry on. A year later the Poldhu Wireless Station had successfully transmitted signals to ships at distances over 321km. Nonetheless, the transatlantic project remained Marconi’s main goal.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Cape Cod site was eventually abandoned. Numerous difficulties, including severe weather, necessitated the move of the receiving station from Cape Cod to St John’s Newfoundland, which was also 965km closer to Cornwall.
Marconi travelled across the Atlantic to supervise proceedings from that end. Due to time and financial constraints, he opted not to build a masted receiving antenna array. The original receiving antenna in Newfoundland was 10cm in diameter and was held aloft by a balloon, which was ripped apart in a storm. The first attempt to send signals across was made in November 1901, but failed when one of two balloons holding the aerial wire aloft broke its mooring and floated away.
At 12.30am on 12 December 1901, at Signal Hill in St John’s, Newfoundland, Marconi heard three faint clicks through the earphones of his wireless receiver – the Morse code letter ‘S’ – and a new era was born. The receiving aerial, 180m of wire, was held aloft by six kites flying at an altitude of 120m.
The British government and Admiralty were greatly impressed and many people wanted to invest in the new technology. Demand grew and large numbers of ships carried the new apparatus, which saved many lives at sea. One of the most famous occasions was when the RMS Titanic sank. There were two wireless operators on board the ship that fateful evening of 14 April 1912. Jack Phillips was the senior operator on board the doomed vessel along with Harold Bride, the junior telegraphist.
The wireless room had been kept busy with commercial traffic since departing from Southampton. The transmission equipment had developed a fault as a result and in turn this had led to a decrease in power output. According to the Marconi manual and company policy, telegraphists were not to attempt to fix this particular component but wait until getting into port whereby a Marconi engineer could be called to repair the fault. Instead, Phillips made the decision to troubleshoot and fix the problem, working through his allotted time to sleep. If he had taken the decision to wait, it’s likely that they would not have had sufficient power to contact the rescue ships later.
Phillips eventually repaired the fault in the afternoon and had been working hard to clear the backlog of messages, sending them via Cape Race in Newfoundland. There had been several communications over the wire from various ships warning that the Titanic was heading towards an ice field. Most of these had not been conveyed to the bridge for various reasons, but similar warning messages had been delivered to the captain earlier that day and a lookout had been posted.
Phillips has since been heavily criticised for having told the radio operator of the RMS Californian, ‘Shut up! I am busy, I am working Cape Race,’ when interrupted on-air by his counterpart. The use of the words ‘shut up’ was a common short form among wireless operators to politely ask other operators to ‘keep the line free’ and had absolutely nothing to do with any conceit.
The Titanic struck an iceberg at 11.40pm that night and began to sink. Captain Edward Smith entered the wireless room and told the men to prepare to send out a distress signal. Shortly after midnight the captain came in again and told them to send out the call for assistance and gave them Titanic’s estimated position. Both men elected to stay at their positions for as long as possible to help communicate with the ships coming to assist with the rescue.
Phillips began sending out the distress signal code CQD. Bride had to remind him that the new call was SOS. Phillips stayed at the wireless set frantically tapping away at the key. While all this was going on, Bride relayed messages to Captain Smith about which ships were coming to the vessel’s assistance. Following one visit to the bridge, the telegraphers were warned that the forward part of the ship was flooded and advised to put on more clothes and grab lifesaving equipment.
The power was cut shortly after 2am, rendering the wireless equipment useless. Captain Smith arrived and told the men they were relieved of their duty and to ‘shift for themselves’. As the men made their preparations to leave, another crew member attempted to steal Phillips’ lifebelt. There followed a brief scuffle which ended when Phillips knocked the crew member out. By this time the water was beginning to flood the wireless room and they both rushed out, leaving the unconscious crewman where he fell. The men then split up, with Bride heading forward and Phillips heading aft. This was the last time Bride saw Phillips alive.
Harold Bride was washed overboard as the Titanic’s boat deck flooded. Nevertheless, he managed to scramble onto the upturned lifeboat Collapsible B and was rescued by the RMS Carpathia later in the morning. Despite being injured, he helped the Carpathia’s wireless operator transmit survivor lists and personal messages from the ship.
The fate of Phillips is less certain. There are several uncorroborated reports about what happened to him. One account stated that he had made it to the same lifeboat that Bride had reached but subsequently died of exposure. Another report had him clinging to the side of one lifeboat but he was too weak to clamber aboard. None of these accounts were ever satisfactorily confirmed and unfortunately his body was never recovered.
The Titanic took less than three hours to sink, taking almost 1,500 passengers and crew with her. Phillips had only celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday on the ship two days before the disaster.
Titanic’s wireless set had a nominal working range of 463km, but signalling more distant stations was possible. At night, ranges of up to 3,200km were attained with sets of similar design. The ‘T’ type aerial that was used offered greater power and sensitivity, both fore and aft, therefore optimised performance could be expected when the ship was pointed either towards or away from a distant station. The ability to send signals over great distances helped to summon assistance much quicker and undoubtedly saved many lives. Without Marconi’s technology, all those aboard would have perished and the fate of the ship would have remained a mystery.
In 1909 Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun, the inventor of the cathode ray tube. In his acceptance speech he freely admitted he didn’t really understand how his invention worked. He always regarded himself as much more a tinkering engineer than a scientist.
At the outbreak of the First World War all Marconi’s energy was diverted to the war effort. German technology was, in many ways, superior to that of the Allies. Nevertheless, when it came to radio, Marconi’s expertise helped Britain immensely. British wireless operators had discovered how to intercept German radio signals sent from the trenches and many surprise attacks were foiled due to the advance warnings given by Marconi’s equipment.
The Marconi technology also proved particularly useful at sea. During the Battle of Jutland, the primary and most critical naval engagement of the war, the substantial battle fleet of the German Imperial Navy had the potential to inflict mayhem on British maritime lifelines. To counteract this, the Royal Navy patrolled the mouth of the Skagerrak strait, bottling the Germans into the Baltic Sea.
On 30 May 1916 the German fleet attempted a break-out. Thanks to radio intercepts, Lord Jellicoe, the British admiral, had advance warning of the move, giving him time to order his ships to battle stations. The subsequent battle turned out to be inconclusive. Under cover of night, the German fleet slipped back to the security of the Baltic ports, where it remained until the end of the war. A year later the entire imperial battle fleet was escorted to Scapa Flow and scuttled.
With Europe at war, and wireless engineers immersed in the war effort, it was left to the Americans to advance long-distance wireless telephony. In October 1915 the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, working with the Western Electric Company, successfully broadcast speech and music from Arlington, Virginia, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, a distance of some 5650km. For this, the first successful transatlantic telephonic relay, as many as 500 valves were required for the transmitter. An even greater distance, 8,000km, was achieved a year later when speech was again relayed from Arlington, this time to Honolulu.
When the Radio Act of 1912 was legislated under US Federal law, licensing fell under the auspices of the Department of Commerce. There is no comprehensive record of the stations licensed under this act. The department had no authority to deny a licence to anyone who requested one, and didn’t regulate frequencies or power.
The aspirations of the early radio pioneers didn’t include the broadcasting of music and information into homes using wireless. All the same, some people saw it as a serious wireless alternative to the Bell telephone.
Conveying voice or music by radio required a continuous-wave transmitter. In 1902 Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen invented an arc converter as a generator of continuous-wave radio signals. Beginning in 1904, Poulsen used the arc for experimental radio communication from Lyngby to various sites in Denmark and Great Britain.
The arc was formed between copper and carbon electrodes enclosed in a gas-tight vessel containing either coal gas or hydrogen, and inserted directly in the aerial-earth circuit. The arc transmitter emitted a fixed constant note in the receiver’s headphones when the Morse key was pressed. This enabled signals to be sent over very much longer ranges than by spark transmission. By connecting a microphone in the direct current supply circuit of the arc, it was seen that this could vary the current flowing through the arc and so be used for the transmission of wireless telephony. The high-frequency continuous wave produced by the arc acted as a carrier wave for the small varying waves of low-frequency speech that were superimposed upon it. This ‘modulated’ wave was then picked up in the aerial of the receiver, and the low-frequency current was detected and separated from the carrier before being received through the headphones.
The radio-telephone years of 1900-1920 were known more for the rival voice transmission technologies than for broadcasting. While spark was quickly rejected as too noisy and the alternator as too costly, it was the many versions of the Poulsen arc that clearly dominated radio-telephone inventions and early broadcasting for an audience.
Surprisingly, Marconi saw no need for voice transmission. He felt that the Morse code was adequate for communication between ships and across oceans. Marconi didn’t anticipate the development of the radio and broadcasting industry and he left the early experimentation with wireless telephony to others.
Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden’s technology and circuit arrangements were very different to Marconi’s. He tried all the various methods of generating wireless signals in the early days: by spark, by arc and by the high-frequency alternator. His work was dominated by his interest in transmitting words without wires. Fessenden’s equipment included a spark transmitter, using a Wehnelt interrupter working a Ruhmkorff induction coil. In 1899 he noted that when the key was held down for a long dash, the odd wailing sound of the Wehnelt interrupter could be clearly heard in the receiving telephone. This suggested to him that by using a spark rate far above voice band, wireless telephony could be achieved.
On 23 December 1899 Fessenden succeeded in transmitting speech, albeit highly distorted, over a distance of 1.5km. By 1904 fairly satisfactory speech had been transmitted by the arc method. Nevertheless, Fessenden remained an impassioned supporter of the continuous wave method of transmission.
He developed his new high-frequency alternator-transmitter, showing its utility for point-to-point wireless telephony, including interconnecting his stations to the wire telephone network. Fessenden placed a carbon microphone directly in line between his alternator and the antenna lead.
Fessenden also invented the heterodyne effect. In this, a received radio wave is combined with a wave of a frequency slightly different from the carrier wave. The intermediate frequency wave that is produced as a result is easier to amplify, and can then be demodulated to generate the original sound wave.
Marconi’s transatlantic experiments had captured the public’s imagination, but Fessenden had also been conducting his own transatlantic transmission experiments from the National Electric Signalling Company at Brant Rock in Massachusetts. To carry out these experiments Fessenden’s Company built a station at Machrihanish in Scotland, installing exactly the same equipment as at Brant Rock. After numerous attempts it became evident that no signals were coming through from Scotland. Fessenden sent one of his best engineers, James Armor, to investigate and, in January 1906, Armor sent a telegram saying that Machrihanish was receiving the signals from Massachusetts loud and clear.
Encouraged by this achievement, Fessenden enhanced the effectiveness of his high-frequency alternator, and with a new type of umbrella antenna of his own design, both stations were in regular communication. In June a small testing station was built at Plymouth, 17km from Brant Rock. The engineers used voice transmission to communicate with each other.
In November a letter was received from James Armor containing the astounding news that he had clearly heard the complete conversation of Adam Stein, Fessenden’s chief engineer, at Brant Rock, telling the operator at Plymouth ‘how to run the dynamo’. The first human voice to be transmitted across the Atlantic, therefore, was that of Adam Stein.
The Machrihanish tower collapsed during a severe winter storm on 5 December 1906. It was never rebuilt and so Fessenden’s transatlantic trials came to a rapid conclusion. Instead, he decided to concentrate on developing voice transmission. On Christmas Eve 1906, from his workshop in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, Fessenden sent a Morse message alerting all ships at sea to expect an important transmission. What they heard that night was the first public broadcast of the human voice.
Fessenden stepped up to the asbestos-covered microphone and proceeded to give a brief description of the forthcoming broadcast. He then played an Edison wax-cylinder recording of Handel’s Largo. Fessenden then treated his listeners to his rendition of Oh Holy Night on the violin, actually singing the last verse as he played.
Adam Stein was due to make an announcement but panicked and was unable to say a word. Consequently, he became the first person to suffer from ‘mic fright’. Fessenden’s wife, Helen, and his secretary, Miss Bent, had promised to read passages from the Bible, but when the time came to perform they also froze and Fessenden took over. He concluded the broadcast by extending Christmas greetings to his listeners and asked them to write and report to him on the broadcast wherever they were. The broadcast was successfully repeated on New Year’s Eve.
Fessenden’s claim that these two broadcasts were the first to broadcast speech and music is disputed. There are claims that the first broadcast of music actually took place on 15 June 1904 at the university in Graz, Austria. Professor Otto Nussbaumer personally yodelled an Austrian folk song into a microphone and the transmission was heard at a distance of 22m. Then there is the claim that in the spring of 1906, a full six months before Fessenden’s broadcast, a wireless operator on board the USS Missouri played the melody of the folk song Home Sweet Home by varying the speed of the spark generator. Nevertheless, Fessenden can rightly claim that his was the first intentional broadcast.
Fessenden’s methods were extremely primitive when compared to today’s standards. They were, nevertheless, the first real departure from Marconi’s damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy, which other experimenters were merely emulating or adapting.They were the first groundbreaking steps towards radio communications and radio broadcasting.
Following the Titanic sinking after colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic, Fessenden announced that he had ‘bounced signals off icebergs by radio, measuring the distance.’ His invention could realistically be described as the forerunner of radar.
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden died in Bermuda on 22 July 1932. His tomb was inscribed with these words: ‘By his genius, distant lands converse and men sail unafraid upon the deep.’
It’s unclear exactly who was the first person to conduct a telephony broadcast in Britain but most historians point to Lieutenant Quentin Crawford. In 1907 the British Admiralty authorised him to create an experimental radio station on board HMS Andromeda. Using the call sign QFP, he adapted the spark wireless transmitter on board to broadcast a programme featuring music and speech for the benefit of the Royal Navy fleet in Chatham dockyard. Crawford’s historic inaugural broadcast was a patriotic concert programme performed by navy personnel. This transmission was widely perceived to be a success but the navy decreed that the broadcast be kept secret.
There are also several reports that a British amateur had broadcast wireless telephony that year. H. Anthony Hankey had used a portable Poulsen Arc transmitter located in Aldershot in a demonstration to members of the military in Midhurst, Kent. Hankey’s broadcast consisted of a few songs and monologues performed personally by him. Many people believe this may have been the first wireless telephony broadcast in the UK. Nevertheless, unlike the Admiralty, the army was unenthusiastic about the adoption of wireless in the years before the First World War and took it no further.
Lieutenant Crawford’s naval broadcast from Chatham is claimed as the first radio music broadcast from a ship. A year later, army radio operators at Sandy Hook in New Jersey made several experimental broadcasts of music for reception at Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island, the location of the famous Statue of Liberty.
Harry Grindell Matthews was a British wireless experimenter whose first telephony broadcasts featured him whistling and playing the banjo. He demonstrated the versatility of wireless telephony by being the first to communicate with a moving aircraft. On Saturday, 23 September 1911, at Ely Racecourse in Cardiff, Matthews established radio contact with pioneer aviator Bentfield Charles Hucks, who was flying at a height of 215m and at a speed of 96km per hour.
Matthews called his invention an Aerophone device, which soon attracted the attention of the government. He was asked to demonstrate its capabilities to the Admiralty. Matthews agreed, but requested that no experts be present at the scene. When four of the observers dismantled part of the device before the demonstration began and took notes, Matthews stopped the demonstration and sent observers away. Newspaper reports backed Matthews’ side of the story but The War Office denied any meddling. They initially claimed that the demonstration was a failure but later stated that the affair was just a misunderstanding.
In 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, the British government announced an award of £25,000 to anybody who could remotely control unmanned vehicles. Matthews claimed that he had produced a remote control system that used selenium cells. He demonstrated it with a remotely controlled boat to representatives of the Admiralty at Richmond Park’s Penn Pond. It’s reported that he received his payment but the Admiralty never used the invention.
Matthews claimed to have perfected a way of transmitting energy without wires. He claimed that his ‘Death Ray’ could stop the ignition system of a spark-ignition engine and, with enough power, would be able to shoot down aeroplanes and explode ammunition dumps.
The Air Ministry was wary because of previous bad experiences with would-be inventors. Nevertheless, Matthews was requested to demonstrate his ray on 26 April 1924 to the armed forces. In Matthews’ laboratory they saw how his invention switched on a light bulb and cut off a motor. Unfortunately, he failed to convince the officials, who suspected it might be a confidence trick.
When the British Admiralty requested a further demonstration, Matthews refused to give it and announced that he had an offer from France. Swiftly, the High Court in London granted an injunction that forbade Matthews from selling the rights to the ‘Death Ray’. When Major Wimperis arrived at his laboratory to discuss a new agreement, Matthews had already flown to Paris.
Questions were asked in parliament what the government intended to do to stop Matthews selling his ‘Death Ray’ to a foreign power. The Under Secretary for Air answered that Matthews was not willing to let them investigate the ray to their satisfaction. The government said it was vital that Matthews demonstrated the ray’s ability to stop a petrol motorcycle engine in the conditions that would satisfy the Air Ministry. In return, he would receive £1,000 and further consideration. From France, Matthews answered that he was not willing to give any further proof.
Matthews then tried to market his invention to America. He was offered $25,000 to demonstrate his beam to the Radio World Fair at Madison Square Garden. He refused again and claimed, without substance, that he wasn’t allowed to demonstrate it outside Britain.
He later claimed to have invented a device that projected pictures onto clouds, aerial mines and a system for detecting submarines. However, his reputation preceded him and the government was no longer interested in his concepts.
In 1904 Sir John Ambrose Fleming invented the thermionic diode or valve, which assisted the detection of high-frequency radio waves. He’d adapted Edison’s electric lamp and added a second element called a plate. The valve contained a carbon filament that was made incandescent by an electric current. The fibre was sealed in the glass bulb and all of the air was removed. Around the filament, but not touching it, was a metal pipe attached to a wire and sealed through the bulb, while the terminals of the filament and the cylinder were fixed to a base. The Fleming Diode acted as a detector and rectifier of the incoming high-frequency alternating currents picked up by the receiver’s aerial, and transformed these into direct current to which the headphones responded.
John Ambrose Fleming’s invention was a major step forward in wireless technology as it was considerably more efficient as a radio wave detector than coherers or magnetic detectors. Valves became fundamental components in radios, as well as television sets and computers for fifty years, before being superseded by the transistor.
American Lee de Forest was convinced there was a great future in wireless telegraphy but Marconi was already making impressive progress in both Europe and the United States. One drawback to Marconi’s approach was his use of a coherer as a receiver. This method was slow, insensitive and unreliable. To provide a permanent record of the transmission, it had to be tapped to restore operation. He was determined to devise a superior system, including a self-restoring detector that could receive transmissions by ear, thus giving it the ability to receive weaker signals and also enabling faster Morse code sending speeds.
After a succession of short-lived jobs with various communication companies, de Forest decided to strike out on his own. In the autumn of 1901 Marconi had been hired by the Association Press to provide reports for the International Yacht Races in New York, and de Forest struck a deal to provide a similar service for the smaller Publishers’ Press Association.
The race deal turned out to be a disaster for de Forest as his transmitter broke down. In a fit of rage, he threw it overboard and had to revert to using a spark coil as an alternative. Unfortunately, none of the other companies in attendance had effective tuning for their transmitters, so only one could transmit at a time without causing reciprocal interference. Although an attempt was made to have the different systems avoid disputes by rotating operations over five-minute intervals, the arrangement broke down quickly, resulting in signals being lost in electronic mush. De Forest mournfully conceded that under the circumstances, visual semaphore ‘wig-wag’ flags were the only successful ‘wireless’ communication during that period.
In January 1907 de Forest patented the triode valve, which he called the ‘audion’. He modified Ambrose Fleming’s design by adding a grid to control and amplify radio and sound waves. Not only was the audion a very efficient detector of wireless waves, it also acted as an amplifier. This made it possible for the reception of transmissions over far greater distances than had been possible before. This was one of the most important strides in the development of communication as many of the previous problems had now been overcome.
Later that year he formed the de Forest Radio Telephone Company and began seeking investors. His first experimental broadcasts were transmitted from the top floor of the Parker Building on Fourth Avenue and Nineteenth Street in New York in February 1907. Although the broadcast consisted mainly of Columbia gramophone records, it was widely considered successful. At times it was the victim of quite severe interference from Morse code transmissions and some noticeable signal fading due to atmospheric conditions.
As de Forest (and hundreds of other inventors) unfortunately discovered, you had to be a promoter as well as an inventor. Arguably, there was no wireless and radio inventor who was more associated with controversy than Lee de Forest. He was occasionally linked with unsavoury business promoters and was accused frequently of dishonest business practices. Opinions are divided about him – he seems to have been vilified or sanctified in equal measure – yet the evidence robustly indicates that he was the first to want to use the wireless for more than two-way commercial message traffic. De Forest fought for decades to persuade the scientific community that he deserved to be known as the ‘Father of Radio’. He spent millions in court battles trying to validate and revalidate his patents.
In 1909 de Forest invited his eminent mother-in-law, Harriet Stanton Black, to give the world’s first broadcast talk regarding the women’s suffrage movement. De Forest was a music lover and he soon came up with the idea of having a live performer on the radio. In September 1907 Eugenia Farrar, the Swedish soprano, sang a few songs from the USS Connecticut in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In an early company article, de Forest predicted, ‘It will soon be possible to distribute grand opera music from transmitters placed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House by a Radio Telephone station on the roof to almost any dwelling in Greater New York and vicinity.’
That prediction eventually became reality on 12 January 1910 when he conducted an experimental broadcast of the live performance of the opera Tosca. The next day he broadcast a performance with the participation of the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. He installed a 500-watt transmitter in an attic room of the opera house for these broadcasts and the aerial was strung between two bamboo fishing rods on the roof. To capture the performances, he placed one microphone on the stage and another in the wings. The audiences for these broadcasts were largely journalists who were invited to experience the events. They were huddled around receivers placed strategically in different parts of New York.
By the start of 1916 de Forest had refined his audion to be used as an oscillator for the radio-telephone. He sold it to the telephone company as an amplifier of transcontinental phone calls. Later that year he broadcast the first radio advertisements from experimental radio station 2XG in New York City. Incidentally, the advertisements were for his company’s products. He went on to sponsor radio broadcasts of music, but received little financial backing.
De Forest transmitted the first presidential election report by radio in November 1916, from his station in The Bronx, assisted by a wire supplied by the Republican newspaper The New York American. He sent bulletins out every hour, and between the bulletins listeners heard The Star-Spangled Banner and other anthems, songs and hymns. The broadcast lasted approximately six hours until signing off about 11pm. However, it ended before Woodrow Wilson came from behind to win, so many of the listeners heard the wrong candidate declared the winner.
A few months later, de Forest moved his transmitter to High Bridge, New York. He had been granted a licence from the Department of Commerce for an experimental radio station, but had to cease all broadcasting when the US entered the First World War in April 1917.
De Forest resumed his broadcasts from High Bridge after the war, but came into conflict with the US Federal Inspector, so moved his operations to California in April 1920. He operated his station 6XC from the California Theatre until November 1921, after which the transmitter was moved to Oakland and 6XC became KZY, the Rock Ridge Station.
Lee de Forest moved on to work on a variety of non-radio technical devices, most notably his Phonofilm system, a process to make the movies talk by adding a synchronised optical soundtrack to the film. In his final years, he was disillusioned at what radio programming had become. Speaking to reporters, he asked, ‘Why should anyone want to buy a radio? Nine-tenths of what one can hear is the continual drivel of second-rate jazz, sickening crooning by degenerate sax players, interrupted by blatant sales talks.’
John Stone Stone was an American physicist and inventor. He first worked for the research and development department of the Bell Telephone Company. However, he is probably better known for his influential work developing early radio technology, in particular for improvements in tuning. He recognised that his earlier work on resonant circuits on telephone lines could be applied to improve radio transmitter and receiver designs. Stone used his knowledge of electrical tuning to develop a ‘high selectivity’ approach to reduce the amount of interference caused by static and signals from other stations.
In 1902 he formed his own company in Boston. Beginning in 1905, Stone demonstrated radio-telegraphy stations to the US Navy using spark transmitters and electrolytic detectors and by the end of 1906, the government had purchased five ship and three land installations. The company’s first commercial radio-telegraph link was between the Isle of Shoals and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which operated during the summer of 1905, replacing a failed Western Union telegraph cable. Despite his advanced designs, the Stone Telegraph and Telephone Company failed in 1908. Its assets, including its valuable portfolio of patents, were sold to Lee de Forest’s company and Stone spent the remainder of his career as an engineering consultant.
Before the First World War, receivers were mainly crystal sets, which were exceedingly insensitive and non-selective. They were connected to a pair of headphones and required a long aerial. In Britain, the new technology was strictly controlled by the Post Office. It was reasonably simple to acquire a receiving licence but a much more complicated proposition to obtain permission to use a transmitter.
The British Post Office had to be satisfied that the applicant had suitable engineering qualifications, or knowledge, to operate the transmitter. Transmitter output power was restricted to 10 watts, and use was only permitted for scientific research or for something of use to the public. Only a small number of radio amateurs were transmitting before the First World War.
As in many other wars, the First World War hastened the development of technology that was useful for the war effort. Although valves had been produced since 1904, the inability to produce a good vacuum meant that these devices were unreliable and had a short life.
Irving Langmuir was an American physicist, best known to the electrical industry as the inventor of the gas-filled tungsten lamp. He discovered that filling the bulb with an inert gas, such as argon, could lengthen the lifetime of the filament. He also discovered that by curling the thread into a tight coil, he could enhance its efficiency. Langmuir developed a method of producing an excellent vacuum, but his first major development was the improvement of the diffusion pump, which ultimately led to the invention of the high-vacuum tube (the vacuum tube is more commonly known as a valve in Britain and Europe).
French military scientists used Langmuir’s technique to produce a reliable and efficient triode valve, which was called the ‘R’ valve. It was used in military communication equipment and was produced in large numbers. After 1916 lamp manufacturers Osram also produced the valve in England.
When the war ended, many of these valves appeared on the surplus market and therefore were readily obtainable. A lot of people were interested in the new technology and began building receivers, and so the number of radio amateurs grew rapidly. The new valves made it possible to easily transmit high-quality speech and music, and allowed high-sensitivity receivers to be developed.
The first regularly scheduled broadcasts had begun in America in 1912. The person responsible for these was Charles David Herrold. He had enrolled at Stanford University in 1895. While there, he was inspired by reports of Marconi’s demonstrations and began to experiment with the new technology.
Illness forced Herrold to withdraw from the university without graduating after three years. When fully recovered he moved to San Francisco, where he developed a number of inventions for surgery, dentistry and underwater lighting. Unfortunately, the infamous 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck and Herrold lost everything.
Subsequently, he took an engineering teaching position at Heald’s College of Mining and Engineering in Stockton, California. During his spell there, one of his research projects included the remote detonation of mines using radio signals. During his three years at the college, he received further inspiration from the novel ‘Looking Backward’ by Edward Bellamy, which envisaged the dissemination of entertainment programming over telephone lines to individual homes. Herrold began to speculate about the possibilities of using radio signals to distribute the programming more efficiently.
When he returned to San Francisco in 1909 he opened his own school. The Herrold College of Wireless and Engineering was located in the Garden City Bank Building at 50 West San Fernando Street in San Jose, where a huge ‘umbrella-style’ antenna was constructed on the roof of the building.
The college’s primary purpose was to train radio operators for handling communications aboard ships or staffing shore stations. Although Herrold never held a degree, his students knew him respectfully as ‘Doc’. By all accounts he was an excellent teacher. His spare time was spent inventing ways to make his wireless radio inventions talk.
Herrold’s primary radio-telephone effort was towards developing a commercial system suitable for point-to-point service. Working with his assistant Ray Newby, he initially used high-frequency spark transmitters. Nevertheless, as the limitations of the high-frequency spark soon became apparent, he diverted to refining versions of the Poulsen arc, which was more stable and produced better sound.
In 1912 Herrold was hired as chief engineer of the National Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company in San Francisco. They hoped that he could develop a highly profitable point-to-point ‘arc fone’ radio-telephone. Herrold produced a system with good quality sound, informally described as ‘shaving the whiskers off the wireless telephone’. Despite the low power, a number of successful tests for the US Navy were reported.
Unfortunately, the professional partnership between Herrold and NWT&T was not to be a lengthy or happy one. In late 1913 Herrold resigned and then sued NWT&T on the grounds that he had not been fully recompensed for his time and effort. The company counter-claimed that they had honoured the terms of his contract. Moreover, the company ultimately abandoned most of the improvements made by Herrold. The judge sided with NWT&T and rejected Herrold’s claim. In addition, despite his attempts to create a transmission system that didn’t encroach upon the patents of the Poulsen arc, there was a degree of uncertainty that he had actually achieved this objective.
Charles Herrold didn’t claim to be the first to transmit the human voice but he claimed to be the first to conduct ‘broadcasting’. He coined the terms ‘narrowcasting’ and ‘broadcasting’ respectively, to identify transmissions destined for a single receiver, such as that on board a ship, and those transmissions destined for a general audience. Herrold was the son of a Santa Clara Valley farmer and the term ‘broadcasting’ was originally a farming idiom, meaning to spread seed over a large expanse.
Herrold made the first planned radio broadcast from his radio school in 1912. The station announced itself as ‘San Jose Calling’ initially as there were no call letters assigned at the time. He was later awarded two permits: 6XE for portable operations and 6XF, a standard experimental licence.
To help the radio signal to spread in all directions, he designed some omnidirectional antennas, which he mounted on the rooftops of various buildings in San Jose. Herrold also claims to be the first broadcaster to accept advertising. He exchanged publicity for the Wiley B. Allen Company, a local record shop, for records to play on his station. Herrold’s wife, Sybil, later recalled that she took part in several of the Wednesday night programmes where she played recordings that had been requested by the listeners.
Herrold’s ultimate transmitter design featured a water-cooled microphone linked to six small arcs burning in liquid alcohol. A review of a Christmas 1916 concert complimented the good audio quality of the ‘Herrold-Portal aerial system of telephony’, stating, ‘It was as sweet and beautiful as if it had been played and sung in the next room.’
Despite the popularity of the broadcasts, they received only scant local attention, and were largely unheard of outside the immediate San Jose area. The broadcasts eventually finished on 6 April 1917, when all civilian station operations were suspended as a result of the United States’ entry into the First World War.
Eventually, on 9 December 1921, a licence for San Jose, with the randomly assigned call sign of KQW, was issued to Herrold. Operation of the broadcasting station was financed by sales of radio equipment by the Herrold Radio Laboratory, but by 1925 the costs for KQW had grown considerably and the station was sold to the First Baptist Church of San Jose. Two stipulations of the sale were that Herrold be kept on as the director of programmes and, secondly, the station’s sign-ons had to include the statement: ‘This is KQW, pioneer broadcasting station of the world, founded by Dr Charles D. Herrold in San Jose in 1909.’
Herrold ended his association with KQW in 1926 and began working as a salesman for KTAB in Oakland, California. He later became a repair technician and a janitor, and died in a Californian retirement home, aged seventy-two. Towards the end of his life he sought recognition for his pioneering broadcasts. The general consensus is that he was the first to transmit regular entertainment broadcasts, therefore giving him a legitimate claim to the self-proclaimed title of ‘Father of Broadcasting’.
American engineer and inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong invented three of the basic electronic circuits underlying all modern radio, radar and television. In 1914, while still an undergraduate, he patented the regenerative circuit, which produced amplification hundreds of times greater than previously attained. This amplified signals to an extent that receivers could use loudspeakers instead of headphones.
While serving as a major in the US Army Signal Corps during the First World War, he developed the super-heterodyne receiver. This circuit made radio receivers more sensitive and selective and is still extensively used today.
Other people ultimately claimed many of Armstrong’s inventions in patent lawsuits. In particular, the regenerative circuit, which he patented in 1914 as a ‘wireless receiving system,’ was patented by Lee de Forest two years later. De Forest then sold the rights of his patent to AT&T.
Armstrong was incredibly fond of grand stunts. In 1923 he climbed the WJZ aerial array situated at the top of a twenty-storey building in New York City and reportedly performed a handstand. He arranged to have photographs taken and delivered to Marion MacInnis, secretary to RCA President, David Sarnoff. Armstrong and MacInnis married later that year. A publicity photograph was made of him presenting Marion with the world’s first portable super-heterodyne radio as a wedding gift.
Between 1922 and 1934 Armstrong found himself embroiled in a patent war. On one side were Armstrong, RCA, and Westinghouse, and de Forest and AT&T on the other. This action was the longest patent lawsuit ever litigated up to that period. Armstrong won the first round, lost the second, and the third ended in stalemate. Ultimately de Forest was granted the regeneration patent at the Supreme Court, though many people today believe this result was due to a misunderstanding of the technical facts.
The legal battles had one serendipitous outcome for Armstrong. While he was preparing equipment to oppose a claim made by a patent attorney, he ‘accidentally ran into the phenomenon of super-regeneration’, where, by rapidly ‘quenching’ the valve oscillations, he was able to achieve even greater levels of amplification. In 1922 Armstrong sold his super-regeneration patent to RCA. This eventually made him RCA’s largest shareholder, and he noted that ‘The sale of that invention was to net me more than the sale of the regenerative circuit and the super-heterodyne combined.’
While the lawsuits dragged on, Armstrong was already working on another significant invention. He created wide-band frequency modulation radio or FM. Rather than varying the amplitude of a radio wave to create sound, Armstrong’s method varied the frequency of the wave instead. FM radio broadcasts delivered a much clearer sound, free of static, than the AM radio dominant at the time. This, however, was the depressed decade of the 1930s and the radio industry was in no mood to take on a new system that required a radical overhaul of both transmitters and receivers. Armstrong found himself boxed in on every side. It took him until 1940 to get a permit for the first FM station, erected at his own expense, on the Hudson River Palisades at Alpine, New Jersey. It would be another two years before the Federal Communications Commission allocated him a few frequencies.
After a hiatus caused by the Second World War, FM broadcasting began to expand. Armstrong again found himself impeded by the FCC, which ordered FM into a new frequency band at limited power. Armstrong’s inventions made him a rich man – he held forty-two patents in his lifetime – but he also found himself ensnared in a protracted legal dispute with RCA, which regarded FM radio as a threat to its AM radio business. In addition, several other corporations had also immersed him in legal battles on the basic rights to his inventions, which left him financially drained.
Armstrong’s business worries also put a strain on his marriage. One day, during a violent argument, he struck his wife on the arm with a fireplace poker. She went to stay with a relative and Armstrong fell into a deep depression. Beset with personal problems, embittered and drained by years of litigation and facing financial ruin, he chose to commit suicide. On the night of Sunday, 31 January 1954, Armstrong jumped to his death from the thirteenth-floor window of his New York City apartment. An employee found his body, fully clothed with a hat, overcoat and gloves, the following morning on a third-floor balcony. His suicide note to his wife said: ‘May God help you and have mercy on my soul.’
Armstrong’s widow doggedly renewed her husband’s patent fight. In late December 1954 it was announced that an out-of-court settlement had been reached through arbitration with RCA. Following a further series of protracted court proceedings against a coterie of other companies, she was able to formally establish Armstrong as the inventor of FM over five of his basic FM patents. Marion Armstrong ultimately won $10 million in damages. She founded the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation in 1955, and ran it until her death in 1979 at the age of eighty-one.
For the first few decades after it was invented, the radio was immobile. The wireless used a large amount of energy and was too easily broken because of the fragile valves inside. During the 1940s both those drawbacks were about to be overcome. There was a concerted effort during the Second World War to decrease the size and power consumption of valves, predominantly because the receivers used in radio-controlled bombs depended on valve technology.
In 1947 three research physicists working at Bell Laboratories in America developed the transistor. Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley realised that pioneering research into crystals carried out by Russell Ohl a decade earlier could lead to a solid-state alternative to the thermionic valve. The transistor was smaller and more reliable than its cumbersome predecessor. This meant that radios could become smaller and more portable. The initial batch of transistors had used a constituent called germanium as the conducting material. Although it tested well in the confines of the laboratory, it proved too fragile for everyday use. Germanium would eventually be superseded by a silicon alternative a few years later.
The first transistor radio to be produced commercially went on sale in November 1954. It was a joint venture between Texas Instruments in Dallas and Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA) in Indianapolis. Texas Instruments had sought an established radio manufacturer to develop a portable radio but none of the major manufacturers seemed all that interested. However, Ed Tudor, the President of IDEA, jumped at the chance, predicting sales would reach the 20 million mark in three years.
The look and size of the Regency TR-1 received favourable reviews, but comments about its performance were usually adverse. The circuitry had been reduced considerably in an effort to keep costs down and this had severely limited the volume level and sensitivity of the radio. A review in ‘Consumer Reports’ references the high level of noise and instability on certain frequencies, advising against the purchase.
The radio operated from a 22.5-volt battery and sold for $49.95. Sadly, the high price meant that initial sales were poor and limited to around 150,000 units in the first year. Nevertheless, within a few years prices had fallen sufficiently and transistor radios became very popular. Other companies introduced alternative models and by the end of the decade, almost half of the ten million radios made and sold in America were the portable transistor type.
The birth of radio was a long drawn-out affair. It had a disparate group of inventors and entrepreneurs all claiming parentage but we are no nearer to finding one single person who could claim to be the ‘father of radio’.
These men had the marvellous gift of developing their own inventions or adapting other people’s theories and ideas. Together they created a superb piece of technology that helped to save lives and influence and entertain others.
By the early 1920s, radio had advanced sufficiently from an invention that was the exclusive preserve of hobbyists and enthusiasts to a medium with real mass-market appeal. Radio was about to hit the mainstream.