The Race for Wireless

For centuries before Hertz’s time, Russia had been an undeveloped, poor, feudal, imperialistic country ruled mercilessly by the autocratic Romanoff dynasty. Unlike Western Europe, 19th -century Russian society was stratified between only two classes: the privileged, rich, often well-educated upper class – aristocrats, military officers, artists, and intellectuals – and the extremely poor and mostly illiterate lower class, mainly peasants and slaves drafted into the Imperial Army to serve for 20 years! There was virtually no middle class, almost no sizable industry (other than military), nor any serious private enterprise. In January 1896, nine years after Hertz conducted his first experiment, a Russian physicist named Alexander Popov published a scientific paper describing in detail an improved receiver of the electromagnetic “Hertzian” waves. The receiver was initially intended to detect remote lightning discharges. The principle was clever: Lightning generates an electromagnetic wave, and electrical currents induced by the wave in a long-wire antenna flow to earth ground through a peculiar device, invented by French physicist Edouard Branly six years before, called a “coherer.” The glass tube of the coherer was filled with tiny metal particles. When electric current of a high frequency flowed from the antenna through the coherer to ground, the metal particles stuck together, allowing the direct electric current from a battery to energize an electromagnetic bell or a telegraph register. Popov publicly demonstrated his lightning detector on May 7, 1895, a year before publishing his results. In March 1896, two years after the death of Heinrich Hertz, Popov demonstrated something even more amazing in front of an audience of his fellow scientists at the session of the Russian Physical Society: the wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves over an incredible distance of 1000 feet. When a large “Leyden Condenser,” a glass jar whose inner and outer walls were covered by a thin layer of copper foil, was charged by the Ruhmkorff coil to a very high voltage, it would suddenly discharge with a loud bang, creating a bright electric spark between two spherical electrodes and generating electromagnetic waves. At the same time, in a remote receiver, like in the one used by Popov a year earlier to detect lightning, the induced high-frequency currents from the antenna would activate the coherer and cause the bell to ring. “That is very spectacular, dear Alexander Stiepanovich,” said the distinguished chairman of the scientific session. “Thank you, but our time is running out. Dear colleagues, who is the next speaker, please?” That was it. Discouraged by the demonstrated lack of interest, Popov did not emigrate to another more developed country to try to find a more receptive environment, and perhaps obtain a patent for his invention, as another inventor, a certain young Italian, would do a few years later. Like the American inventor Amos Dolbear thirty years before, Popov neglected to properly document his invention and to file for a patent. Instead, Popov devoted his talents to a different field. For many years he worked as one of the directors of a military research center at Kronstadt, developing naval torpedoes. The Russian Empire was preparing for another war, this time with Japan. However, in 1898 Popov received news that a young Italian fellow named Marconi had patented in Britain a wireless system essentially identical to his own invention. This motivated Popov to put his invention to use for naval ship-to-shore communication. Although he succeeded in sending and receiving messages over a distance of about 30 miles, the Russian Admiralty did not immediately appreciate the significance of his work. Alexander’s Popov’s creative ideas had been wasted again… The inevitable war with Japan began a few years later in 1904. It didn’t fare well for the Russians. The famous naval battles at Port Arthur and in the Tsushima Straits ended with the magnificent Russian Imperial fleet virtually annihilated, mainly because of the lack of wireless communication between the Russian battleships. Popov died two years later, in 1906.