Practical Antenna Handbook 5/e, 5th Edition

CHAPTER 1Introduction to Radio Communications

Useful communication by radio has been with us for the entire twentieth century and shows no sign of abating in the twenty-first. Originally determined to be mathematically “possible” by the Scottish inventor James Clerk Maxwell in the mid-1860s, radio waves remained science fiction until 1887, when a German, Heinrich Hertz, was first to convert Maxwell’s theoretical equations into laboratory experiments that demonstrated and confirmed their existence. Italian Guglielmo Marconi then picked up the ball and through the 1890s took the first productive steps toward making radio communication a popular and commercial success. Along the way, Nikolai Tesla from Serbia, Alexander Fessenden in Canada, Alexander ...