No single person in the colorful history of radio can be credited with inventing radio. Radio's "inventors" almost all refined an idea put forth by someone else. Wireless communication became a theoretical proposition in 1864 when Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of invisible electromagnetic waves. More than twenty years later, German physicist Heinrich Hertz conducted experiments in 1887 to prove that Maxwell's theories were correct. The fundamental unit of electromagnetic wave frequency, the hertz (Hz), is named for him, though Hertz never promoted wireless communications.

Early Development of Technology

In the 1890s, four inventors simultaneously worked on wireless transmission and detection. French physicist Edouard Branly invented a signal detector called a "coherer" that consisted of a glass tube filled with metal filings that reacted when a signal was detected. English physicist Oliver Lodge worked on the principle of resonance...