Nikola Tesla and the invention of the Radio.

        Nikola Tesla and the invention of the Radio

Hello everybody we are going to talk about Nikola Tesla and his contribution to the invention of the radio.

Contrary to the common believe, the radio was not invented by Guglielmo Marconi, but by Nikola Tesla. Initially Marconi was credited with it invention, but soon it was demonstrated that he had used 17 patents of Nikola Tesla. In 1943, by vote of the United States Congress, the invention of radio was given to Nikola Tesla .

Since its invention, Radio has represented one of the greatest advances in human history, not to mention giving birth to the entire field of electronics.

When radio arrived at the end of the 19th century, few thought that “wireless” communications, in which intangible signals could be sent through the air over long distances, would be competitive in a world dominated by the telegraph and telephone.

Fortunately, other scientists and engineers saw the radio spectrum not as a curiosity but the best tool for a new kind of communication and kept on with the developments that were shorter in time than others technological inventions.

World events quickly proved the value of this work. In 1905 the Japanese navy destroyed the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima, in part because of radio equipment the Japanese bought from Marconi.

And in 1912, after ships responding to the sinking Titanic’s distress signals rescued 711 passengers, maritime authorities required every seagoing vessel to have a wireless operator listening around the clock.

The next big step was finding a way to manipulate radio waves so they could carry more than dots and dashes in fast fashion. Switching from pulses to continuous waves provided the key. Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian autodidact, work out a way to transmit voice and music by altering the intensity of waves—called amplitude modulation—then creating AM radio. Fessenden ultimately earned money and fame from his invention.

On the other hand, American radio engineer Edwin Howard Armstrong, regarded by many radio cognoscenti as the greatest of them all, is today almost forgotten. He also was working in waves and found out that by varying wave frequency instead of amplitude, stations could avoid the interference that often corrupted AM transmissions. The result was frequency modulation—FM radio.

The first decades of the 20th century also saw video being transmitted over the airwaves. The first television system, developed in the U.K. in the early 1920s by John Logie Baird, used an electromechanical device akin to a film camera and projector to capture and reproduce images. He started broadcasting TV using just 30 scan lines per video frame—enough to send an image but crude compared with the 484 lines per frame used in U.S. analog TV broadcasts and worse than the 1,080 lines possible with new digital systems.

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