Guglielmo Marconi inside the station at St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, after receiving the first transatlantic wireless signal.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Guglielmo Marconi inside the station
Just Who Invented Radio And Which Was The First Station?
If you ask most people who invented Radio, the name Marconi comes to mind. Usually KDKA Pittsburgh is the response when you ask about the first Radio station. But are these really Radio's firsts? In the interest of curiosity and good journalism, we set out to determine if these were in fact Radio's firsts.
Of course, as with a rating book, almost anyone can find a place where they rank higher than someone else in something. Such is the case with the inventors of Radio and the first Radio stations. Was the inventor of Radio the person who discovered that electromagnetic waves could be sent through the air, or the person
who actually sent them? Was it the person who sent signals the farthest, or who sent the first with voice? Was the first station the first one to be licensed, or was it the first licensed experimental station? The answers aren't easy.
Wireless itself is relatively broad. Within the wireless category are many subcategories and industries of which Radio broadcasting is just one, as is wireless telegraph, wireless ship-to-shore communication, and so on.
To go back to the development of wireless we must first track events leading up to the discovery of electricity. Though some documentation goes further back, electricity as a science began in 1600 when Dr. William Gilbert, who was Queen Elizabeth's personal physician, invented the electroscope which detected electromagnetic energy in the body. He coined the word electricity. From that point forward many people had their hand in the development of electricity. Sir Thomas Browne, Benjamin Franklin, Alessandro Volta and Georg Simon Ohm among others. For brevitys sake, we'll look at wireless after electricity was invented.
Exploring Wireless
The real interest in wireless began with Samuel F. Morse's invention of the telegraph in 1837, which required wires (a very expensive proposition). In 1867 a Scottish mathematician, James Clerk Maxwell, conceived of the electromagnetic theory of light. This theory holds that light, electric waves and magnetic waves, of varying frequency, travel through the same medium ether. Maxwell was never able to prove the theory.In 1865 a Washington, D.C. dentist, Dr. Mahlon Loomis, explored wireless. He developed a method of transmitting and receiving messages using the Earth's atmosphere as a conductor. Loomis sent up kites 18 miles apart from two West Virginia mountaintops. The kites were covered with a copper screen and were (1)connected to the ground with copper wires. The wire from each kite string was connected to one side of a galvanometer; the other side was held by Loomis, who was ready to make a connection to a coil buried in the Earth. The receiving station connection, between the meter and the coil buried in the Earth, was always closed, and whenever the circuit was closed at the transmitting end, the galvanometer at the receiving station actually dipped. Congress then awarded Loomis a $50,000 research grant.
In 1879 David Edward Hughes discovered that when a stick of wood covered with powdered copper was placed in an electrical circuit, the copper would adhere when a spark was made. In 1885 Sir William H. Peerce and A.W. Heaviside sent signals to one another at a distance of 1,000 yards with two parallel telegraph lines and an unwired telephone receiver in the middle. This was the discovery of induction, or crosstalk.
The real experiments leading to Radios discovery started with Heinrich Hertz in 1887. Some call him the father of Radio because his experiments created interest by Marconi. Radio waves were commonly called Hertzian Waves in the early days. Hertz studied Maxwell's theories and in attempting to develop further data, actually set up the first spark transmitter and receiver. The transmitter consisted of a Leyden jar and a coil of wire, the ends of which were left open so that a small gap was formed. For the receiver he used a similar coil at the opposite end of the room. When the jar was charged, sparks flew across the gap and were received on the other end. Hertz then measured the velocity of the waves and found they were the same as light, 186,000 miles per second.
In 1892 a French inventor, Edouard Branly, created a tube containing loose zinc and silver filings, with contact plugs on each end. The shavings would stick together after the first spark was received; a method of separating them for the next signal was necessary. Popov, a Russian, came up with the idea of using a vibrator and the hammer of an electric bell to strike the tube and cause the filings to separate.
Tesla, Marconi and Stubblefield
In 1893 a Serbian, Nikola Tesla, suggested a means of conduction using the Earth. He invented the Tesla coil which created high frequency oscillations. In 1895 Marconi experimented with Hertzian waves and was able to send and receive messages over a mile and a quarter. He made great strides when he created transmission between two ships 12 miles apart. He then solicited and secured investors for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph company, the first to commercialize wireless. He was 23. By 1899 he had covered distances of 74 miles. In 1899 he adopted Sir Oliver Lodge's principles of tuning circuits, perfecting them and obtaining a patent in 1900. In December 1901 when Marconi sent the first transatlantic signal, inventor H. Otis Pond told Tesla, "Looks like Marconi got the jump on you." Tesla replied, "Marconi is a good fellow, let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents." Tesla's attitude toward Marconi later changed after years of litigation between them. Tesla later referred to Marconi as "a donkey."Tesla had come up with something different and superior to that of Hertz's original ideas. He developed a series of high frequency alternators producing frequencies up to 33,000 cycles per second (33,000 Hz). This, of course, was the forerunner to high frequency alternators used for continuous wave Radio communication. Tesla went on to build the Tesla coil, an air-core transformer with primary and secondary coils tuned to resonate a step-up transformer which converts low-voltage high current to high-voltage low current at high frequencies. It is used today in all Radios and televisions.
In 1892, a Kentucky farmer and inventor, Nathan Stubblefield, publicly demonstrated wireless. Not only did he broadcast signals, but he also was able to broadcast voice and music. He demonstrated wireless again in 1898 to a documented (by The St. Louis Dispatch) distance of 500 yards. He demonstrated a ship-to-shore broadcast on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 1902, and received patent number 887,357 for wireless telephone on May 12, 1908. Stubblefield was so afraid that someone would steal his invention, he sheltered it from everyone. He had been offered $500,000 for his invention but turned it down because he felt it was worth more. Stubblefield envisioned the device in motorcars (as shown on his patent). Following another demonstration in Washington his "secret box" with his apparatus inside was stolen (documented February 13, 1912) and he believed his invention was copied. Nathan B. Stubblefield died of starvation and a pauper in Murray, Kentucky, after going into seclusion because of his failed attempts for acceptance.
Fessenden, De Forest & Fleming
In 1900, Professor Reginald A. Fessenden realized that Marconi's work was limited to telegraphy and wanted to find a way to transmit and receive telephony (voice). He began experimenting with continuous wave transmissions which led to the perfection of the arc transmitter. He also developed an alternator, similar to todays alternating current, with a higher frequency and thus eliminated the spark gaps which wasted energy. His work was to become a major milestone in the development of Radio. Simultaneously Lee De Forest built a wireless outfit, also less cumbersome than Marconi's. He used the electrolytic detector as did Fessenden, which later created legal conflicts between the two. (De Forest spent years in litigation with many other inventors and was often accused of taking credit for the inventions of others).In 1904 J. Ambrose Fleming developed his two-element (diode) valve (The Fleming Valve) while working for Marconi. Though significant, the invention was short-lived due to De Forest's invention of a three-element (triode) valve, which later became the audion tube, said to be the most significant invention in Radio. Unfortunately DeForest could not interest the public in buying stock in his company and he was forced to sell the rights to the American Telephone and Telegraph company for $500,000. The decision made by AT&T was thought to be foolish at the time, but later proved to be the investment that made the company.
On Christmas Eve in 1906 Fessenden delighted listeners up and down the East Coast by broadcasting voice and music from his transmitter at Brant Park, Massachusetts, using a high frequency alternator based on Teslas designs and principles. The program consisted of music from phonograph records, a violin solo, and a speech by the inventor. Fessendens program did not prove to be a pioneering effort, however. For several years Radio remained a communications medium devoted to sending and receiving messages. It proved especially valuable to the armed forces during World War I. The broadcasting potential was not realized until after the war, though David Sarnoff in 1916 envisioned the possibility of a Radio receiver in every home. (He later became head of the Radio Corporation of America and the National Broadcasting Company.) In 1907 G.W. Pickard discovered that minerals made an excellent detector which led to the invention of the crystal detector. It was not only effective but inexpensive which made the availability of wireless receivers more widespread.
The Radio Act of 1912
In 1910 the government required all ships to have a wireless telegraph. In 1912 the Titanic hit an iceberg and sent the first SOS signal which was heard by a nearby ship that came to the rescue of many survivors. It was later learned that another ship was closer, which would have resulted in more lives being saved, but that ship only had one wireless operator on board who happened to be "off-watch" at the time the Titanic went down. That resulted in the Radio Act of 1912, requiring that two operators be employed on all ships with constant watch. When the Titanic sunk, a young wireless operator was stationed at the Wanamaker Radio station in New York City to receive signals between the distressed ship and its rescuers, reports about the rescue work, and a list of the survivors so that the anxious world could be advised. This kid stayed at the telegraph for 72 hours. His name... David Sarnoff. It was this event that made the public aware of the importance of the wireless.In 1913 Edwin H. Armstrong (who much later invented FM Radio) created a way to increase the sensitivity of receivers. This regeneration system ended up in litigation with De Forest who claimed he was the inventor. Ultimately De Forest prevailed. De Forest also continued to perfect the audion tube he had sold to AT&T. It now had the ability to function as an oscillator (generator of high frequencies). This led to the oscillator circuit created by W.E. Hartley. The result was improved long-distance transmission of speech, the forerunner of Radio broadcasting.
The First Stations
In 1916 an amateur operator and engineer for Westinghouse Electric began broadcasting programs from his garage on amateur station 8XK in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. The broadcasts were enthusiastically received by other Radio amateurs who liked hearing wireless music. The broadcasts resulted in a newspaper article which generated such interest, that Westinghouse decided to build a station for the purpose of broadcasting. The station, KDKA, was rushed to launch its first broadcast for the election returns of the Harding-Cox presidential race. It was the first programming to reach a sizable audience (perhaps 1,000 persons mainly ham and amateur Radio operators). The returns were read by Leo Rosenberg, who later claimed to be the first professional Radio announcer. KDKA also hired the first full-time announcer Harold W. Arlin, who became the first sportscaster to do play-by-play football. The newspapers (2,000 across the country) having not yet realized that they were promoting a competitor, were so enamored with the medium that they printed daily broadcast schedules. KDKA broadcast the first remote, the first religious service, the first broadcast from a theater, and the first prizefight, all in 1921.The first commercial was claimed to be sent out over WEAF in New York City in 1922, however that is disputed because in KDKAs initial broadcasts announcers mentioned a record store in exchange for records to play on the air, as did KQW announcers in San Jose, California. (It's interesting to note that Westinghouse, which owned KDKA, was founded by George Westinghouse, the first owner of an electric company to employ the principles of alternating current. These principles were obtained through a relationship with Nikola Tesla who held the patent, and also had the patent on wireless transmission.)
But was KDKA the first station? Though its November 2, 1920 debut is considered the official start of Radio broadcasting, others were doing the same prior to KDKA. Earlier that same year, in Detroit, WWJ using call letters 8MK began regular broadcasts. And much earlier, in 1912, Charles David Herrold began regular, continuous broadcasts of music and information in San Jose. The amateur station was well-known around the Bay area. It eventually became KQW and then KCBS.
In 1913 the physics department at Iowa State University began wireless demonstrations and is documented by a newspaper article to have done one such demonstration at the Iowa State Fair in 1915. It became station 9YI and later WOI. With groundwork dating back to 1904, the University of Wisconsin in Madison experimented with voice and music transmission in 1917. Their calls were 9XM, and later WHA.
Radio's Father
So who was the father of Radio? We have credited Marconi traditionally, however there is much doubt that he is the true father of Radio. He was very industrious, highly inventive, and had the strongest and most successful entrepreneurial spirit of any of Radio's fathers. He made excellent commercial applications for wireless telegraphy. However our exhaustive research points to the father of Radio as Nikola Tesla who had disclosed wireless and the technology at a lecture in 1893, preceding Marconi's wireless inventions and practical demonstrations. In fact, a Supreme Court case in 1943 ruled that Tesla was the father of Radio. Marconi's first patent was issued in 1900 and Tesla's in 1898.But what about Nathan Stubblefield who had demonstrated wireless in 1892? If you go to the town square in Murray, Kentucky, you'll find a statue of Stubblefield inscribed with the words "Murray, Kentucky, Birthplace of Radio" Could it be that a forward-thinking albeit eccentric farmer from Kentucky outwitted the intellects of Tesla, Marconi, Edison (who once worked on wireless experiments and also won a suit against Marconi for patent infringement) and others? You will recall that after being very protective of his proprietary knowledge, Stubblefield's apparatus was stolen following a demonstration in Washington, D.C. Could it have surfaced as someone else's invention? Documents prove his early demonstrations of an actual working wireless system to have occurred one year before Tesla's lectures about Radio which were prior to his working experiments. No one will ever know for sure. The Supreme Court ruled that Tesla is the father of Radio ... and Marconi is not. The question remains whether the honor should really go to Stubblefield.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Martin Cooper - History of Cell Phone Martin Cooper talks about the first cell phone call.
Martin Cooper demonstrates the first portable cellular telephone.
April 3, 2003 marked the 30th anniversary of the first public telephone call placed on a portable cellular phone. Martin Cooper ( now chairman, CEO, and co-founder of ArrayComm Inc) placed that call on April 3, 1973, while general manager of Motorola's Communications Systems Division. It was the incarnation of his vision for personal wireless communications, distinct from cellular car phones. That first call, placed to Cooper's rival at AT&T's Bell Labs from the streets of New York City, caused a fundamental technology and communications market shift toward the person and away from the place.
"People want to talk to other people - not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire. It is that freedom we sought to vividly demonstrate in 1973," said Martin Cooper.
Martin Cooperadded, "As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones. I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter - probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life."
Following the April 3, 1973, public demonstration, using a "brick"-like 30-ounce phone, Cooper started the 10-year process of bringing the portable cell phone to market. Motorola introduced the 16-ounce "DynaTAC" phone into commercial service in 1983, with each phone costing the consumer $3,500. It took seven additional years before there were a million subscribers in the United States. Today, there are more cellular subscribers than wireline phone subscribers in the world, with mobile phones weighing as little as 3 ounces.
Martin Cooper Today
Martin Cooper's role in conceiving and developing the first portable cellular phone directly impacted his choice to found and lead ARRAY COMM, a wireless technology and systems company founded in 1992. ArrayComm's core adaptive antenna technology increases the capacity and coverage of any cellular system, while significantly lowering costs and making speech more reliable. This technology addresses what Cooper calls "the unfulfilled promise" of cellular, which should be, but still isn't as reliable or affordable as wired telephony.
ArrayComm has also used its adaptive antenna technology to make the Internet "personal" by creating the i-BURST Personal Broadband System, which delivers high-speed, mobile Internet access that consumers can afford.
"It's very exciting to be part of a movement toward making broadband available to people with the same freedom to be anywhere that they have for voice communications today," said Martin Cooper. "People rely heavily on the Internet for their work, entertainment and communication, but they need to be unleashed. We will look back at 2003 as the beginning of the era when the Internet became truly untethered."
Martin Cooper ( cell phone inventor)
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| Martin Coope |
The entire telecommunications industry will be restructured within the next couple of years, the father of the cellular phone says. And if you still do business the old-fashioned way, you will be left in the wake of wireless turbulence.
As a witness to how the major long-haul carriers now scramble to provide wireless, Martin Cooper, chairman, CEO and co-founder of ArrayComm Inc. says the industry is moving away from technological divisions and more into the area of perceived service.
"The divisions we made in the past, like local, long distance, analog or digital are disappearing, if they haven't disappeared already," says Cooper. "There is hardly analog left anywhere. It is now voice as data, and there are different kinds of data."
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Because of this, Cooper says wireless--and especially his newest endeavor at ArrayComm--is an opportunity that will revolutionize telecom today and tomorrow, just as his cell phone began changing calling habits in the 1970s.
Cooper adds that carriers, resellers and independent agents can claim a stake in this future, if they are concerned about personal communications services.
"And they certainly will have to be concerned, because eventually all services will be wireless," says Cooper. "I'm not just speaking about voice. I'm speaking of all data. When the Internet grows up, most Internet services are going to be wireless."
But first, wireless must mature, he says.
"Everybody I know has been on a cell phone call and will say, 'Let's finish this call on a real phone.' There is no fundamental reason wireless can't be as good as wireline," Cooper insists.
So the man who is credited for creating the cell phone in 1973 while working for Motorola Inc. and who lives by the principle that "There is no lack of spectrum, only a lack of spectral efficiency" has a new technology that he believes will once again shake up telecom dramatically.
Many people might be satisfied with one gigantic accomplishment in a lifetime. Cooper was not.
"Think about what the alternative is," says the 71-year-old. "You could sit around talking about the past and boring people to death, or you can keep active and be where the action is. Your mind and body have similar attributes. If you stop using your mind and body, they atrophy. That is why I run six miles every other day. I lift weights for 20 minutes on the days I run.
"To keep up with these smart alecs, you have to keep yourself exercised and persuade yourself to stay younger."
Cooper is credited as a co-founder of ArrayComm--his fifth startup. The "technical" founder is one of those "smart alecs" who sought out Cooper nine years ago at the suggestion of Arnaud Saffari, the company's executive vice president. Saffari heard a concept from a "techie," and told him no one would listen to him unless he could convince someone in the industry who had clout, Cooper recalls.
"I hear ideas like this on an average of one every two weeks," Cooper says. "This guy persisted, and the only time I could find to meet with him was during my running time during a convention in New Orleans."
Cooper laughs at that meeting. He says the youngster was cruising alongside him explaining his idea, while the older man says he probably looked as if he was huffing-and-puffing to get through the run.
But it was a meeting that satisfied "Cooper's law" of squeezing more stuff into the spectrum.
"The problem right now is capacity," Cooper explains. "If we can find a way to increase capacity and make it less costly, we can get to the point where personal communications can be done completely wireless. The key issue is how much stuff can you squeeze into a radio frequency. We've been searching for ways to squeeze more onto frequencies since Marconi invented radio.
"I've come up with a way to squeeze more into a radio frequency by 10 trillion times."
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He explains that with Marconi's discovery, the conversation was simply two-way radio. After the invention of the cell phone, the 1980s allowed the technology to provide "confined wireless conversations" within a specific distance.
Cooper says, "Now, we can deliver the entire radio spectrum to each individual. We can do this by literally placing radio energy around the individual."
According to Cooper, the proof is in Southeast Asia, where ArrayComm already has installed 50,000 base stations.
Cooper says the ArrayComm methodology is through what the company calls i-BURST, its "smart antennae arrays" that direct data transmissions at 1mbps.
"We've only seen a trace of what will be possible in the next 10 or 15 years," says Cooper, explaining that i-BURST will allow streaming media from the Internet anywhere on earth. He compares the performance of the i-BURST system with current cellular to a Razor Scooter up against an F-16.
"What we do comes down to the matter of how we are combining the signals, which allows us to receive signals from the people from whom we want, and to reject the signals who interfere with us," Cooper explains.
The array requires 10 or 12 antennas. This allows the system to act more like a radio station engineer who processes the music sent over the air.
"Think about how you hear," Cooper explains. "If you and I are in a room and are speaking, you can close your eyes and you know exactly where I am because you have two ears, and because my voice gets to your ears at different times, your brain can figure out where in the room I am."
In a room with a lot of people, however, a person's brain goes into overdrive in order to zero in on specific conversations or sounds. This is what Cooper calls the "cocktail party effect."
"Your brain has the ability of focusing in, and if someone behind you says something that interests you, your mind immediately focuses on that," he says. "You haven't moved your head, but you think differently. You can reject the first person.
"That is what we do. Instead of two ears, we have 10 or 12. We can really magnify the signal. Furthermore, while you have one mouth when you talk, we have 10 or 12 antennas."
The technology is also able to work on top of any existing system, Cooper says.
"How does this relate to your clients? Well, if they've built a wireless system and apply our kind of technology, they need many fewer base stations to serve more people," Cooper says.
While he is excited at what ArrayComm is doing, Cooper admits that he has "always lived in the future."
His first cell phone was a 29-ounce, brick-like device. Now he marvels at how similarly today's cell phones resemble the communicator Capt. James T. Kirk used on television's original "Star Trek."
And in a few short years, it may become similar to what was used in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Cooper told a CNN audience during a recent interview, "The future of the cell phone will continue to be personal. ... In the long term, you may even have your cell phone embedded, perhaps, under the skin behind your ear."
During his interview with PHONE+, Cooper said, "It's really embarrassing, but television did not become commercial until I was past my teen years." Instead, he read science fiction novels, and he recognizes that many of today's technologies were born through the imaginative visions of what was, decades ago, science fiction.
So maybe Cooper's major contribution is in bringing science fiction to reality.
Who Invented the Cell Phone?
The cell phone was invented by bell labs from about 1947 to 1967….by Martin cooper who at that time was a vice-president at Motorola….he made the first cell-phone call in 1973 on a street corner in New York using a base station at the top of a tall building in that city. He called an acquaintance at AT&T who at that time was a rival and perhaps said something like “we’ve done it”. Motorola introduced its cell phone in 1983 after five generations, 15 years, and $ 90 million; …the first commercial cell phone service was started by NTT in Japan on December 3, 1979….Cooper himself… states that “Bell Labs had invented this thing called cellular technology”. What Martin Cooper apparently did was build a relatively small radio telephone which could be carried by a person. He did not develop the idea and the mechanism for automatically switching over when a phone went from one cell to another. The true inventor of the cell phone is the person or group who developed the concept of small cells and implemented the automatic switchover system, and this was Bell Labs. ….Necessity is the mother of invention. If… the FCC had not limited the number of channels available for radio telephones to 23, Bell Labs would not have been under intense pressure to develop the cellular concept. …Finally the explosion of cellular technology which we now see around us today was caused by the Microprocessor, i.e. a computer on a small single chip.
Martin Cooper - Inventor Of The Cellphone
 | Dr Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, is considered the inventor of the first portable handset and the first person to make a call on a portable cell phone in April 1973. The first call he made was to his rival, Joel Engel, Bell Labs head of research. |
AT&T's research arm, Bell Laboratories, introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947. But Motorola and Bell Labs in the sixties and early seventies were in a race to incorporate the technology into portable devices.
Cooper, now 70, wanted people to be able to carry their phones with them anywhere.
While he was a project manager at Motorola in 1973, Cooper set up a base station in New York with the first working prototype of a cellular telephone, the Motorola Dyna-Tac. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone technology to New York to show the public.
 | The First Cellphone (1973) Name: Motorola Dyna-Tac Size: 9 x 5 x 1.75 inches Weight: 2.5 pounds Display: None Number of Circuit Boards: 30 Talk time: 35 minutes Recharge Time: 10 hours Features: Talk, listen, dial |
In 1973, when the company installed the base station to handle the first public demonstration of a phone call over the cellular network, Motorola was trying to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to allocate frequency space to private companies for use in the emerging technology of cellular communications. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone technology to New York to show the public.
On April 3, 1973, standing on a street near the Manhattan Hilton, Mr. Cooper decided to attempt a private call before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. He picked up the 2-pound Motorola handset called the Dyna-Tac and pushed the "off hook" button.
The phone came alive, connecting Mr. Cooper with the base station on the roof of the Burlington Consolidated Tower (now the Alliance Capital Building) and into the land-line system. To the bewilderment of some passers-by, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear.
Who is he?
Cooper grew up in Chicago and earned a degree in electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. After four years in the navy serving on destroyers and a submarine, he worked for a year at a telecommunications company.
Hired by Motorola in 1954, Mr. Cooper worked on developing portable products, including the first portable handheld police radios, made for the Chicago police department in 1967. He then led Motorola's cellular research.
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