The eternal invention of the radio

As they say colloquially, “seems like yesterday”. But it’s already been 125 years since the first radio transmission was produced, a May 14, 1897 and considered as the undisputed precursor of wireless telephony.

Radio is the product of construction of many technological discoveries and it is attributable to the investigations and findings of different personalities of the world, but It is Guillermo Marconi who is credited with the first radio transmission.

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While receiving classes as a child at home became interested in the topics of magnetism and electricity and then in college he went from curiosity to research.

Marconi succeeded in sending a telegraphic signal across the open sea, at a distance of six kilometers that separate the English town of Bristol and the Welsh town of Penarth, in which a simple but portentous was heard: You are ready?

And what he had read and learned then served to allow electromagnetic waves to propagate through the air using an oscillator that he had designed, following the model created by Rudolph Hertzin whose honor those waves that carry the signal are called Hertzian waves.

Although it is fully proven that Marconi made his demonstration days before Alexander Popov’sthe Russian Government continues to claim the paternity of a wave receiver similar to the one developed by Marconi.

In that legal dispute one could also include Nicholas Tesla, Serbian nationalized Americanwho claimed for the patent granted to Marconi by arguing that several of the previous investigations were his for the invention of the radio.

By then, the popular aphorism was fulfilled that “Whoever kneels first confesses.” and it is Marconi to whom he grants the patent as inventor, in the year 1904.

A peak moment to highlight the importance of this invention would occur between the night of the 14th and the morning of April 15, 1912when the call for help was heard at a time when the titanic sank.

“When the Titanic hit an iceberg, one of the telegraphers sent a distress message that would be heard by the Carpathia and, when he came ashore, Marconi was present on the dock. Days later, the survivors went en masse to his hotel to thank him for his invention,” says a report from the EFE agency that recreates that story.

The Spanish news agency recalls that when he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909, Marconi referred to wireless telegraphy thus: “It is destined to occupy an equally important position in providing efficient and economical communication between distant parties” and “there is no doubt” that “it is here to stay, and it will not only stay, but will continue to advance”.

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What Tesla could have been the inventor of the radio, but he lost that “opportunity” due to a patent issuethat James Clerk Maxwell developed the theory of electromagnetic waves in 1873 and Hertz radio waves in 1888that some were in charge of the technological development, that others of the industry, of the first transmissions and that the list of inventors is long, that is known.

Also that Marconi is a true pioneer of this wonderful invention that is now called radio, a means of communication that is being transformed, that is being modernized, that will continue to live forever.