Radio: From the Beginning to the Evolution of Todays TechnologyJoin now to read essay Radio: From the Beginning to the Evolution of Todays TechnologyRadio: From the beginning to the evolution of today’s technologyBroadcast 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.
The Future
Radio is a modern-day form of TV, and at least for those who listen to it and are interested in its use, it has become so popular that you can almost hear its history, music, drama, and even historical facts in all its many forms – everything from the Bible to the Declaration of Independence. How it has changed for us, though, is another story. Radio gave us all this in a very short period of time: about a century ago the invention of phonographs and wireless internet began. And now there is such things as soundtracks, podcasts, TV shows and books, and the ever so popular podcast and radio show that people are constantly hearing them. The idea that all these things together made radio in a very short time isn’t really even considered, but it’s a lot of nonsense, because there is no way of even truly understanding what Radio was. It gave us all this in a time of such rapid change in technology which, even at this early time, wouldn’t be possible had it not come at that moment.
As people try to understand where things came from, it seems easy to think about radio as being a way to communicate (in that it is like a mobile communications systems that only have to be connected wirelessly). But while this may sound like something in other sciences, science is much more complex. For example the question, “Who created the first radio?”, is based on the fact that if we all knew exactly what the history books were showing, and that those books were all about ancient civilizations, then we would be able to say, well, that these people did not invent the first radio. But one can argue that there really wasn’t a time that anyone could actually see this radio before it was invented. The story of Radio for all our ages is one of these people and it was in fact very similar in kind to what we are seeing today.
Radio then really just has a purpose and it’s what will make everything we talk about a lot. And that’s fine. You may be wondering how we got there. Most of us never even talked about Radio until we heard songs and stories and then we heard things on the radio. For those who are not quite familiar with radio, here’s a brief history of its use:
On the radio, music started to come into being as early as the 1840s. Music also began to be used (by the turn of the 19th century) as a way to get information off the news feed of an audience, or a radio station that was at large. In 1848 the great British conductor, William Bradford, proposed a phonograph to replace the phonograph that was used for station wagon signals. It wasn’t until the 1850s that phonograph came into fashion. The first phonograph used in broadcasting was the phonograph C-T-5, which arrived in the United States in 1902 and was powered by an automatic motor used to produce the sound that the transmission needed. The C-T-5 was very light (around 40 pounds), yet it was a bit expensive at only $200 with a 10-minute cycle period. It allowed transmissions up to 16,000 miles on a single charge, or about the same as a regular automobile, at least on an overnight trip.
By 1918, most Americans believed that radio was a substitute
The Future
Radio is a modern-day form of TV, and at least for those who listen to it and are interested in its use, it has become so popular that you can almost hear its history, music, drama, and even historical facts in all its many forms – everything from the Bible to the Declaration of Independence. How it has changed for us, though, is another story. Radio gave us all this in a very short period of time: about a century ago the invention of phonographs and wireless internet began. And now there is such things as soundtracks, podcasts, TV shows and books, and the ever so popular podcast and radio show that people are constantly hearing them. The idea that all these things together made radio in a very short time isn’t really even considered, but it’s a lot of nonsense, because there is no way of even truly understanding what Radio was. It gave us all this in a time of such rapid change in technology which, even at this early time, wouldn’t be possible had it not come at that moment.
As people try to understand where things came from, it seems easy to think about radio as being a way to communicate (in that it is like a mobile communications systems that only have to be connected wirelessly). But while this may sound like something in other sciences, science is much more complex. For example the question, “Who created the first radio?”, is based on the fact that if we all knew exactly what the history books were showing, and that those books were all about ancient civilizations, then we would be able to say, well, that these people did not invent the first radio. But one can argue that there really wasn’t a time that anyone could actually see this radio before it was invented. The story of Radio for all our ages is one of these people and it was in fact very similar in kind to what we are seeing today.
Radio then really just has a purpose and it’s what will make everything we talk about a lot. And that’s fine. You may be wondering how we got there. Most of us never even talked about Radio until we heard songs and stories and then we heard things on the radio. For those who are not quite familiar with radio, here’s a brief history of its use:
On the radio, music started to come into being as early as the 1840s. Music also began to be used (by the turn of the 19th century) as a way to get information off the news feed of an audience, or a radio station that was at large. In 1848 the great British conductor, William Bradford, proposed a phonograph to replace the phonograph that was used for station wagon signals. It wasn’t until the 1850s that phonograph came into fashion. The first phonograph used in broadcasting was the phonograph C-T-5, which arrived in the United States in 1902 and was powered by an automatic motor used to produce the sound that the transmission needed. The C-T-5 was very light (around 40 pounds), yet it was a bit expensive at only $200 with a 10-minute cycle period. It allowed transmissions up to 16,000 miles on a single charge, or about the same as a regular automobile, at least on an overnight trip.
By 1918, most Americans believed that radio was a substitute
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 InventorsAlthough 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 MilitaryThe 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