Category: August 2013

Credited with being the “father of Ameri­can radio.” DeForest was a direct competitor to Marconi at the turn of the century (1899), when he was the chief scien­tist at the U.S.’s first radio firm- American Wireless Tele­phone and Telegraph- until Marconi took over the com­pany’s assets in 1912 after a series of financial scandals. Although…

This WWI Army officer, Columbia University engineering professor, and creator of FM radio invented the regenerative circuit, the first amplifying receiver and reliable continuous-wave transmitter; and the superheterodyne circuit, a means of receiving, converting and amplifying weak, high-frequency electromagnetic waves. His inventions are considered by many to provide the foundation for cellular phones.

This Italian crea­tor spent most of his working life in England where he introduced many of the first uses of wireless telegraphy to European navies. His radio apparatus is widely considered to be the reason that over 700 people survived the Titanic disaster in 1912, instead of dying as they likely would have if ships…

This Canadian spent much of his working life in the U.S. where he developed a way to combine sound and radio carrier waves. His first effort to transmit this mixed signal-to a receiver where the carrier wave would be removed and the listener could hear the original sound-failed. However, in 1906, using Alexanderson’s alternator, Fessenden…

Born in Sweden, this remarkable inventor developed the first alternator to make transmission of speech (as opposed to the dots and dashes of telegraphs) possible. It is said that this holder of 344 patents “virtually invented everything General Electric did in the field of AM, FM, and TV.”