The Invention of Radio

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2013

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the invention of radio. In the early 1860s the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell derived four equations which together describe the behaviour of electricity and magnetism. They predicted the existence of a previously unknown phenomenon: electromagnetic waves. These waves were first observed in the early 1880s, and over the next two decades a succession of scientists and engineers built increasingly elaborate devices to produce and detect them. Eventually this gave birth to a new technology: radio. The Italian Guglielmo Marconi is commonly described as the father of radio - but many other figures were involved in its development, and it was not him but a Canadian, Reginald Fessenden, who first succeeded in transmitting speech over the airwaves.

With:

Simon Schaffer Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge

Elizabeth Bruton Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Leeds

John Liffen Curator of Communications at the Science Museum, London

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:44.0	Hello on the 2nd of July 1897 a young Italian living in Bayswater was awarded a patent
0:49.5	for a new device.
0:50.9	The official document explains that, according to this invention,
0:54.6	electrical actions or manifestations are transmitted through the air,
0:58.5	earth or water by means of electric oscillations of high frequency.
1:03.4	The inventor's name was Marconi, and he was 23.
1:06.7	Today we'd call these electric oscillations radio waves,
1:10.4	and Marconi had devised a means of sending telegraphic signals great distances by using them.
1:15.0	His invention led eventually to the development of modern radio communication.
	...

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