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The Wireless Revolution
The Origins of Wireless
Less than twenty-eight years after Samuel F.B. Morse invented a practical telegraph in 1837 and thirteen years before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, James Clerk Maxwell, the greatest nineteenth-century physicist, presented a paper that would revolutionize the world. Addressing the Royal Society, Maxwell presented a theory showing that electromagnetic fields could be propagated through space as well as through conductors. Moreover, they could travel as waves with the speed of light (186,252 miles per second). In his view, light itself was electromagnetic radiation within a certain range of wavelengths. It followed that it was theoretically possible to ...
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