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Brief History
1900, Reginald Fessenden made a weak transmission of voice over the airwaves. In
1901, Marconi conducted the first successful transatlantic experimental radio
communications.
In the early 1900s there where many attempts of developing radio waves so they
transmitted voice and music but it wasn’t until world war 1 where the development of
radio really accelerated, mainly due to the use for the military communications. After the
war, commercial radio broadcasting began in the 1920s and became an important mass
medium for entertainment and news. Stereo FM broadcasting of radio was taking place
from the 1930s onwards in the United States and displaced AM as the dominant
commercial standard by the 1960s, and by the 1970s in the United Kingdom.
1880 - 1890
1888: Heinrich Hertz detects and produces radio waves.
1894: Marchese Guglielmo Marconi builds his first radio equipment, a device that will ring a bell from 30 ft. away.
1899: Marconi establishes first radio link between England and France.
1900 - 1919
1900: American scientist R.A. Fessenden transmists human speech via radiowaves.
1903: Valdemar Poulsen patents an arc transmission that generates continuous radio waves, producing a frequency of 100 kHz and receivable over
150 miles.
1906: First radio program of voice and music broadcast in the U.K
1907: Fessenden invents a high-frequency electric generator that produces radio waves with a frequency of 100 kHz.
1910: Radio communications gain publicity when the captain of the Montrose alerts Scotland via radio of an escaping criminal.
1913: The cascade-tuning radio receiver and the heterodyne receiver are introduced.
1988: The first Radio Data System (RDS) car radio is installed
in the UK.
1990s
1995: The BBC begins the UK’s first digital radio transmissions with Radio 1 to 5 sharing,
Parliament and Sports
1996: Internet radio in the UK, as Virgin Radio becomes Europe’s first radio station to
broadcast online.
1999: Digital One, the UK’s first national commercial digital radio multiplex launches with five
channels including Planet Rock, Talk Radio, Classic FM, Virgin Radio and Core.
2001: VideoLogic launches the Pure DRX-601EX, the world’s first portable digital radio. It costs £499.
2002: The BBC launches a series of digital-only channels including BBC 1Xtra, 4 Xtra and 6 Music.
2013: The government delays the FM switch-off, because not enough people own DAB radio sets.
2015: Figures from Ofcom show more Brits are using digital platforms (TV, internet, DAB) to listen to the
radio. 39.6% of total radio hours listened to are through digital platforms. Analogue is 54.3%, but declining.
Today