How the radio was invented. The radio as we know it today, definitely didn’t start that way. It took a very long time to get from wireless Morse code to Voice transmissions. In fact, it took about thirty years. Hopefully this article will help you understand how the radio was invented.
The first person to actually start off the invention of the radio and to think about radio waves was James Maxwell in 1864. He
had a theory that if electricity was sent down a wire in bursts, there would be as he put it
“some sort of waves that travel at the speed of light” or in plain English, radio waves.
Heinrich Hertz was the next person to advance the idea of the radio wave. Hertz used
Maxwell’s thesis to demonstrate that radio waves travel in straight lines and can be
reflected by a metal sheet. Hertz had tested this idea with the radio waves traveling a
distance of five feet. Gugliemo Marconi, an Italian Physist, repeated this idea with the
radio waves traveling a distance of thirty feet instead of five.
In 1888 Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti created the ‘tube’. Then, in 1894, Oliver Lodge
renamed the ‘tube’ the ‘coherer’, and increased radio wave reception. Finally Alexander
Popoff, a Russian scientist, used the cohere to create the first antenna. With all of
these in place, Marconi was able to make the first wireless transmitter. After some
experimenting, he was able to make the radio waves travel one hundred kilometers.
Now being able to send signals wirelessly, Marconi opened the first radio factory in
1899. He eventually created the first radio link with Britain, France, and eventually the
United States in 1901.
Marconi became very wealthy and shared the Nobel prize for physics in 1909.
Marconi wasn’t able to send voice transmissions yet, but worked hard and in 1921,
voice became wireless too. He also introduced short wave transmissions in 1922.
Short waves are in a frequency that allows them to travel long distances and they are
definitely an important part of the invention of the radio.
Surprisingly, quite a few people claim to be the first person to be the first to invent the radio. One of them was Nikola Tesla. He was a modern inventor and scientist who had
made a theoretical model for a radio four years before Marconi. He filed a court
objection against Marconi in 1915, but was turned down. Twenty eight years later the
Supreme Court reviewed the decision and named Tesla the ‘official’ inventor of the
radio. So now, Tesla is the ‘official’ inventor of the radio, even though he never actually
made a working radio.

So that is how the radio waves were invented and how they became a reality. If you
really think hard, radio waves govern most of our lives today. Wireless internet for
example uses radio waves, but most of us take that for granted. Also being able to
listen to the radio in the car would have never happened without Marconi and the others
that contributed to the radio. That is the invention of the radio.