The early history of radio is the history of technology that produced radio instruments that

The early history of radio is the history of technology that produced radio instruments that

use radio waves. Within the timeline of radio, many people contributed theory and inventions

in what became radio.[1] Radio development began as "wireless telegraphy".[1] Later radio

history increasingly involves matters of programming and content.

Various scientists proposed that electricity and magnetism, both capable of causing

attraction and repulsion of objects, were linked. In 1802 Gian Domenico Romagnosi suggested

the relationship between electric current and magnetism, but his reports went unnoticed. In

1820 Hans Christian Ørsted performed a widely known experiment on man-made electric current

and magnetism. He demonstrated that a wire carrying a current could deflect a magnetized

compass needle. Ørsted's experiments discovered the relationship between electricity and

magnetism in a very simple experiment. Ørsted's work influenced André-Marie Ampère to

produce a theory of electromagnetism. During its early development and long after wide use

of the technology, disputes persisted as to who could claim sole credit for this obvious

boon to mankind. Closely related, radio was developed along with two other key inventions,

the telegraph and the telephone.[1]

transmitting spoken words over a greater distance than that of normal speech. The very

earliest mechanical telephones were based on sound transmission through pipes or other

physical media. Speaking tubes long remained common, including a lengthy history of use

aboard ships, and can still be found today.

A different device, the tin can telephone, or 'lover's phone', has also been known for

centuries. It connected two diaphragms with a taut string or wire which transmitted sound by

mechanical vibrations from one to the other along the wire, and not by a modulated

electrical current. The classic example is the children's toy made by connecting the bottoms

of two paper cups, metal cans, or plastic bottles with string

Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed, and new

controversies over the issue have arisen from time-to-time. Charles Bourseul, Antonio

Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have

all been credited with the telephone's invention. The early history of the telephone became

and still remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified

by the huge mass of lawsuits to resolve the patent claims of many individuals and commercial

competitors. The Bell and Edison patents, however, were forensically victorious and

commercially decisive

Alexander Graham Bell has most often been credited as the inventor of the telephone.

Additionally, the Italian-American inventor and businessman Antonio Meucci has been

recognized by the U.S. Congress for his contributory work on the telephone. In Germany,

Johann Philipp Reis is seen as a leading telephone pioneer who stopped only just short of a

successful device. However, the modern telephone is the result of work done by many people,

all worthy of recognition of their contributions to the field. Bell was, however, the first

to patent the telephone, an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds

telegraphically".

History of television
The history of television records the work of numerous engineers and inventors in several countries over many decades. The fundamental principles of television were initially explored using electromechanical methods to scan, transmit and reproduce an image. As electronic camera and display tubes were perfected, electromechanical television gave way to all-electronic systems in nearly all applications.

The beginnings of mechanical television can be traced back to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873, the invention of a scanning disk by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884 and John Logie Baird's demonstration of televised moving images in 1926.

As 23-year-old German university student, Paul Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884.[1] Although he never built a working model of the system, variations of Nipkow's spinning-disk "image rasterizer" for television became exceedingly common, and remained in use until 1939.[2] Constantin Perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on August 25, 1900. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of Nipkow and others.[3] The photoconductivity of selenium and Nipkow's scanning disk were first joined for practical use in the electronic transmission of still pictures and photographs, and by the first decade of the 20th century halftone photographs, composed of equally spaced dots of varying size, were being transmitted by facsimile over telegraph and telephone lines as a newspaper service.[4]

However, it was not until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology, by Lee DeForest and Arthur Korn among others, made the design practical.[4] The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of still silhouette images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909, using a rotating mirror-drum as the scanner and a matrix of 64 selenium cells as the receiver.[5]

In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Zworykin created a television system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the "Braun tube" (cathode ray tube or "CRT") in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner, "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy".[6]

On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion, at Selfridge's Department Store in London.[7] AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories transmitted halftone still images of transparencies in May 1925. On June 13 of that year, Charles Francis Jenkins transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion, over a distance of five miles from a naval radio station in Maryland to his laboratory in Washington, using a lensed disk scanner with a 48-line resolution.[8][9]

However, if television is defined as the live transmission of moving images with continuous tonal variation, Baird first achieved this privately on October 2, 1925. But strictly speaking, Baird had not yet achieved moving images on October 2. His scanner worked at only five images per second, below the threshold required to give the illusion of motion, usually defined as at least 12 images per second. By January, he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 images per second. Then he gave the world's first demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter on January 26, 1926 at his laboratory in London. Unlike later electronic systems with several hundred lines of resolution, Baird's vertically scanned image, using a scanning disk embedded with a double spiral of lenses, had only 30 lines, just enough to reproduce a recognizable human face.[citation needed]

In 1927, Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles (705 km) of telephone line between London and Glasgow. In 1928, Baird's company (Baird Television Development Company/Cinema Television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore-to-ship transmission. He also demonstrated an electromechanical color, infrared (dubbed "Noctovision"), and stereoscopic television, using additional lenses, disks and filters. In parallel, Baird developed a video disk recording system dubbed "Phonovision"; a number of the Phonovision recordings, dating back to 1927, still exist.[10] In 1929, he became involved in the first experimental electromechanical television service in Germany. In November of the same year, Baird and Bernard Natan of Pathé established France's first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. In 1931, he made the first outdoor remote broadcast, of the Epsom Derby.[11] In 1932, he demonstrated ultra-short wave television. Baird's electromechanical system reached a peak of 240 lines of resolution on BBC television broadcasts in 1936 though the mechanical system did not scan the televised scene directly. Instead a 35 mm film was shot, rapidly developed and then scanned while the film was still wet. This intermediate film system was discontinued within three months in favor of a 405-line all-electronic system developed by Marconi-EMI.[12]

History of the Cell phone

The history of mobile phones begins with early efforts to develop mobile telephony concepts using two-way radios and continues through emergence of modern mobile phones and associated services.

Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s, while hand-held mobile radio devices have been available since 1973. Mobile phone history is often divided into generations (first, second, third and so on) to mark significant step changes in capabilities as the technology improved over the years.

The early years of the 20th century saw the first attempts at wireless and mobile telephony. In 1908, U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone was issued to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent to "cave radio" telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood.[1] Two years later Lars Magnus Ericsson installed a telephone in his car, although this was not a radio telephone. While travelling across the country, he would stop at a place where telephone lines were accessible and using a pair of long electric wires he could connect to the national telephone network.[2]

In Europe, radio telephony was first used on the first-class passenger trains between Berlin and Hamburg in 1926. At the same time, radio telephony was introduced on passenger airplanes for air traffic security. Later radio telephony was introduced on a large scale in German tanks during the Second World War. After the war German police in the British zone of occupation first used disused tank telephony equipment to run the first radio patrol cars.[citation needed] In all of these cases the service was confined to specialists that were trained to use the equipment. In the early 1950s ships on the Rhine were among the first to use radio telephony with an untrained end customer as a user.

However it was the 1940s onwards that saw the seeds of technological development which would eventually produce the mobile phone that we know today. Motorola developed a backpacked two-way radio, the Walkie-Talkie and a large hand-held two-way radio for the US military. This battery powered "Handie-Talkie" (HT) was about the size of a man's forearm. In 1946 soviet engineers G. Shapiro and I. Zaharchenko successfully tested their version of a radio mobile phone mounted inside a car. The device could connect to local telephone network with a range of up to 20 kilometers.[citation needed]

In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles.[3] Philip T. Porter, also of Bell Labs, proposed that the cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas that would transmit/receive in three directions (see picture at right) into three adjacent hexagon cells.[4] At this stage the technology to implement the ideas did not exist nor had the frequencies had been allocated and it would be some years until Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs developed the electronics to achieve this in the 1960s.

During the 1950s the experiments of the pioneers started to appear as usable services across society, both commercially and culturally. In the 1954 movie Sabrina, the businessman Linus Larrabee (played by Humphrey Bogart) makes a call from the phone in the back of his limousine. In 1957 a young Soviet radio engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich from Moscow created a portable mobile phone, and named it the LK-1 after himself.[5] This mobile phone consisted of a relatively small handset equipped with an antenna and rotary dial, and communicated with a base station. The LK-1 weighed 3 kilograms and could operate in a range of up to 20 or 30 kilometers. The battery lasted 20 to 30 hours. The LK-1 was depicted in popular Soviet magazines as Nauka i zhizn. Kupriyanovich patented his mobile phone in the same year. The base station serving the LK-1 (called ATR, or Automated Telephone Radiostation) could connect to local telephone network and serve several customers. During 1958, Kupriyanovich produced a "pocket" version. The weight of improved lighter handset was about 500 grams.

In 1969, a patent for a wireless phone using an acoustic coupler for incoming calls was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969, but did not include dialing a number for outgoing calls.

In all these early examples, a mobile phone had to stay within the cell area serviced by one base station throughout the phone call, i.e. there was no continuity of service as the phones moved through several cell areas. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff, as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology, were described in the 1970s. In 1970 Amos E. Joel, Jr., a Bell Labs engineer,[6] invented an automatic "call handoff" system to allow mobile phones to move through several cell areas during a single conversation without interruption.

In December 1971, AT&T submitted a proposal for cellular service to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After years of hearings, the FCC approved the proposal in 1982 for Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) and allocated frequencies in the 824–894 MHz band.[7] Analog AMPS was eventually superseded by Digital AMPS in 1990.

A cellular telephone switching plan was described by Fluhr and Nussbaum in 1973,[8] and a cellular telephone data signaling system was described in 1977 by Hachenburg et al.[9] In 1979 a U.S. Patent 4,152,647 was issued to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, of Las Vegas for an emergency cellular system for rapid deployment in areas where there was no cellular service.

History of the Internet

The concept of data communication - transmitting data between two different places, connected via some kind of electromagnetic medium, such as radio or an electrical wire - actually predates the introduction of the first computers. Such communication systems were typically limited to point to point communication between two end devices. Telegraph systems and telex machines can be considered early precursors of this kind of communication. The earlier computers used the technology available at the time to allow communication between the central processing unit and remote terminals. As the technology evolved new systems were devised to allow communication over longer distances (for terminals) or with higher speed (for interconnection of local devices) that were necessary for the mainframe computer model. Using these technologies it was possible to exchange data (such as files) between remote computers. However, the point to point communication model was limited, as it did not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems; a physical link was necessary. The technology was also deemed as inherently unsafe for strategic and military use, because there were no alternative paths for the communication in case of an enemy attack.