HEINRICH RUDOLF HERTZ COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG!

William Duncan

Wireless communications, later called radio, started with just the belief that electromagnetic fields existed as result of the reversing or oscillating currents. James Clark Maxwell and Michael Faraday both predicted the existence of electromagnetic fields as result of the alternating currents but it was Heinrich Rudolf Hertz who was finally able to prove it.

In 1888 Mr. Hertz was able to prove Maxwell's and Faraday's predictions by building a spark gap transmitter and a receiver which consisted of a single loop of wire with a spark gap on each end of the loop. The gap at each end of the loop was placed in a dark box so as to make the spark more visible.

Hertz was fascinated with the phenomenon but when asked about the practical use of his findings he said, "It's of no use whatsoever[...] this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right - we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there." Again when asked what the ramifications of his experiment were he simply replied, "Nothing, I guess." It is Guglielmo Marconi who is credited with finding a practical use for these waves by building the wireless telegraph in the summer of 1895. So it was just 7 years after Hertz said, "It's of no use whatsoever..." that wireless communications, probably one of the most influential inventions on our world today, came into existence.

All Marconi did was put together the invention by Samuel Morse and the discoveries by Heinrich Hertz to build his first wireless system. Hertz had built a transmitter and though Hertz did technically build the first receiver it was Alexander Stepanovich Popov, in 1894, who built the first coherent detector receiver like the one used by Marconi (Popov's receiver was not used for communications but it was used to detect approaching thunder storms). So all Marconi did was just bring together the work of others into a practical usable item. But then that is what most great inventions are.

Hertz was the first to use the term wireless in reference to radio waves. Marconi picked up on this word and called his invention "wireless telegraph" which was the accepted term for many years. It was usually shortened to just wireless. Edouard Branly coined the word radio in 1897 from the Latin word "radius" which means "spoke of a wheel, beam of light, ray." The word radio appeared in an article by Lee de Forest in 1907, and it was adopted by the United States Navy in 1912. For the most part the word wireless remained common but was almost entirely dropped when the first commercial broadcasts were aired in the United States in the 1920s. It is interesting to see how with the advent of cell phones the word wireless has come back.

And to think it was all started by a man who said, "It's of no use whatsoever..."