Alexander Stepanovich Popov (nonfiction)
Alexander Stepanovich Popov (sometimes spelled Popoff; Russian: Алекса́ндр Степа́нович Попо́в; March 16 [O.S. March 4] 1859 – January 13 [O.S. December 31, 1905] 1906) was a Russian physicist who is acclaimed in his homeland and some eastern European countries as the inventor of radio.
Popov's work as a teacher at a Russian naval school led him to explore high frequency electrical phenomena.
On May 7, 1895 he presented a paper on a wireless lightning detector he had built that worked via using a coherer to detect radio noise from lightning strikes. This day is celebrated in the Russian Federation as Radio Day. In a March 24, 1896 demonstration he used radio waves to transmit a message between different campus buildings in St Petersburg.
His work was based on the work of other physicists such as Oliver Lodge and contemporaneous with the work of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.
Radio wave receiver
Along with his teaching duties at the naval school Popov pursued related areas of research. Trying to solve a problem with the failure in the electrical wire insulation on steel ships (which turned out to be a problem with electrical resonance) led him to further explore oscillations of high frequency electrical currents. His interest in this area of study (including the new field of "Hertzian" or radio waves) was intensified by his trip in 1893 to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in the United States where he was able to confer with other researchers in the field.
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External links:
- Alexander Stepanovich Popov @ Wikipedia