Who's Who of Wireless Pioneers

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790

• Benjamin Franklin's Kite Experiment 
• An account of Franklin's kite experiment 

Mahlon Loomis (1826-1886)

• Mahlon Loomis - First Wireless Telegrapher 
• Mahlon Loomis's Journal 
• Story of Mahlon Loomis - 1872 lecture extract 

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)

• "The Theory I propose may . . . be called a Theory of the Electromagnetic Field because it has to do with the space in the neighborhood of the electric or magnetic bodies, and it may be called a dynamical theory, because it assumes that in that space there is matter in motion, by which the observed electromagnetic phenomena are produced."

• THE JAMES CLERK MAXWELL FOUNDATION 

• Biography 

Michael Faraday (1791-1867)

• The discoverer of electro-magnetic induction, electro-magnetic rotations, the magneto-optical effect, diamagnetism, field theory and much else besides

• The English chemist and physicist

• Michael Faraday on the Structure of the Aether, and the Nature of Action-At-A-Distance 

Adolph Slaby (1849-1913)

• Professor Adolph Slaby was a scientist based in Berlin and Germany's leading figure in communications who had also experimented with Hertzian waves. He was sent by his government to assess the work occurring in England and witnessed Marconi's demonstrations at the Bristol Channel in 1897. Viewing Marconi's apparatus Slaby was able to develop further ideas of his own and later played a big part in setting up Telefunken. Telefunken was strongly supported by the Kaiser and the German Government in a bid for world domination in wireless communication and became the bitter rival of Marconi's Company in the years before World War I.

Carl Ferdinand Braun (1850-1918)

• Biography of Carl Ferdinand Braun 

• After the outbreak of the First World War, Braun was summoned to New York to attend as a witness in a lawsuit regarding a patent claim. Owing to his absence from his laboratory and due to illness he was unable to carry out further scientific work.  Braun thus spent the last years of his life peacefully in the United States, where he died on April 20, 1918. FromNobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921.  Copyright© 2000 The Nobel Foundation For help, info, credits or comments, see "About this project" 
  Last updated by Webmaster@www.nobel.se / July 14, 1998 

• "Forgotten" Pioneers of Wireless Part 5 

Oliver Lodge (1851-1940)

• Achieved world fame for his pioneering work in radio . . .

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

• Inventor, Electrical Engineer and Physicist

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894)

• Heinrich Rudolf Hertz

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937)

• SIR JAGADISH CHANDRA BOSE : the unsung Hero of Radio Communication 

Nathan Stubblefield (1860-1928)

• KENTUCKY FARMER INVENTS WIRELESS TELEPHONE! 

Reginald A. Fessenden (1866-1932)

• Biography 

• IEEE History Center 

Valdemar Poulsen (1869-1942)

• Federal Telegraph Company Arc Wireless Station in Ocean Beach, 1912 

John Stone Stone (1869-1943)

• I refer to an article by Tesla in The Century Magazine in its issue of June 1900, pages 175-211, and particularly to that section entitled "Wireless Telegraphy--The Secret of Tuning--Errors in Hertzian Investigations--A Receiver of Wonderful Sensitiveness."  Here as elsewhere, Tesla takes a fling at those who attribute the transfer of the energy of these high frequency currents to a distance as a process of radiation.  In this he was more than half right, and whatever error be made in this connection was a failure to recognize that electromagnetic waves guided by the earth's surface, and therefore accompanied by currents in that surface, are in a sense still radiation, and that the two explanations of the phenomena are supplemental of one another and a comprehensive explanation of the phenomenon includes both the conception of the gliding electromagnetic waves and the currents in the earth's surface.  I misunderstood Tesla. I think we all misunderstood Tesla.  We thought he was a dreamer and visionary.  He did dream and his dreams came true, he did have visions but they were of a real future, not an imaginary one.  Tesla was the first man to lift his eyes high enough to see that the rarified stratum of atmosphere above our earth was destined to play an important role in the radio telegraphy of the future, a fact which had to obtrude itself on the attention of most of us before we saw it.  But Tesla also perceived what many of us did not in those days, namely, the currents which flowed way from the base of the antenna over the surface of the earth and in the earth itself.
• IEEE History Center 
• Physicist, began his career as a telephone engineer . . . 

Lee de Forest (1873-1961)

• http://www.svetlana.com/docs/tubeworks.html 
  
  Many other inventors tried to improve the Fleming diode, most without success. The only one who succeeded was New York inventor Lee de Forest. In 1907 he patented a bulb with the same contents as the Fleming diode, except for an added electrode. This "grid" was a bent wire between the plate and filament. de Forest discovered that if he applied the signal from the wireless-telegraph antenna to the grid instead of the filament, he could obtain a much more sensitive detector of the signal. In fact, the grid was changing ("modulating") the current flowing from the filament to the plate. This device, the Audion, was the first successful electronic amplifier. It was the genesis of today's huge electronics industry. 

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937)

• Marconi in Newfoundland : The 1901 Transatlantic Radio Experiment   
• Marconi's Three Transatlantic Radio Stations In Cape Breton, by Henry M. Bradford
• The Cape Breton Stations Of The Marconi Transatlantic Radio Service - Part 1
• Did Marconi Receive Transatlantic Radio Signals in 1901? - Part 1

Ernst Fredrik Werner Alexanderson (1878-1975)

• Ernst Fredrik Werner Alexanderson