From Transmitter to Receiver

A steaming cup of tea in your hand and a rejuvenating voice of the RJ wishing you a "Good morning!"- what else could start your day in a better way? Be it a teenager or a pensioner, the radio is loved by all! With over 245 private broadcasters, radio rules the air over India. From cricket updates to spicy celebrity gossips, light hearted jokes to foot tapping music, the radio plays it all. To delve into an altogether light-hearted world, all you need to do is to plug in your headphones and tap that radio app. But have you ever cogitated how we metamorphosed from those big old spark gap transmitters to these cool radio apps?

It all began with some science and some innovative minds. Michael Faraday was the one who proposed that electromagnetic forces extended into the empty space around a conductor, but couldn't complete his work. This was the spark which triggered the invention of radio. In 1873, James Maxwell carried the research forward and gave theoretical basis to the proposal. Later, it was Hertz who validated Maxwell's Theory through experimentation. He demonstrated that radio radiation had all the properties of waves and discovered that the electromagnetic equations could be reformulated into a partial differential equation called the wave equation.

Later on physicists like Sir Oliver Lodge and J.C Bose carried out various experiments in this area. Lodge demonstrated the reception of Morse code signaling using radio waves using a "coherer". Indian physicist, Bose ignited gunpowder and rang a bell at a distance using electromagnetic waves, proving that communication signals can be sent without using wires. Finally, it was Marconi who performed the first ever successful radio transmission, and thus was titled the "inventor of radio".

With the turn of the 20th century, the scope of the research expanded from mere experimentalism to setting up commercial broadcasting stations. Charles Herrold constructed the first ever broadcasting station in 1909 in San Jose named "San Jose Calling". A revolutionary change in broadcasting embarked with the invention of FM by Edwin Armstrong. Though initially it took a few decades for setting up commercial FM broadcasting stations, it soon popularized. Your addiction to the radio speaks it all! 

The radio soon became portable in the latter half of the 20th century when Regency introduced the first pocket transistor radio, the TR-1. Later, Sony introduce its first transistorized radio which was small enough to fit in a vest pocket. Further as we time travel towards the present, the GPS constellations of satellites were launched, trailed by application of digital transmissions to broadcasting in the 1990's which came to us in the form of these 'cool' radio apps.

So here you are, back in 2014, switching over radio stations on your smartphones according to your mood, now remotely aware of how it all began! Stay tuned!

Inspired by nature, Inspiring to all

Everything we see today has been possible because somewhere someone was observant and was keen to recreate a better picture of the world with science. Be it the apple that fell on Newton’s head or the streamlined bodies of modern day airplanes, nature has made its impact on science in more ways than we can ever count. When the Wright brothers created their ‘flying machine’ to soar high into the sky, little did they know that they would be unearthing so much potential trapped inside the world around them. The submarines glide through the sea using the streamlining feature of sharks, and other marine animals. All through the human existence, there have been many instances where humans have solved their complex problems by mimicking nature’s simple solutions. Biomimicry today has become a field of study per se. Velcro, the stickybot and the bullet train, are all famous examples.

It’s amazing how much nature can teach us. Everything that the earth has is a trick in disguise. Every second, every part of it is teaches us to innovate to adapt. Be it the colour combinations for the creative minds or scientific traces for the curious ones, nature provides us a lot and it’s up to us how we observe and replicate them in ways that will be useful for mankind.

On one side we talk about Mother Nature being our inspiration and on the other, we are ruining it. Today, we have reached a stage where we only think about moving forward and moving fast. We don’t think about the possible fall-out and the side-effects that our creations can have on nature. In our journey of scaling new heights, we've been leaving behind scars and forgetting why we started it in the very first place.

Nature is beautiful and has infinite stories to tell and lessons to teach. But at the rate we are going we may ruin it before we can even learn quarter of what it has to say. So, next time you're pondering over ways to leave a mark on the world, observe the nature around you, but make sure you don't end up destroying what inspired you.