Radio

James Clerk Maxwell had a prediction. By working "out the laws concerning electromagnetism in 1865, [he] had predicted that an oscillating current would produce radiation with an extremely long wavelength." (1) In other words, he had proved mathematically that certain electric currents could be detected at great distances. After that, people like Guglielmo Marconi and Reginald Aubrey Fessenden began working on a new invention; the radio. But the radio was not just invented by one man, or at one time. It took a period of about a century (1864-1960) before the first radios were perfected and sold to the general public. When they were first put on the market radios started selling like hotcakes, and, because of this, they ended up changing a nation. Radios are very complex machines, but without them America would still be in a time of confinement and darkness.

Michael Faraday showed that an electrical current could produce a magnetic field. This find lead to Nikola Tesla, 1893, inventing a way of sending messages via wireless telegraph. He perfected this idea, and by 1897 he transmitted a message over 25 miles. Heinrich Hertz discovered Hertzian waves using an oscillator and a spark gap. Next came Oliver Lodge, who invented the coherer by looking at Edouard Branly's discovery that metal powders cohered to one another and putting them to practice. Lodge only used the coherer to make the transmission clearer as he was know to be a perfectionist. Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov, a Russian physicist, added a wire to Lodge's coherer and invented the first ever antenna. This was followed by Karl F. Braun's method of magnetic induction, which entailed attaching the transmitter directly to the antenna, which improved the range. Edison also added to this list of inventers with his patented device called the "grasshopper telegraph" (3) in 1885. It was a box that was put on top of the roofs of trains to pick up messages. Unfortunately it could not differentiate between the signals and picked up all of them.

There were two main inventors of the radio, or at least two people who were given the most credit for the work. One of these two people was Guglielmo Marconi. He followed Sir William Crookes's steps to reach wireless communication, which led him to do great things. Guglielmo Marconi surprised and amazed the world when he transmitted a signal over a distance of 2,137 miles, between England and Newfoundland. As he sat in Poldhu, England and waited for a signal all he heard was three dots, the letter S in Morse code. This baffled the world, as the previous signal had only been over a distance of 25 miles. He received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909 along with Karl F. Braun.

Marconi's invention of the radio was a very important part of ships communication. The radio officers on the voyages were called Marconi wireless operators. All vessels were given call signs, which always started with the letter that was assigned to their country so surrounding ships knew where they were from, or on such vessels like the Titanic, the call sign started with an M, to show that it was a Marconi installed wireless radio system. The Titanic's call sign started of as MUC, but was later changed to MGY. The two Marconi wireless operators on the Titanic were John G. Phillips and Harold Bride. The radio was used mainly to state certain checkpoints the vessel had passed, and to send telegraphs to friends of the passengers on board. Over 250 had already been sent off before the Titanic hit the berg. Telegraphs were not cheap to send, but the first class passengers sent them to keep their family and friends updated at all times. Although all the ships were too far away to reach the Titanic in time, if it were not for the invention of the radio, everyone, including the few that survived, would have died on that ship. The messages that were sent out were done in codes a lot of the time (appendix 1a), such as CQD OM means that "it's a distress situation old man."(6) Unfortunately the radio could not save the fate of the Titanic, and this sinking impacted the lives of many innocent people.
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The other of the two inventors was Reginald Aubrey Fessenden. Fessenden actually started off by working for Edison. He became one of Edison's leading assistants, and thought of putting galvanized-iron tubing around electrical wires to stop them from setting on fire. He invented a high frequency alternator in 1901, which makes a continuous radio wave rather than having to use Morse code. He also used a microphone to convert sounds into an electrical signal. The most famous thing he ever did was in 1906, when he used an amplitude-modulated radio on Christmas Eve and sent out his voice, ...

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