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!