Twelve Inventions Which Changed America by Gerhard Falk

Author:Gerhard Falk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780761860815
Publisher: Hamilton Books

Chapter Seven

Radio and Television

I.

So many men have contributed to the invention of the radio that the endless dispute concerning priority of ideas and developments can never be resolved. Suffice it to understand that the radio, and subsequently television, was the direct outgrowth of the creation of the telegraph and wireless communication. Included in the list of contributors to the radio are Gian Romagnosi, Hans Ørsted and Andrė Ampẻre. All of these scientists experimented with electromagnetic physical phenomena. It was the theory of electromagnetism as proposed by Michael Faraday, Joseph Henry, James Clerk Maxwell, and Wilhelm von Belzhold, which became the forerunner of the radio.1

It was David Edward Hughes (1831-1900) who discovered that sparks would generate a radio signal that could be detected by listening to a telephone receiver connected to a microphone. He was succeeded by a host of additional contributors, including Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894), Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), and finally Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), who succeeded in creating “electric wave telegraphy,” resulting in the award to Marconi by the United States Patent Office of a patent for radio in 1901.2

The consequences of this development for the United States were indeed dramatic and revolutionary. In 1901 the United States was chiefly a country dominated by many rural communities. Communication between these communities within the three million square miles of the country was hardly possible. It was therefore the radio which became the most important catalyst in promoting American unity from coast to coast as never before. In addition, the radio became a source of instant news about faraway events in a manner not heretofore known. This became evident when on April 15, 1912 the luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and sank, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 of her passengers.

The Titanic was advertised as unsinkable. The ship was equipped with two 1.5 kilowatt spark-gap wireless telegraphs. This telegraphy was at that time the latest, most advanced system of communication, so that it was used for the first thirty years of radio transmission. The two radio operators on the damaged ship sent messages to nearby ships asking for help before the Titanic sank. The ships La Touraine and Mount Temple simultaneously heard the distress signal of the Titanic at 10:25 p.m. on April 14, 1912. In addition, radio communication made it possible that the ship Carpathia was at least able to rescue some of the Titanic survivors from the lifeboats they were using after the Titanic had already sunk. The Titanic disaster may also led to the growth of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, because David Sarnoff, who was working for the “Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company,” claimed he picked up transmissions from the Carpathia concerning the sinking of the Titanic and the names of the survivors. These events, said Sarnoff, led him to recognize the importance of radio, so that he made his career with RCA.3

In 1933, Edwin Howard Armstrong, a professor at Columbia University, invented Frequency Modulation or FM radio. This allowed for the

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