Radio: From the Beginning to the Evolution of Today's Technology

Radio: From the beginning to the evolution of today's technology

Broadcast media has been around for many, many years and the grandfather of them all is the radio. The radio has been around for so long and has become such a prominent fixture in our society that we take it for granted. Every day many of us are exposed to some form of radio without realizing it. From the beginning of its technology, other forms of media have evolved also; television, wireless internet, and cellular phones, which most of us use daily. Something we do not think of is, where did it all start, whose idea was this to begin with, and what will the radio of tomorrow be like or will there even be radio in the future. I guess we will see.

What is Radio?

Many of us know what a radio is. We think it comes in your car, or when you buy a home stereo, only then it is known as a tuner, or how about those little radios that fit in your shirt pocket. Some of us work for companies that have company radios mounted in our company vehicles. However, what is a radio really?

According to Encarta Encyclopedia (2007), a radio is a "...system of communication employing electromagnetic waves propagated (transmitted) through space." The range of these waves varies from a few kilohertz to several gigahertz.

A normal radio communication system is made of two separate components, a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter emits an electrical fluctuation at a frequency known as the carrier frequency. Frequency modulation has more than just one pair of sidebands, which produces the variations that translate into the speech or any other sound that a radio broadcasts or the alterations of light and darkness in television broadcasting (Encarta Encyclopedia, 2007).

The Invention and the Inventors

Although there were many different discoveries in the taming of electricity, the first recorded discovery was the publication by British physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1873. The theory Maxwell had was with light, but 15 years later German physicist Heinrich Hertz used the same principle with electricity. Hertz found that by sending an electrical pulse to a capacitor and short-circuited the capacitor through a spark gap, the electrical pulse rushed past the neutral point building an opposite charge in the capacitor sending it back and continuing to fall back and forth creating an electrical oscillation. During this process, some of the energy escaped into the air causing electromagnetic waves. Hertz measured these waves and many of the properties as well as wavelengths and velocity. These pulses are measured in cycles per second or hertz; 1 kilohertz (kHz) is 1000 per cycle, 1 megahertz (MHz) is 1 million cycles per sec, and 1 gigahertz (GHz) is 1 billion cycles per sec (Encarta Encyclopedia, 2007).

Wireless radio technology was not introduced until 1893 when Nikola Tesla gave a demonstration of wireless transmission in St. Louis, Missouri. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the National Electric Light Association, Tesla described in detail the principles of radio communication. The system he used had a more sensitive electromagnetic receiver that was unlike the ones used by Guglielmo Marconi.

In 1895, Marconi received a telegraph message without wires, but did not send voice over the airwaves. The beginning of the same year Tesla received signals from his lab in New York, a distance of 50 miles. This technology bounced back and forth between these two men until 1904 when Marconi; backed by Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, filed for a patent for the invention of the radio.

International Government and American Military

The radio became a major discovery worldwide, and from its inception, governments around the world began conferences to see who and how the radio would be controlled. The first conference was held in Berlin, Germany in 1903. Thomas White (n.d.) stated that this was basically a, "...preliminary conference concerning wireless telegraphy." In this conference a set of regulations were handed out to the participating countries and then in 1906 the conference will convene once more.

President Theodore Roosevelt called a conference of his own in 1904, the "Roosevelt Board." The conference was only for American government agencies, those present consisted of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Agriculture, and Army's Signal Corp. The reason for this conference is to elect a representative from each government agency and to begin preparations of coordinating each agency with the others, and the development of radio services. The 1904 "Roosevelt Board" Report gave the U.S. Navy the powering control over government radio, and placed many significant limitations on commercial radio.

In 1906 the Berlin conference reconvened with an agreement, International Wireless Telegraph Convention. This agreement was adopted on November 3, 1906, but would not come into effect until July 1, 1908. Even though the United States signed this agreement in 1906, the U.S. Senate did not endorse the Berlin Convention until 1912. Roosevelt ordered the convention effective on May 25, 1912.

The United States passed a radio regulation law lasting from 1911 to 1927. These regulations written by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Navigation, placed three inspectors to insure that ocean going ships carried radio equipment. A Radio Inspector was placed at each major port, which expanded the inspectors to nine (White, n.d.).

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA), was formed by General Electric Corporation as an American monopoly over radio technology. At the end of World War 1, the U.S. Navy encouraged General Electric to purchase Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America from its parent company in England. Upon doing so General Electric would gain the companies, assets that included the United States only radio facilities, the hundreds of ship installations and David Sarnoff. Sarnoff oversaw the development of radio technology in the 1910's and the 1920's eventually to move onto television in the 1930's to the 1950's.

Vacuum-tube equipment began to transform the radio. On April 7, 1917, the President ordered all amateur and commercial radio to shut down or the government will take full control. At this time, the government tried to create a government-controlled monopoly.

December 26, 1916, then Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels wrote in a letter announcing the U.S. Governments stance towards the Alexander bill. The bill allows for the eradication of all commercial radio stations from the ship-shore communications trade. It goes on pushing the recommendation that Congress provide for the purchase