History of radio
[6][7] After their discovery many scientists and inventors experimented with transmitting and detecting "Hertzian waves" (it would take almost 20 years for the term "radio" to be universally adopted for this type of electromagnetic radiation).
[9][10] Following Hertz' untimely death in 1894, British physicist and writer Oliver Lodge presented a widely covered lecture on Hertzian waves at the Royal Institution on June 1 of the same year.
[14] After Lodge's demonstrations researchers pushed their experiments further down the electromagnetic spectrum towards visible light to further explore the quasioptical nature at these wavelengths.
[15] Oliver Lodge and Augusto Righi experimented with 1.5 and 12 GHz microwaves respectively, generated by small metal ball spark resonators.
[16] He would later write an essay, "Adrisya Alok" ("Invisible Light") on how in November 1895 he conducted a public demonstration at the Town Hall of Kolkata, India using millimeter-range-wavelength microwaves to trigger detectors that ignited gunpowder and rang a bell at a distance.
The Serbian American engineer Nikola Tesla considered Hertzian waves relatively useless for long range transmission since "light" could not transmit further than line of sight.
[19] There was speculation that this fog and stormy weather penetrating "invisible light" could be used in maritime applications such as lighthouses,[18] including the London journal The Electrician (December 1895) commenting on Bose's achievements, saying "we may in time see the whole system of coast lighting throughout the navigable world revolutionized by an Indian Bengali scientist working single handed[ly] in our Presidency College Laboratory.
"[20] In 1895, adapting the techniques presented in Lodge's published lectures, Russian physicist Alexander Stepanovich Popov built a lightning detector that used a coherer based radio receiver.
In 1904, he established a commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers.
A regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service was finally begun on 17 October 1907[33][34] between Clifden, Ireland, and Glace Bay, but even after this the company struggled for many years to provide reliable communication to others.
[35] In the late 1890s, Canadian-American inventor Reginald Fessenden came to the conclusion that he could develop a far more efficient system than the spark-gap transmitter and coherer receiver combination.
[38] While working for the United States Weather Bureau on Cobb Island, Maryland, Fessenden researched using this setup for audio transmissions via radio.
Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.
[47] The Dutch company Nederlandsche Radio-Industrie and its owner-engineer, Hanso Idzerda, made its first regular entertainment radio broadcast over station PCGG from its workshop in The Hague on 6 November 1919.
Its popular program was broadcast four nights per week using narrow-band FM transmissions on 670 metres (448 kHz),[48] until 1924 when the company ran into financial trouble.
Union College in Schenectady, New York began broadcasting on October 14, 1920, over 2ADD, an amateur station licensed to Wendell King, an African-American student at the school.
[49][50] In 1922 regular audio broadcasts for entertainment began in the UK from the Marconi Research Centre 2MT at Writtle near Chelmsford, England.
CCITT R.44 (the most advanced pure-telex standard) incorporated character-level error detection and retransmission as well as automated encoding and routing.
Documents including maps and photographs went by radiofax, or wireless photoradiogram, invented in 1924 by Richard H. Ranger of Radio Corporation of America (RCA).
In 1937, W1XOJ, the first experimental FM radio station after Armstrong's W2XMN in Alpine, New Jersey, was granted a construction permit by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Because of the recent war, Germany (which did not exist as a state and so was not invited) was only given a small number of medium-wave frequencies, which were not very good for broadcasting.
For this reason Germany began broadcasting on UKW ("Ultrakurzwelle", i.e. ultra short wave, nowadays called VHF) which was not covered by the Copenhagen plan.
Other European nations followed a bit later, when the superior sound quality of FM and the ability to run many more local stations because of the more limited range of VHF broadcasts were realized.
The British government and the state-owned postal services found themselves under massive pressure from the wireless industry (including telegraphy) and early radio adopters to open up to the new medium.
In an internal confidential report from February 25, 1924, the Imperial Wireless Telegraphy Committee stated: When radio was introduced in the early 1920s, many predicted it would kill the phonograph record industry.
It was determined through this and previous cases (such as the lawsuit against Shanley's Restaurant) that Bamberger was using the songs for commercial gain, thus making it a public performance for profit, which meant the copyright owners were due payment.
With this ruling the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) began collecting licensing fees from radio stations in 1923.
[87] This act requires ships to have a radio system with a professional operator if they want to travel more than 200 miles offshore or have more than 50 people on board.
In 1912, distress calls to aid the sinking Titanic were met with a large amount of interfering radio traffic, severely hampering the rescue effort.
Coming only two dozen years after the breakup of AT&T, the act sets out to move telecommunications into a state of competition with their markets and the networks they are a part of.
