Talk:Timeline of radio

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 * 1864: James Clerk Maxwell mathematically predicts the existence of radio waves.
 * 1872: Mahlon Loomis and W. H. Ward (USA) file for U.S. Patents for a "wireless telegraph".
 * 1885 - 1886: Heinrich Hertz proves the existence of radio waves using a primitive transmitter and receiver.
 * As a professor of physics at Karlsruhe Polytechnic, he produces electromagnetic waves in the laboratory and measures their wavelength and velocity. He shows that the nature of their reflection and refraction was the same as those of light, confirming that light waves are electromagnetic radiation obeying the Maxwell equations.
 * 1887: Hertz publishes his research in the journal Annalen der Physik.
 * 1890: Edouard Branly invents the coherer.
 * 1891: Nikola Tesla is granted U.S. Patent No. 454,622 "System of Electric Lighting," first revealing the basic techniques for greatly improving radio transmitter performance.
 * 1892: Hertz publishes "Untersuchungen Ueber Die Ausbreitung Der Elektrischen Kraft” (“Investigations on the Propagation of Electrical Energy”).
 * 1893: Tesla demonstrates "wireless telegraphy" at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the National Electric Light Association, demonstrating the practical application eight years after Hertz experiments.
 * 1894: The book INVENTIONS, RESEARCHES AND WRITINGS OF NIKOLA TESLA, edited by T.C. Martin is published.
 * 1894: Hertz dies at age 37.
 * 1894: Alexander Popov builds his first radio receiver in Russia. This was the first non-laboratory radio service.
 * 1894: Oliver Lodge transmits radio signals at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University on August 14. One year before Marconi but one year after Tesla.
 * 1894: Jagadish Chandra Bose uses electromagnetic waves to ignite gunpowder and ring a bell at a distance in November in Calcutta.
 * 1895: Popov presents his radio receiver to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society on May 7. The paper on his findings was published December 15.
 * 1895: Marconi transmits wireless signals a distance of about one mile.
 * 1896: Tesla transmits wireless signals over distances of up to 30 miles.
 * 1897: Tesla is granted U.S. Patents No. 645,576 and 649,621 covering the four-tuned circuit wireless system.
 * 1897: Marconi is granted a British patent for his work, establishes the world's first radio station on the Isle of Wight, England & forms the London company later to become the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company
 * 1897: Bose reports on his microwave radio experiments to the Royal Institute in London & speculates on the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the sun,
 * 1898: Popov effects ship-to-shore communication over a distance of 6 miles
 * 1898: Tesla publicly demonstrates his remote-controlled boat containing "rotating coherers" plus circuit elements that allowed secure communication between transmitter and receiver.
 * 1900: Popov supervises the construction of a radio station on Hogland island providing a two-way communication by wireless telegraphy between Russian navy base and crew of the battleship General-Admiral Apraksin.
 * 1900: Tesla begins construction of the Wardenclyffe Tower facility for trans-Atlantic wireless telephony.
 * 1901: Marconi receives the first trans-Atlantic radio signal on 12 December. The message received was three dots, the Morse code for the letter S.
 * 1902: Tesla gives interference testimony in the matter of his patent application for "Systems of Signaling" and that of Reginald Fessenden for "Improvement in the Transmission and Receipt of Signals," subsequently determined in Tesla's favor.
 * 1904: Bose receives patent for the use of a semi-conducting crystal as a detector of radio waves
 * 1904: John Ambrose Fleming develops the "oscillation valve" or "kenotron," later known as the vacuum-tube diode.
 * 1904: Tesla advertises his services.
 * 1906: Lee De Forest invents the Audion, now known as the vacuum-tube triode.
 * 1906: Fessenden transmits the first audio radio broadcast on AM from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing the song Silent Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.
 * 1909: Marconi wins the Nobel Prize in physics
 * 1910: Lee de Forest airs radio programs from New York's Metropolitan Opera House.
 * 1920s: Hundreds of radio stations emerge in the USA
 * 1922: The BBC begins broadcasting from London, on November 14.
 * 1928: Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patents the transistor principle in Germany
 * 1933: Edwin Armstrong patents FM (frequency modulation)
 * 1947: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeds in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on 22 December. This work followed from their war-time research into radar.
 * 1956: Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the transistor.

J. D. Redding 18:37, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 04:30, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Radio killed the sports star?
If we're listing "firsts", how 'bout first broadcast of a baseball or football game? 1st national broadcast of a sports event? 1st broadcast of a World Series? Just to start with.... TREKphiler 05:27, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
 * 1st radio mounted on a ship?
 * 1st radio mounted on a truck?
 * 1st radio mounted on airplane?
 * 1st radio mounted on a human ?

Deletion of crazy Tesla stuff
Tesla did not transmit any message or information using radio waves, he lit light bulbs by capacitive coupling. It is time for this crazy Tesla stuff to go. Martin Hogbin (talk) 22:57, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I totally agree. Similarly, references to Loomis and Stubblefield are unwarranted. Both were working with other forms of Wireless Communications (eg Static field, Magnetic field and Ground Conduction), but not with Electro-Magnetic Radiation (eg Radio), so have no place in an article on the "Timeline of Radio". Gutta Percha (talk) 07:26, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Loomis' kites were resonant antennas outside each other's nearfield zone: they employed EM waves, e.g. radio (not "static," but a spark-transmitter powered with naturally-occuring high-voltage, rather than HV from a transformer.) Tesla in 1896 transmitted over 30 miles from his NYC lab, to a receiver on a boat progressively moving along the Hudson, described in the Marconi case, 1916 legal deposition in LI Anderson book. Certainly NOT "lit bulbs by capacitive coupling" in the nearfield (Tesla insisted his long-distance transmission was EM surface-waves, others thought it was Hertz' EM space-waves.) But Tesla's 1986 experiments employed unmodulated waves, on/off detection, sent via a poorly-controlled high-frequency dynamo later dubbed the "Alexanderson Alternator," and detected with one of Tesla's mechanical-based receivers. (Really, it's time for all the irrational anti-Tesla stuff to go. Emotionally biased "believers" and "haters" are equally bad for WP. )128.95.172.170 (talk) 08:53, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Badly Worded
Some passages rather clumsy and outright wrong:

"although some early radios used some type of amplification through electric current or battery"

How does a Battery Amplify? Presumably this is a clumsy reference to early Crystal Amplifiers (forerunner of the Transistor), Magnetic Amplifiers, Negative Resistance amplifiers, or the classic "Earpiece connected to Carbon-Mike" amplifier.

"Fessenden and Lee de Forest pioneered the invention of amplitude-modulated radio (AM radio), so more than one station can send signals (as opposed to spark-gap radio, where one transmitter covers the entire bandwidth of spectra)"

Messy and completely wrong. Early Spark (and Arc) was routinely filtered to give narrower bandwidth so multiple Spark stations could co-exist. And it wasn't AM, but Continuous Wave which finally solved the bandwidth problem. eg Spark is itself an amplitude modulated (AM) form of transmission.

Gutta Percha (talk) 07:32, 16 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Re: "amplification through electric current or battery" is so vague its hard to tell what is meant there. It may also refer to coherers, when they received a signal they became conductive and sent a current from a battery to a bell, Morse inker, or what ever was hooked up. Better description would help here. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 14:34, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Suggested merge
I propose that this article should be merged with the Invention of radio article. That covers essentially the same topic but in more detail. Anything of value her should be added to that article. Martin Hogbin (talk) 10:21, 12 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Tempting but Weak oppose - at this time. Invention of radio is a very long article (that I think should be made much shorter) so IMHO this would not be a merger, it would be a deletion of Timeline of radio (meaning this may be more appropriate as an AfD discussion?). This timeline also goes beyond "Invention of radio", it covers History of radio so is actually redundant/case for merger with that article as well. Been looking deep into the claims in this timeline and Invention of radio and see some glaring miss statements of fact, what comes off as nationalism/hero PUSHing, and general WP:UNDUE, so maybe this article should be kept around for a while as a development tool (and maybe kept permanently if others make a good case for it). Redundancy is expected in WP:LIST articles including timelines, although that is normally vs categories. I would support the deletion of the timeline at Invention of radio and just having the link to this timeline: allot of "Invention of radio" as the communication medium we know today went on between 1890 and 1900 and the formatting of that table does not allow for that level of detail making it inherently WP:UNDUE. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 15:32, 12 August 2014 (UTC)