Development of radio technology

Maxwell’s prediction

Early in the 19th century, Michael Faraday, an English physicist, demonstrated that an electric current can produce a local magnetic field and that the energy in this field will return to the circuit when the current is stopped or changed. James Clerk Maxwell, professor of experimental physics at Cambridge, in 1864 proved mathematically that any electrical disturbance could produce an effect at a considerable distance from the point at which it occurred and predicted that electromagnetic energy could travel outward from a source as waves moving at the speed of light.

Hertz: radio-wave experiments

At the time of Maxwell’s prediction there were no known means of propagating or detecting the presence of electromagnetic waves in space. It was not until about 1888 that Maxwell’s theory was tested by Heinrich Hertz, who demonstrated that Maxwell’s predictions were true at least over short distances by installing a spark gap (two conductors separated by a short gap) at the centre of a parabolic metal mirror. A wire ring connected to another spark gap was placed about five feet (1.5 metres) away at the focus of another parabolic collector in line with the first. A spark jumping across the first gap caused a smaller spark to jump across the gap in the ring five feet away. Hertz showed that the waves travelled in straight lines and that they could be reflected by a metal sheet just as light waves are reflected by a mirror.

Marconi’s development of wireless telegraphy

The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, whose main genius was in his perseverance and refusal to accept expert opinion, repeated Hertz’s experiments and eventually succeeded in getting secondary sparks over a distance of 30 feet (nine metres). In his experiment he attached one side of the primary spark gap to an elevated wire (in effect, an antenna) and the other to Earth, with a similar arrangement for the secondary gap at the receiving point. The distance between transmitter and receiver was gradually increased first to 300 yards (275 metres), then to two miles (three kilometres), then across the English Channel. Finally, in 1901, Marconi bridged the Atlantic when the letter s in Morse code travelled from Poldhu, Cornwall, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres). For this distance, Marconi replaced the secondary-spark detector with a device known as a coherer, which had been invented by a French electrical engineer, Edouard Branly, in 1890. Branly’s detector consisted of a tube filled with iron filings that coalesced, or “cohered,” when a radio-frequency voltage was applied to the ends of the tube. The cohesion of the iron filings allowed the passage of current from an auxiliary power supply to operate a relay that reproduced the Morse signals. The coherer had to be regularly tapped to separate the filings and prepare them to react to the next radio-frequency signal.

The Fleming diode and De Forest Audion

The next major event was the discovery that an electrode operating at a positive voltage inside the evacuated envelope of a heated filament lamp would carry a current. The American inventor Thomas A. Edison had noted that the bulb of such a lamp blackened near the positive electrode, but it was Sir John Ambrose Fleming, professor of electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, who explored the phenomenon and in 1904 discovered the one-directional current effect between a positively biased electrode, which he called the anode, and the heated filament; the electrons flowed from filament to anode only. Fleming called the device a diode because it contained two electrodes, the anode and the heated filament; he noted that when an alternating current was applied to the diode, only the positive halves of the waves were passed—that is, the wave was rectified (changed from alternating to direct current). The diode could also be used to detect radio-frequency signals since it suppressed half the radio-frequency wave and produced a pulsed direct current corresponding to the on and off of the Morse code transmitted signals. Fleming’s discovery was the first step to the amplifier tube that in the early part of the 20th century revolutionized radio communication.

Fleming failed to appreciate the possibilities he had opened up and it was the American inventor Lee De Forest who in 1906 conceived the idea of interposing an open-meshed grid between the heated filament and positively biased anode, or plate, to control the flow of electrons. De Forest called his invention an Audion. With it he could obtain a large voltage change at the plate for a small voltage change on the grid electrode. This was a discovery of major importance because it made it possible to amplify the radio-frequency signal picked up by the antenna before application to the receiver detector; thus, much weaker signals could be utilized than had previously been possible.

Early research by commercial companies

The first commercial company to be incorporated for the manufacture of radio apparatus was the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, Ltd. (England) in July 1897 (later changed to Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd.); other countries soon showed an interest in the commercial exploitation of radio.

Among the major developments of the first two decades of the 20th century was De Forest’s discovery in 1912 of the oscillating properties of his Audion tube, a discovery that led to the replacement of the spark transmitter by an electronic tube oscillator that could generate much purer radio waves of relatively stable frequency. By 1910, radio messages between land stations and ships had become commonplace, and in that year the first air-to-ground radio contact was established from an aircraft. A landmark transmission came in 1918, when a radiotelegraph message from the Marconi long-wave station at Caernarvon, in Wales, was received in Australia, over a distance of 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometres).

Though early experiments had shown that speech could be transmitted by radio, the first significant demonstration was not made until 1915 when the American Telephone & Telegraph Company successfully transmitted speech signals from west to east across the Atlantic between Arlington, Virginia, and Paris. A year later, a radiotelephone message was conveyed to an aircraft flying near Brooklands (England) airfield. In 1919 a Marconi engineer spoke across the Atlantic in the reverse direction from Ballybunion, Ireland, to the United States.

From 1920 onward radio made phenomenal progress through research activities in Europe, North America, and Asia. The invention of the electron tube and later the transistor (1948) made possible remarkable developments.

Hand wiring

In the early days of radio and up to the end of World War II, radio receivers consisted of resistors, capacitors, inductors (coils), and electronic tubes joined together by wires with coloured insulation. A colour code, whereby a particular colour was assigned to a particular circuit connection, such as black leads for filaments, green for grid, was adopted throughout the world to facilitate manufacture and the tracing of faults. Later, wires cut to the right length were laced together into a harness to speed assembly. Plugs and sockets were employed for connecting one major part with another. Printed circuit wiring, developed during the 1940s, eliminated much of the hand work and produced important manufacturing economies.

Printed circuits

With printed wiring, the layout of the circuit is planned with component size and position in mind, and connections are made by suitably shaped copper strip or foil bonded to an insulating board or substrate. An extension of this technique was the printed component; resistors, capacitors, and low value inductors became a part of the printing process.

The development of the transistor simplified the exploitation of printed circuitry by eliminating one of the bulkiest components, the vacuum tube. Further development led to the manufacture of the integrated circuit in the 1960s. Compact circuits of this type can perform a multiplicity of tasks such as amplification and switching. They are widely used in computers where space is at a premium. Integrated-circuit amplifiers are likely to become more important because of their ability to amplify very high frequencies.

The size of a portable receiver constructed from microminiature circuits is now dictated almost entirely by the loudspeaker and the quality of reproduction required. The smaller the loudspeaker the lower the power it can accept and the less the output of low audio frequencies.