When the radio was invented how many stations did it have?

Answer 1

Radio -- signaling and audio communication using electromagnetic radiation -- was first employed as a "wireless telegraph", for point-to-point links where regular telegraph lines were unreliable or impractical. Next developed was radio's ability to broadcast messages simultaneously to multiple locations, at first using the dots-and-dashes of telegraphic code, and later in full audio.

Although "electromagnetic radiation" is the formal scientific term for what Heinrich Hertz demonstrated with his simple spark transmitter in the 1880s, in addition to "radio" numerous other descriptive phrases were used in the early days, including various permutations of "Hertzian waves", "electric waves", "ether waves", "spark telegraphy", "space telegraphy", "aerography" and "wireless". In the November 30, 1901 Electrical Review, a letter from G. C. Dietz offered "atmography" as the answer to What Shall We Call It?, but the suggestion fell on deaf ears. Spark, Space, Wireless, Etheric, Hertzian Wave or Cableless Telegraphy--Which? by A. Frederick Collins in the August 24, 1901 Western Electrician wondered whether the question might eventually become academic, for "In the distant future when all wire systems, both telegraph and telephone, have been superseded by the so-called wireless, there will be no confusing qualifying adjectives, for there will be no dual systems requiring qualification, and wireless telegraphy and telephony will be spoken of as simply telegraphy and telephony." So, what's the difference between wireless and radio? "There ain't none" -- both refer to the exact same thing -- explains Edward C. Hubert in Radio vs. Wireless, from the January, 1925, Radio News.In 1895, Guglielmo Marconi became the first person to successfully demonstrate the controlled transmission and reception of longrange radio signals. But once the details of his advances became widely known, a large number of competitors sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom developed important refinements of their own.

Scientists in the United States were particularly intrigued by reports of Marconi's advances. A short notice in the January 23, 1897 Scientific American, Telegraphy Without Wires, stated that "a young Italian, a Mr. Marconi" had recently demonstrated to the London Post Office the ability to transmit radio signals across three-quarters of a mile (one kilometer), and that "if the invention was what he believed it to be, our mariners would have been given a new sense and a new friend which would make navigation infinitely easier and safer than it now was.

Beginning in the late 1880s, Heinrich Hertz conducted a series of experiments in Germany which proved the existence of radio waves. Moreover, the devices used in early radio demonstrations could readily be constructed by self-trained individuals -- in the July 6, 1894 The Electrician (London), Oliver Lodge, reviewing "The Work of Hertz", noted that "Many of the experiments lend themselves to easy repetition, since they require nothing novel in the way of apparatus except what is easily constructed; many of them can be performed with the ordinary stock apparatus of an amateur's laboratory." A few months later, 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi began his historic experiments on his father's Italian estate.

Prior to late 1912, there were no laws or regulations restricting amateur radio transmitters in the United States. The industrialized northeast quickly became congested with a mixture of competing amateur and commercial stations, and it was the amateur operators who sometimes dominated the airwaves.