Radio Broadcasting: A History of the Airwaves

Chapter 1

The Fathers of Radio

On a chilly evening early in 1922, in an old army hut located in a small Essex village, a small, ragtag band of men had gathered. It was St Valentine’s Day but romantic thoughts had been pushed to the back of their minds. They were preoccupied with something else; something far more important. As the hands of the timepiece on the wall inched slowly forward to 8pm, they scurried around tweaking and adjusting their equipment. Last-minute checks completed, the men waited eagerly to proceed.

This wasn’t a crack team of military personnel about to embark on a secret mission. They were a disparate bunch of engineers brought together by an enterprising Italian called Guglielmo Marconi. Under the auspices of his company, they were about to launch Britain’s first regular radio broadcasting service. At the appointed hour the transmitter and aerial crackled into life.

This experimental station, named 2MT and based at Writtle, a small village near Chelmsford, was the first British radio station to make regular entertainment broadcasts. Transmissions emitted from a hut near to the Marconi laboratories. Initially the station only had 200 watts and transmitted on 428 kilohertz on Tuesdays from 8pm to 8.30pm.

The first transmission was far from a triumph. The signal was weak and the sound was muffled. However, things did gradually improve. These early tests consisted mainly of gramophone records but a live concert was broadcast later.

The station, fronted by the eccentric Captain Peter Pendleton Eckersley, a Marconi engineer, was a surprising success. Eckersley, known as ‘Captain’ or ‘PPE’ by his friends, was no shrinking violet and never suffered from the dreaded disease of microphone shyness. His light-hearted enthusiasm effervesced across the ether and pervaded each broadcast.

The station was required to read out its allocated call sign ‘2MT’ at regular intervals. The British Army phonetic alphabet was widely used by radio amateurs in 1922; consequently ‘M’ was ‘Emma’ and ‘T’ was ‘Toc’, so ‘2MT’ became ‘Two Emma Toc’. The humorous and glib manner in which Eckersley read out the phonetic version of ‘2MT’ resulted in the station being affectionately known as ‘Two Emma Toc’.

PPE liked to experiment with sound and would use whatever was lying around to make unusual noises. He would perform spontaneous comedy sketches and improvise operatic parodies. His regular announcement, ‘This is Two Emma Toc, Writtle testing, Writtle testing,’ delivered in his jocular style, became extremely well known in a very short space of time.

The medium of radio had been established but its genesis had been a prolonged affair. In the late nineteenth century it was clear to numerous scientists that wireless communication was possible. Various theoretical and experimental advancements led to the development of radio and the communication system we know today. The key invention for the beginning of ‘wireless transmission of data using the entire frequency spectrum’ was the spark-gap transmitter. These devices served as the transmitters for most wireless telegraphy systems for the first three decades of radio.

During its early development, and long after widespread use of the technology, disputes persisted as to the person who could claim sole credit for the invention of radio. Many experiments were running concurrently and across continents. Some scientific theories were merely notional and later verified as unworkable, but they also helped fuel other ideas that did advance technology. There are several men who have been proclaimed the ’father of radio’, but perhaps one simple way to sort out the parentage is to place events in a rough chronological order.

Numerous scientists had posited that electricity and magnetism were linked in some way, but while both are capable of causing attraction and repulsion of objects, they remain distinct effects. In 1802 Gian Domenico Romagnosi proposed the relationship between electric current and magnetism, but his reports were largely ignored.

In 1820 Hans Christian Øersted publicly conducted an experiment that demonstrated the relationship between electricity and magnetism in a very simple way. He established that a wire carrying a current could deflect a magnetised compass needle. His initial interpretation was that magnetic effects radiate from all sides of a wire carrying an electric current, as do light and heat. Three months later he began more thorough investigations and subsequently published his findings. Øersted’s work influenced André-Marie Ampère’s theory of electromagnetism.

The British physicist Michael Faraday had discovered the existence of electromagnetic fields in 1845. After becoming interested in science, Faraday began working with Humphrey Davy, the renowned chemist and inventor. Davy gave Faraday a valuable scientific education and also introduced him to important European scientists.

Faraday’s greatest contribution to science was in the field of electricity. In 1831 he began a series of experiments in which he discovered electromagnetic induction. Faraday developed the theory that a current flowing in one wire could induce a current in another wire that was not physically connected to the first.

Although Faraday was the first to publish his results, the American scientist Joseph Henry had been working with electromagnetism. Henry had invented a forerunner to the electric doorbell, in particular a bell that could be rung at a distance via an electric wire.

James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist, was fascinated by Faraday and Henry’s work on electromagnetism. He noticed that electrical and magnetic fields could couple together to form electromagnetic waves. Neither an electrical field such as the static which forms when you rub your feet on a carpet, nor a magnetic field like the one that holds a magnet onto a refrigerator will go anywhere on their own account. Nevertheless, Maxwell discovered that a varying magnetic field would induce a varying electric field and vice-versa.

An electromagnetic wave subsists when the changing magnetic field causes another changing electric field, which then causes yet another changing magnetic field, and so on in perpetuity. Unlike a static field, a wave can’t exist unless it is moving. Once produced, an electromagnetic wave will carry on forever unless absorbed by matter.

In 1864 Maxwell published his first paper that showed by theoretical reasoning that an electrical disturbance resulting from a change in an electrical quantity, such as voltage or current, should propagate through space at the speed of light. Maxwell finally published this work in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873.

In 1866 Dr Mahlon Loomis described a system of signalling by radio. He proposed the theory that the Earth’s upper atmosphere was divided into separate concentric layers, and these layers could be tapped by metallic conductors on hills and mountain tops. This was to provide long-distance wireless telegraph and telephone communication, as well as draw electricity down to the Earth’s surface.

Dr Loomis claimed to have transmitted signals between two Blue Ridge Mountain tops 22km apart in Virginia, using two kites as antennas. The kites had 180-m-long wires attached to them. Both ends were grounded; one through a galvanometer. When he disconnected and reconnected one end, the amount of current flowing through the other end changed. He therefore claimed to be the first person to achieve wireless, electronic communication. His idea of conductive atmospheric layers has since been discredited.

Mahlon Loomis received a patent for a ‘wireless telegraph’ in July 1872. This patent claimed to eliminate the overhead wire used by the existing telegraph systems by utilising atmospheric electricity. It didn’t contain diagrams or specific methods and didn’t refer to, or incorporate, any known scientific theory. It is markedly similar to William Henry Ward’s patent that was issued a few months earlier. Neither patent referred to any known scientific theory of electromagnetism and could never have received and transmitted radio waves. It’s widely assumed that Loomis exaggerated his achievements to sustain interest in a system that he undoubtedly believed would work.

Towards the end of 1875, while experimenting with the telegraph, Thomas Edison described a phenomenon that he termed ‘etheric force’, which would later be known as high frequency electromagnetic waves. He announced it to the press on 28 November but cancelled this avenue of research when Elihu Thomson, the engineer and inventor, ridiculed the idea. It was not based on the electromagnetic waves described by Maxwell.

In 1879 David Edward Hughes was the first to claim to have transmitted and received radio waves. He spotted what seemed to be a new phenomenon during his experiments. He realised that sparking in one device could be heard in a separate portable microphone apparatus he had installed nearby. He demonstrated his discovery to the Royal Society in 1880, nine years before electromagnetic radiation was a proven concept. It was most probably radio transmissions, but others convinced Hughes that his discovery was simply induction. Hughes was so demoralised he didn’t publish the results of his work and though he continued experimenting with radio, he became diffident and left it to others to document his findings.

In 1884 the Italian Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti demonstrated a primitive device that would later be developed to become the first practical radio detector. He placed metal filings in a glass box or tube, and made them part of an ordinary electric circuit.

In 1890 Frenchman Edouard Branly demonstrated a much-improved version of Calzecchi-Onesti’s device. He called his version a ‘radioconductor’ (based on the verb ‘to radiate’: in Latin ‘radius’ means ‘beam of light’). His device would later be known as a ‘coherer’. Branly demonstrated that such a tube would respond to sparks produced at a distance from it.

In 1885 Edison took out a patent on a system of radio communication between ships. However, the patent was not based on the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves. He later sold the patent to Marconi.

James Clerk Maxwell’s theoretical prediction that electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light was verified in 1888. German physicist Heinrich Hertz made the amazing discovery of radio waves, a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths too long for our eyes to see. He demonstrated the transmission and reception of the electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell and thus was the first person to intentionally transmit and receive radio.

Hertz created a transmitting oscillator, which radiated radio waves and detected them using a metal loop with a gap at one side, which he called a resonator. This consisted of a 1m length of thick copper wire, with a small metal circle soldered at each end. The wire was twisted into the shape of a ring with the spheres almost touching each other. When the loop was placed within the transmitter’s electromagnetic field, sparks were produced across the gap. Hertz showed in his experiments that these signals possessed all of the properties of electromagnetic waves.

With this oscillator Hertz solved two problems. The first was timing Maxwell’s waves. He had physically demonstrated what Maxwell had only theorised: that the velocity of radio waves was equal to the velocity of light. This demonstrated that radio waves were a form of light. Second, Hertz found out how to make the electric and magnetic fields detach themselves from wires and go free as Maxwell’s waves. These waves became known as ‘Hertzian Waves’ and Hertz managed to detect them across the length of his laboratory. This simple resonator was the world’s first wireless receiver. Famously, Hertz couldn’t see any practical purpose for his discovery. However, his detection led to an increase of experimentation with this new form of electromagnetic radiation.

Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor, began his research into radio in 1891. Two years later he gave a detailed description of the principles of ‘wireless’ radio communication to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Tesla’s contribution involved refining and improving his predecessor’s work. A most important innovation was the introduction of the coupled tuned circuit into his preliminary transmitter design. This was the ‘Tesla coil’, with its primary and secondary circuits both synchronised to vibrate together in harmony.

Tesla’s apparatus contained all the elements that were integrated into radio systems before the early vacuum tube – known then as an oscillation valve – was developed. He first used sensitive electromagnetic receivers, which were different to the less responsive coherers later used by Marconi. Tesla’s modifications meant his transmitter could have signalled across the Atlantic, had he thought of such an enterprise. Supplementary work resulted in the development of wireless receivers that also included two synchronised circuits.

After 1890 Tesla experimented with transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil. He endeavoured to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling. He conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit incandescent light bulbs from across a stage. In 1893 at the National Electric Light Association, Tesla told his audience that he was certain a system like his could eventually convey ‘intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires’ by conducting it through the Earth.

Tesla would spend most of the decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors. Despite this, none of the enterprises succeeded commercially. Afterwards, the principle of radio communication was publicised widely from Tesla’s experiments and demonstrations. Various scientists, inventors, and experimenters began to investigate wireless methods.

Claims have been made that Nathan Beverly Stubblefield, an eccentric farmer from Murray, Kentucky, developed radio between 1885 and 1892, before either Tesla or Marconi. He received widespread attention in early 1902 when he gave a series of public demonstrations of a battery-operated wireless telephone, which could be transported to different locations and used on mobile platforms such as boats.

Stubblefield was convinced other people were stealing his ideas but his devices seemed to have worked by induction transmission rather than radio transmission. Nonetheless, Stubblefield may have been the first to simultaneously transmit audio wirelessly to several receivers, albeit over moderately short distances, while envisaging the eventual development of broadcasting on a national scale.

Stubblefield later became a recluse and lived in a rudimentary shelter near Almo, Kentucky. He died around 28 March 1928 and his body was not discovered until a few days later, having been ‘gnawed by rats’. While many later reports state that the cause of death was starvation, at the time of his death a coroner was quoted as saying ‘he apparently was a victim of heart disease’. The citizens of Murray, Kentucky, were highly affectionate towards their ‘mad radio genius’, calling him ‘The Father of Radio’ and even erecting a monument to him in the town in 1930.

Between 1893 and 1894 a Brazilian priest and scientist, Roberto Landell de Moura, who was commonly known as Roberto Landell, conducted experiments in wireless transmissions. He didn’t publicise his achievement until 1900, when he held a public demonstration of a wireless transmission of voice in São Paulo on 3 June. He was granted a Brazilian patent in 1901 before securing three more for a Wave Transmitter, a Wireless Telephone and Wireless Telegraph.

A lack of technical details makes it uncertain which sending technology was being utilised, but if radio signals were employed, then these would be the earliest reported audio transmissions by radio. Although Landell secured patents in Brazil and the United States during the early 1900s, he was unable to acquire enough financial support to further develop his devices.

The Indian physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose publicly demonstrated the use of radio waves in Calcutta in November 1894. Bose set fire to gunpowder and activated a bell using electromagnetic waves and therefore was the first to send and receive radio waves over a significant distance. Bose progressed swiftly with remote wireless signalling and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio signals. However, he wasn’t interested in patenting his work and allowed others to further develop his research.

Oliver Lodge transmitted radio signals on 14 August 1894 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University. This was one year after Tesla, five years after Heinrich Hertz and one year before Marconi. On 19 August 1894 Lodge demonstrated the reception of Morse code signalling via radio waves using a coherer. He had upgraded Edouard Branly’s coherer radio wave detector by adding a trembler, which displaced clustered particles, thus restoring the device’s sensitivity. Lodge had initiated a new system of communication by means of electrical waves that became known as wireless telegraphy.

In August 1898 Oliver Lodge patented ‘Electric Telegraphy’, which made wireless signals using Induction or Tesla coils for the transmitter and a Branly coherer for the detector. By making the antenna coil or inductance variable, Lodge had made it possible to tune in and select a desired frequency.

In 1895 the physicist Alexander Stepanovich Popov developed a practical communication system based on the coherer. His invention was capable of detecting electromagnetic waves that indicated the presence of electrical discharges, specifically lightning, in the atmosphere. The design of Popov’s lightning detector was similar to that of Marconi’s wireless telegraph, but Popov’s invention focused on receiving rather than transmitting signals. He didn’t apply for a patent for this invention.

Popov had expanded upon the work of earlier physicists, such as Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge, but he was the first to incorporate an antenna. Another significant discovery of Popov’s came in 1897, when he found that metallic objects could interfere with the transmission of radio waves, a phenomenon known as wave reflection.

On 7 May 1895 Popov demonstrated the transmission and reception of radio waves used for communication at the Russian Physical and Chemical Society. Around March 1896 he reportedly demonstrated the transmission of radio waves between different buildings to the Saint Petersburg Physical Society. This would have been before the public demonstration of the Marconi system. However, other accounts state that Popov achieved these results in December 1897, after publication of Marconi’s patent. He later experimented with ship-to-shore communication. Popov died in 1905 and the Russian government didn’t press his claim until 1945.

In 1895 the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford arrived in England. The First Baron Rutherford of Nelson was a keen innovator and inventor. He began using wireless waves as a method of signalling. Sir Robert Ball, who had been scientific adviser to the body maintaining lighthouses on the Irish coast, championed Rutherford’s work and hoped he would be able to solve the onerous problem of a ship’s inability to detect a lighthouse in fog. Rutherford increased the sensitivity of his apparatus until he could detect electromagnetic waves over a distance of several hundred metres.

Karl Ferdinand Braun made two major contributions to the development of radio. The first was the introduction of a closed tuned circuit in the generating part of the transmitter, and its separation from the antenna by means of inductive coupling. Around 1898 he invented a crystal diode rectifier or ‘Cat’s whisker diode’. Braun’s invention bridged a much longer distance.

Our chronological path now leads us to the person who is widely recognised as the true father of radio. Guglielmo Marconi was fascinated by Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of radio waves, and realised that if they could be transmitted and detected over long distances, wireless telegraphy could be developed for commercial purposes. He started experimenting in 1894 and installed rough aerials on opposite sides of his family’s garden in Bologna, Italy. His aerials were tin plates mounted on posts. Marconi managed to receive signals over a distance of 100m, and by the end of 1895 had extended the distance to over a mile. Marconi offered his telegraph system to the Italian government, but they turned it down.

The British Post Office was more receptive and Marconi moved to London. In February 1896 he constructed his transmitter on the roof of the Central Telegraph Office, and a receiver on the roof of a building called ‘GPO South’ in Carter Lane, 270m away. His later transmissions were detected 2km away, and on 2 September at Salisbury Plain the range was increased to 12km.

Marconi received the first wireless patent from the British government. In part, it was based on the theory that the communication range increases substantially as the height of the aerial above ground level increases. On 12 December 1896 Marconi gave his first public demonstration of radio at Toynbee Hall, London.

In 1897 Marconi established the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company at Chelmsford and the world’s first radio factory was opened there, employing fifty people. On 11 May 1897 tests were carried out to establish that contacts were possible over water. A transmitter was constructed at Lavernock Point, near Penarth, and the transmissions were received on the other side of the Bristol Channel, at the Island of Holm, a distance of 6km.

In November 1897 the first permanent radio installation, ‘Needles Hotel Wireless Station’, was installed at Alum Bay, on the Isle of Wight, by the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company. Alum Bay was an isolated but striking strip of coastline that provided open water straight to the mainland just as far as Marconi’s equipment’s top range.

Marconi managed to transmit to two hired ferryboats and to another station in Bournemouth. Alum Bay may have helped launch wireless but this didn’t impress the inventor’s landlord. The Royal Needles Hotel subsequently raised Marconi’s rent so he dismantled the station at the end of May 1900 and moved further down the coast.

The Daily Express was the first newspaper to obtain news by wireless telegraphy in August 1898. In December 1898 Marconi installed radio equipment on the Royal Yacht Osborne, which was moored at Cowes. Regular messages were relayed from the yacht and from Osborne House, also on the Isle of Wight. The messages were then passed on to Buckingham Palace. The Queen received 150 bulletins on the Prince of Wales’ health from the yacht, where he was convalescing. The Prince operated the equipment on the Royal Yacht while Marconi operated the equipment in Osborne House. Around the same time wireless communication was established between the East Goodwin Lightship and the South Foreland Lighthouse.

In 1899 Marconi was on board the HMS Defiant and observed proceedings as the ship’s captain gave orders to three cruisers in controlled manoeuvres via radio for the first time. The first telegraph message was sent across the English Channel on 27 March 1899. It was sent from South Foreland to Wimereux, in France, by Marconi. The success of the demonstration resulted in lighthouses throughout the UK being fitted with wireless sets.

On 17 March 1899 Marconi garnered a lot of publicity when wireless telegraphy was used to save a ship in distress in the North Sea. The three-masted ship Elbe was sailing to Hamburg with a cargo of slates. A thick fog was prevailing at the time when the ship went ashore on the Goodwin Sands. The East Goodwin Lightship heard the signals and communicated by wireless telegraphy to the South Foreland Lighthouse. From there telegraphic messages were sent to the authorities, and lifeboats at Ramsgate, Deal and Kingsdown were put on standby. Fortunately, the lifeboats weren’t required as the Elbe was able to refloat eight hours later. Nevertheless, this was the first occasion in which lifeboats had been alerted by the means of wireless.

About this time Marconi began to develop tuned circuits for wireless transmission so that a wireless could be tuned to a particular frequency. He patented this on 26 April 1900, under the name of ‘Tuned Syntonic Telegraphy’. His next project was to send a signal across the Atlantic. He convinced investors to spend £50,000 on the transatlantic project and purchased land in Poldhu, Cornwall. This site was chosen by Marconi because it stood directly opposite Cape Cod, where its sister radio station was to be built. The site was also chosen for its remoteness, to keep the project out of the public eye and out of the newspapers.

It was a massive undertaking that dwarfed anything he had built before. Construction work began in October 1900 when around 400 wires were suspended in an inverted cone shape from twenty masts. Infuriatingly, the system was blown down during a storm, so a temporary aerial was hastily assembled, using two surviving masts, to let the transatlantic experiments carry on. A year later the Poldhu Wireless Station had successfully transmitted signals to ships at distances over 321km. Nonetheless, the transatlantic project remained Marconi’s main goal.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Cape Cod site was eventually abandoned. Numerous difficulties, including severe weather, necessitated the move of the receiving station from Cape Cod to St John’s Newfoundland, which was also 965km closer to Cornwall.

Marconi travelled across the Atlantic to supervise proceedings from that end. Due to time and financial constraints, he opted not to build a masted receiving antenna array. The original receiving antenna in Newfoundland was 10cm in diameter and was held aloft by a balloon, which was ripped apart in a storm. The first attempt to send signals across was made in November