“Listen to Ghosts?”

By Scott Hamilton

History will tell you that the radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi based on his 1904 patent. His invention was to kick off the 20th century in grand style. However, what many people don’t know is that the history of the radio has a much more complicated past. Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, Marconi’s financial backers, bribed the American Patent Office with an undisclosed amount of cash and Nikola Tesla found his original patent revoked.

If you dig deep into the history of the radio you will find very quickly that the Serbian genius, Tesla, had beat the whole world to radio technology. His problem was in describing the invention correctly. You see, his early radio experiments which he based his patent on seemed a little too much like magic to those around him and viewing the patent.

Tesla’s first radio experiment was a listening device he had designed to detect natural sources of electromagnetic waves. What even he did not expect was the audio signals from these natural sources. Tesla spent many nights listening to and honestly probably even scaring himself a little as he tried to recognize voices and a spoken language coming from his “spirit radio.”

Tesla was definitely a “mad” scientist of his day, as people in the town surrounding his Pike’s Peak laboratory told stories of sparks reaching from the soles of their shoes to the ground and an eerie blue glow coming from Tesla’s tower high above the town. Tesla is responsible for many inventions still in use today. His alternating current power is used to power houses, factories, and cities globally today with very little design changes from his original principles of electric generation.

Tesla was known to invent things completely in his head and work out all the design flaws before putting the design to paper and building a prototype. This was the case with his radio. One late night in 1893 he powered on the radio set and began to listen, not really knowing what, if anything, he would hear.

He was astounded by what he heard and he wrote, “I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth.”

You can read his full article “Talking With the Planets” in “Collier’s Magazine” in 1901 at http://earlyradiohistory.us/1901talk.htm.

Tesla was not incorrect in his assumption that the best use of the radio would be to communicate over long distances. In fact we use the same technology he discovered in 1893 to communicate with satellites, space stations and probes at the edge of the solar system. However, I doubt he ever expected radio to become a commercial entity used to sell products, play music and distribute news and weather information.

Of that first night, Tesla said, “My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.”

You see it was only later that he learned that these strange, almost vocal sounds, were coming from the ionosphere. There are plans available on instructables.com for building your own “spirit radio” if you want to hear the strange sounds for yourself, but be warned, you will find that it seems you are hearing voices from another world. It was this fanciful story tied to his invention that lost him the patent rights to the radio. You see, even for a scientist like Tesla, the early days of electronics still seemed like magic. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.