I started reading about how radio works when I was about 9 years old, and have continued my interest in the subject throughout a lifetime. Now at age 70 I am learning things not found in any book I ever saw, thanks to your wondeful videos. Great work!
Four years after making this video, Kathy has a book, The Lightning Tamers. I'm reading it and re-watching these videos. Both are great. Highly recommend both.
I'd read about that first spark gap transmission of voice, but had no idea there was a recording of it. That was absolutely fascinating. (After watching a half dozen more vids, I've come to the conclusion that this channel is genius in collecting and ordering obscure facts and history into a unique and fascinating presentation.}
I don't think that recording is of *that* transmission, but rather of a hobbyist later -- could've been a little later, or even recently -- decided to make such a transmission and record it. Sparks create a slough of spurious signals at all frequencies. Frequently audio equipment with loose connections create modulated spark gap signals accidentally, and the discharge will also reproduce the sound via sparks in "accidental receiving equipment". More commonly accidental audio reception from r.f. comes via a loose wire vibrating against a piece of metal.
I started to study this in 1950 and became facinated with electricity, I know almost all of the developments that you have now made available to all...I wish I had you in the 50's 60's 70's It would have made my professional life so much easier.....I retired as a lecturer in the science 20 years ago. I wish I had you at that time with me You have so much knowledge as a product of research but most important a wonderful way of presentation..Thank You
My father studied broadcast engineering in the late 1940's. He always called a capacitor a condenser. The name changed in the 1960's at the same time the tuning indicator on radios change from CPS to Hz. happy to see in this video the reference to both names.
Auto mechanics and the British tended to retain the term "condenser". But now that auto ignition is electronic, even mechanics don't have call for the term any more.
I built a "cat whisker" detector radio when I was about 8 years old. Listened to AM radio stations via a crystal earpiece. Had to ground it to a water pipe to make it work. It tuned with a variable inductor.
Great show. I recognize an image in your program “Passenger on vessel communicating with land” as from Nathan Stubblefield s wireless voice demonstration on the steamer Bartholdi on the Potomac in 1902. Stubblefield may have used audio frequency conduction and induction rather than radio, but he has been called the “Father of broadcasting” because he said wireless would be used for the general transmission of news and entertainment.
I've just found your channel and subbed. Thanks for your unique and informative series of videos. I'm looking forward to watching them all. PS, I'm an amateur radio operator in the UK.
Thans for good video. We have a fully function Alexandersson alternater i Grimeton here in Sweden, built in 1925, it has a big antenna 127m, and transmitting a couple of time a year, on I think 17.2 kHz, sendind morse code.
@@Kathy_Loves_Physics Station SAQ likely has the only remaining operational Alexanderson alternator. IIRC the make a Christmas eve transmission every year, so it should have just occurred.
I've always wondered whether a magnetic amplifier was used to generate the AM modulation or if the multi-kW output of the Alexandeson alternator was somehow fed through the microphone. It would be interesting to see a schematic of the transmitting apparatus. I spent many of my younger years working at WBAA, Purdue University, which was first licensed in 1922. We didn't have any gear from 1922, but we did regularly use a 1940s era transmitter. At our studio we had a device which you might talk about, if you haven't already: the Ampex (350 series) tape recorder. Magnetic recording and Ampex in specific has a very interesting back story. The Germans perfected magnetic tape during WW2, we captured it from them after the war, and thereafter every VOA relay station had an Ampex room which used this technology to broadcast to the Soviets.
@@Kathy_Loves_Physics I was playing around with radios as an 8 year old and my parents then bought me a Phillips Electronic kit and I was hooked☺Then as a "naughty" teenager I started building transmitters for medium and shortwave broadcasting...Yes it was pirate radio! In 1990 I stopped all that and got my Ham radio licence and still love experimenting and talking around the world on the radio.Keep your videos going Kathy because they are really good.👍
The legend I heard about Fessenden's Xmas eve broadcast is that it was heard by some shipboard radio operators who thought it resulted from drinking too much that evening.
Somewhere along the line, I'm related to him. Every Fessenden in North America can trace their lineage back to two brothers that came to what was then the Virginia colony in the 1600s. One of those brothers had adopted their sister's children after she and her husband had died in some accident in England and one of those children is my direct ancestor
Glad Lee De Forest is mentioned, especially re: his "con artist" aspect. The tendency of this guy to steal other people's ideas made Edison's own penchant for grabbing all the credit for other people's work look negligible -- and yet, even with his shifty ways De Forest was indispensable for his part in the development of electronic broadcasting and in transforming the once "silent movie" into "the talkie era." Lee De Forest WAS a con artist, but he was a USEFUL con artist! Can't wait to catch the next video on him!
These are great and remind me a bit of the Jame Burke series Connections, where one thing lead to another and often looped back on themselves often seemingly by happenstance.
Disputed or not, Fessenden's account of a radio transmission on Christmas eve is notable for the following. Radio broadcasting, apart from the technical, requires: a producer, a programmer, a director, a writer, and performers.
That’s some interesting stories. Funny how the invention of radio and telephone developed by the time. We often feels that it happened subito, but it’s rather a path of trials and errors with a lot of people involved. Is it thru that Graham Bell made his research around the idea of creating a device to talk to dead? I heard that somewhere and always wonder. Thanks again for your work.
I did make a video about Bell and the invention of the telephone. It had to do with a dead man's ear but not talking to the dead (I understand the confusion).
I thought he was trying to talk to the deaf. Maybe where you heard it, somehow deaf and dead got mixed up? Kathy's video was the first I heard about the cadaver. Find that video, it is great.
The chemical rectifier is an interesting idea. No surprise that Fessenden, the former chief chemist of the Edison company, came up with it. When I was reading Edisons biography, I was surprised that the electric meters used by the edison electric company were electrochemical, not electromagnetic with slow motors and odometers. Edison himself once inspected and measured the current in JP Morgan's mansion, when the Morgan family complained that the meters were faulty and they were being billed too much.
What fascinates me is than another former Edison employee, Ambrose Fleming, basically discovered the vaccum tube diode,which was the standard rectifier until the invention of the silicon transistor by Bardeen and Brattain. Surprising that the army of brilliant scientists in William Crooke's circle didn't discover the diode and triode. They had plenty of opportunity
VarahaMihira Gopu I mentioned Fleming in my video about the diode and Edison’s factory of inventors was fascinating to me. Fessenden wrote about it a bit but then went off on racist garbage and they told him to stop publishing. William Crookes was amazing but he didn’t have much of a team, just him and an assistant as far as I can tell. I mentioned him in the video about radio waves and about cathod ray tubes and even about the third law of thermodynamics! Plus, I dug his mustache.
Wow, electrochemical meters!? What did they do, measure DC by volume of gas produced electrolytically? Weight of metal reduced, scraped off, dried, and weighed?
You should mention the use of a cat’s whisker as a detector (diode) in the crystal sets boys built years ago. I tried to make one from a kit, but I didn’t have a cat, and my own hair didn’t work.
Loomis claimed wireless sound transmission in 1877 using Bell's telephone equipment with his kite-and-spark-gap setup. I don't know if he demonstrated that publicly, nor do I know if it was replicated, but it *could* have worked, due to the nonlinear characteristics of carbon microphones. A carbon mic in series with a spark gap (powered by the sky-to-ground DC potential) could have generated both r.f. transients (tuned by the long wire of the kite and capacitance of the spark gap) and an audio frequency envelope. It wouldn't've had high fidelity -- nonlinear in, nonlinear out -- but then neither did Fessenden's first try.
Inspired and horrified by the tragedy of the Titanic Fessenden researched the propagation of sound in water with the goal of detecting and avoiding icebergs. He invented SONAR.
Deekonda Saikumar chari The AT&T channel on here has it all. All there short documentary films cover the history of communications they were at the forefront of.
Deekonda Saikumar chari I think that all you need to make a coherer is a small tube with some metal shavings in it! Crazy Huh? I found an old video where they made one: th-cam.com/video/2roG4jIjvEk/w-d-xo.html
Can I add a little here ?? the coherer is made up of a powder of really what is crystals...of metal crystals...of organic crystals and can be explained as a semi conductor. A piece of coal or similar material if "tickled" with a fine wire will become a coherer. a semi conductor. This idea was used in the very first radio receivers as a crystal detector. Today it is the diode and is encased i plastic...but it is still the same principle
No disrespect, but if some dude came along with a complicated name like Reginald Fessenden, I would also just call him Fessi. Didn't even know anything 'bout electricity yet. Ffffffffffffffff.
It's pronounced fess-sen-den, not fezz-za-tin. Also, is it really necessary to show your mug and so close to the camera? I mean, what are you trying to achieve?
Father - priest - Landell de Moura, a brazilian inventor that even patented their invents at US Patents Office really was the first to transmit voice wireless, both in America and Brazil... Sorry the catholic church institution won't a inventor between their congregation that time and gave no credits to him ...
The Brazilian Society for Microelectronics has an annual prize named after Landell. Since he tried various kinds of "wireless" it isn't easy to know how he fits in the story of this video. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura
I started reading about how radio works when I was about 9 years old, and have continued my interest in the subject throughout a lifetime. Now at age 70 I am learning things not found in any book I ever saw, thanks to your wondeful videos. Great work!
Four years after making this video, Kathy has a book, The Lightning Tamers. I'm reading it and re-watching these videos. Both are great. Highly recommend both.
I'd read about that first spark gap transmission of voice, but had no idea there was a recording of it. That was absolutely fascinating. (After watching a half dozen more vids, I've come to the conclusion that this channel is genius in collecting and ordering obscure facts and history into a unique and fascinating presentation.}
Thank you for the lovely compliment and I agree, would love to hear it.
I don't think that recording is of *that* transmission, but rather of a hobbyist later -- could've been a little later, or even recently -- decided to make such a transmission and record it. Sparks create a slough of spurious signals at all frequencies. Frequently audio equipment with loose connections create modulated spark gap signals accidentally, and the discharge will also reproduce the sound via sparks in "accidental receiving equipment". More commonly accidental audio reception from r.f. comes via a loose wire vibrating against a piece of metal.
I started to study this in 1950 and became facinated with electricity, I know almost all of the developments that you have now made available to all...I wish I had you in the 50's 60's 70's It would have made my professional life so much easier.....I retired as a lecturer in the science 20 years ago. I wish I had you at that time with me You have so much knowledge as a product of research but most important a wonderful way of presentation..Thank You
WOW. This is such a rich content! thanks
salma gamal so glad you liked it.
My father studied broadcast engineering in the late 1940's. He always called a capacitor a condenser. The name changed in the 1960's at the same time the tuning indicator on radios change from CPS to Hz. happy to see in this video the reference to both names.
Auto mechanics and the British tended to retain the term "condenser". But now that auto ignition is electronic, even mechanics don't have call for the term any more.
Incredible history and knowledge of the early days of radio and I’m a amateur radio operator and I did not know this. Thank you
Thank you for superb content and delivery. Subscribed.
Thank you for the nice compliment. Frankly, the delivery makes my teeth itch but I think that is the problem of watching yourself speak!
What a STORY!!! Thank you! This is sooooo hard to grasp... You're fortunate to grasp as you do - - - and we're fortunate that yu simplify for us.
I built a "cat whisker" detector radio when I was about 8 years old. Listened to AM radio stations via a crystal earpiece. Had to ground it to a water pipe to make it work. It tuned with a variable inductor.
Me too!
Great show. I recognize an image in your program “Passenger on vessel communicating with land” as from Nathan Stubblefield s wireless voice demonstration on the steamer Bartholdi on the Potomac in 1902. Stubblefield may have used audio frequency conduction and induction rather than radio, but he has been called the “Father of broadcasting” because he said wireless would be used for the general transmission of news and entertainment.
Exactly the video I was looking for. Thanks!
Glad I could help
I've just found your channel and subbed. Thanks for your unique and informative series of videos. I'm looking forward to watching them all.
PS, I'm an amateur radio operator in the UK.
MrBanzoid thanks for watching and commenting. I’ve loved getting to know people in the ham radio world, you are a lovely bunch of people (so far...).
Awesome. I see your videos again and again. I enjoy a lot and learn a lot from you. Love your channel.
I am informed . She is the best teacher, I wish she was my prof .
Ten minutes of pure pleasure! You are a natural! I am subscribed
hank s (blushing) thanks kind stranger.
Thans for good video. We have a fully function Alexandersson alternater i Grimeton here in Sweden, built in 1925, it has a big antenna 127m, and transmitting a couple of time a year, on I think 17.2 kHz, sendind morse code.
Wow! I would love to see it someday.
@@Kathy_Loves_Physics Station SAQ likely has the only remaining operational Alexanderson alternator. IIRC the make a Christmas eve transmission every year, so it should have just occurred.
another fantastically addictive video utterly amazing completely engaging huge huge thank you
i know how much effort you make to produce such a content ,i raise my hat for you . 💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐 thank you a million .
I've always wondered whether a magnetic amplifier was used to generate the AM modulation or if the multi-kW output of the Alexandeson alternator was somehow fed through the microphone. It would be interesting to see a schematic of the transmitting apparatus.
I spent many of my younger years working at WBAA, Purdue University, which was first licensed in 1922. We didn't have any gear from 1922, but we did regularly use a 1940s era transmitter. At our studio we had a device which you might talk about, if you haven't already: the Ampex (350 series) tape recorder. Magnetic recording and Ampex in specific has a very interesting back story. The Germans perfected magnetic tape during WW2, we captured it from them after the war, and thereafter every VOA relay station had an Ampex room which used this technology to broadcast to the Soviets.
A lot of stuff to love on this channel.
Glad you liked it
Excellent videos and presentation! Subscribed and watching as many as I can.
Glad you like them
Hi Kathy...Great videos.Ive always loved radio since I was very young.Best wishes from the UK.G7HFS.
Ian Harling I am new to radio but now that I have a sense of how it was created I am hooked. It is so magical.
@@Kathy_Loves_Physics I was playing around with radios as an 8 year old and my parents then bought me a Phillips Electronic kit and I was hooked☺Then as a "naughty" teenager I started building transmitters for medium and shortwave broadcasting...Yes it was pirate radio! In 1990 I stopped all that and got my Ham radio licence and still love experimenting and talking around the world on the radio.Keep your videos going Kathy because they are really good.👍
The legend I heard about Fessenden's Xmas eve broadcast is that it was heard by some shipboard radio operators who thought it resulted from drinking too much that evening.
Somewhere along the line, I'm related to him. Every Fessenden in North America can trace their lineage back to two brothers that came to what was then the Virginia colony in the 1600s. One of those brothers had adopted their sister's children after she and her husband had died in some accident in England and one of those children is my direct ancestor
Glad Lee De Forest is mentioned, especially re: his "con artist" aspect. The tendency of this guy to steal other people's ideas made Edison's own penchant for grabbing all the credit for other people's work look negligible -- and yet, even with his shifty ways De Forest was indispensable for his part in the development of electronic broadcasting and in transforming the once "silent movie" into "the talkie era." Lee De Forest WAS a con artist, but he was a USEFUL con artist! Can't wait to catch the next video on him!
I agree 💯
Wonderful video. I tell friends and family about your channel.
How wonderful your contents are so much of unknown story
Thanks for great job of your videos
These are great and remind me a bit of the Jame Burke series Connections, where one thing lead to another and often looped back on themselves often seemingly by happenstance.
Thank you so much, his show was delightful
Loving your films. Excellent research. Well done
Thanks John.
Disputed or not, Fessenden's account of a radio transmission on Christmas eve is notable for the following. Radio broadcasting, apart from the technical, requires: a producer, a programmer, a director, a writer, and performers.
Enter Sarnoff.
Walter Braitten, co creator of the transistor, grew up in my tiny home town.
just found tr channel, subbed instantly!👍
That’s some interesting stories. Funny how the invention of radio and telephone developed by the time. We often feels that it happened subito, but it’s rather a path of trials and errors with a lot of people involved.
Is it thru that Graham Bell made his research around the idea of creating a device to talk to dead? I heard that somewhere and always wonder. Thanks again for your work.
I did make a video about Bell and the invention of the telephone. It had to do with a dead man's ear but not talking to the dead (I understand the confusion).
I thought he was trying to talk to the deaf. Maybe where you heard it, somehow deaf and dead got mixed up? Kathy's video was the first I heard about the cadaver. Find that video, it is great.
The chemical rectifier is an interesting idea. No surprise that Fessenden, the former chief chemist of the Edison company, came up with it. When I was reading Edisons biography, I was surprised that the electric meters used by the edison electric company were electrochemical, not electromagnetic with slow motors and odometers. Edison himself once inspected and measured the current in JP Morgan's mansion, when the Morgan family complained that the meters were faulty and they were being billed too much.
What fascinates me is than another former Edison employee, Ambrose Fleming, basically discovered the vaccum tube diode,which was the standard rectifier until the invention of the silicon transistor by Bardeen and Brattain.
Surprising that the army of brilliant scientists in William Crooke's circle didn't discover the diode and triode. They had plenty of opportunity
VarahaMihira Gopu I mentioned Fleming in my video about the diode and Edison’s factory of inventors was fascinating to me. Fessenden wrote about it a bit but then went off on racist garbage and they told him to stop publishing.
William Crookes was amazing but he didn’t have much of a team, just him and an assistant as far as I can tell. I mentioned him in the video about radio waves and about cathod ray tubes and even about the third law of thermodynamics! Plus, I dug his mustache.
Wow, electrochemical meters!? What did they do, measure DC by volume of gas produced electrolytically? Weight of metal reduced, scraped off, dried, and weighed?
@@goodmaro Yes the Edison electro chemical meters measured electricity usage by the increase in weight of the zinc elctrodes.
@@writergopu Did they have a balance attached?
6:19 why do you need the one-way valve? You already get the envelope from the speed of the speaker.
Thanks for you
I find these stories very inspiring than mere learning of thieries
You should mention the use of a cat’s whisker as a detector (diode) in the crystal sets boys built years ago.
I tried to make one from a kit, but I didn’t have a cat, and my own hair didn’t work.
Well done thanks
6:40 the acid didnt react with the metal, it was simple electrolytic deomposition.
Well, I didn't know this. I need to track down if I'm related to him.
Definitely!
Loomis claimed wireless sound transmission in 1877 using Bell's telephone equipment with his kite-and-spark-gap setup. I don't know if he demonstrated that publicly, nor do I know if it was replicated, but it *could* have worked, due to the nonlinear characteristics of carbon microphones. A carbon mic in series with a spark gap (powered by the sky-to-ground DC potential) could have generated both r.f. transients (tuned by the long wire of the kite and capacitance of the spark gap) and an audio frequency envelope. It wouldn't've had high fidelity -- nonlinear in, nonlinear out -- but then neither did Fessenden's first try.
nice video homie
thanks dude
Who was Fessenden's friend that made the stronger Spark Gap generator blueprint?
Inspired and horrified by the tragedy of the Titanic Fessenden researched the propagation of sound in water with the goal of detecting and avoiding icebergs. He invented SONAR.
Bravo soeur tu leur a dit cela , L a matrce.
I just did not understand that recieve diagram that worked for fessy.
pankaj kumarji sorry just noticed this comment. Could you give me more details about what confused you?
What frequency was he using?
Bose had made a crystal detector much earlier...He had used millimeter wave lower power radio
Explain to the mobile communication
Frist to laste
Deekonda Saikumar chari The AT&T channel on here has it all. All there short documentary films cover the history of communications they were at the forefront of.
How to making only coherer powder
I made one of nickel filings between metal pieces and it conducted when I produced radio waves nearby.
That would be FESSenden.
Pour n'importe quel être vivant sur cette terre.
How to make coherent
Deekonda Saikumar chari I think that all you need to make a coherer is a small tube with some metal shavings in it! Crazy Huh? I found an old video where they made one:
th-cam.com/video/2roG4jIjvEk/w-d-xo.html
Crystal radio 1890 Tesla still works
Make a video to coherer powder
Bet early radio was cool before digital interferance. In the 1920s and 30s.
Le noyau c'est vous. Oui il ya un matier qui peut le remplacer, c'est vous.
Explain to the coherent
Can I add a little here ?? the coherer is made up of a powder of really what is crystals...of metal crystals...of organic crystals and can be explained as a semi conductor. A piece of coal or similar material if "tickled" with a fine wire will become a coherer. a semi conductor. This idea was used in the very first radio receivers as a crystal detector. Today it is the diode and is encased i plastic...but it is still the same principle
😎
No disrespect, but if some dude came along with a complicated name like Reginald Fessenden, I would also just call him Fessi. Didn't even know anything 'bout electricity yet. Ffffffffffffffff.
It's pronounced fess-sen-den, not fezz-za-tin. Also, is it really necessary to show your mug and so close to the camera? I mean, what are you trying to achieve?
You talk a lot of smack about Tesla. You really do just speak your mind lol.
Lot of intellectual ferment in the early 20th century. I wonder if had there been no ww1, would there have been that horrible little house painter.
EXCELLENT TECHNICAL EXPLANATIONS .... BUT PLEASE .... GET RID OF THAT POINTLESS AND CONFUSING BACKGROUND
MUSIC (NOISE) ....
Spoiler alert! Lee de Forest was nothing more than a cheap hack. Armstrong was the real deal!
It's like you watched my next videos
Edidon was a thief.
Father - priest - Landell de Moura, a brazilian inventor that even patented their invents at US Patents Office really was the first to transmit voice wireless, both in America and Brazil... Sorry the catholic church institution won't a inventor between their congregation that time and gave no credits to him ...
The Brazilian Society for Microelectronics has an annual prize named after Landell. Since he tried various kinds of "wireless" it isn't easy to know how he fits in the story of this video. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Landell_de_Moura