Thomas Edison | Broadcasting Now

Purpose once defined all communication — signals crept along the wires, moving through the miles. Messages were received in a series of dots and dashes: volleyed back and forth to ensure the success of conversations. A one-to-one dynamic dominated the 19th century, and the public celebrated its practicality. The telegraph was declared a revolution. There was no need to improve it.

Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, however, disagreed.

Fessenden — a Canadian inventor who mentored under Thomas Edison in 1886 — was unimpressed with the limitations of the telegraph. Its intentions were for singular communications, unable to reach the masses. And Fessenden thought this a waste. He wished instead to develop a more comprehensive form of conversing and his efforts eventually created the one-to-many philosophy.

As its name implies, the one-to-many form of broadcasting enables multiple receivers to earn the same message — without having to send that message again and again. The effect is instead simultaneous, allowing information to be wired to different sources without the expected delays.

Derision greeted this idea originally: supporters of the then-ingenious telegraph assumed it was without point. Filtering communications to more than one receptor seemed absurd. Fessenden was convinced of its potential, however, and his efforts yielded the evolution of spark-gap transmitters, coherers and the world’s first audio radio transmission (sending forecast information across the United States in 1900 with the aid of the National Weather Bureau, a feat that was once impossible).

The one-to-many notion then enthralled the country, signaling the end of the telegraph and the beginnings of modern broadcasting.

History of Radio Debatable

: Image via Wikipedia

There has always been much debate over who truly invented radio. Out of this debate, several men have been credited with either inventing some component that makes up the fascinating technology involved with broadcasting sound over air waves or with inventing radio altogether.
A look back into the history of radio brings to mind numerous the names of inventors, scientists, physicists, engineers and entrepreneurs. Some of these men pursued more than one of these career paths, while others worked in one specific area of expertise.

To begin the invention of radio, some people go back to James Clerk Maxwell. He was the mastermind who discovered that magnetic and electrical waves travel as fast as light throughout space in the early 1860s. Then, in the mid-1870s, Thomas Edison discovered what is called the Edison Effect. This is used to describe what happened when he noticed an electrical current flows from a cathode of negative charge to an anode of positive charge.

In the late 1880s, Heinrich Hertz proved Maxwell’s theory of traveling electrical waves. He called the space through which the waves are carried ether. There were a number of others who are attributed, at least in some part, with contributing to the technology involved with radio. It was in the late 1890s that Guglielmo Marconi patented the technology invented, discovered or otherwise developed by him and others.

Marconi had several of his patents denied by the U.S. Supreme Court when others sought credit for the work they had done to make radio broadcasting possible. The court decided Marconi had not invented or developed the original components himself, but had probably used the ideas and work of others to develop radio from there. Lee de Forest developed the audion in the early 1900s around the same time as David Sarnoff began influencing the industry that would expand into a broadcasting empire.

With so many hands in the pot of radio discovery and development, it is impossible to narrow its invention down to only one person. The debate of radio’s original inventor will continue to astound people just as radio itself does.

Changing Signals: Broadcasting

History of Radio Debatable

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