When was radio communication invented?
Originally, radio technology was called ‘wireless telegraphy’, which was shortened to ‘wireless’. The prefix radio- in the sense of wireless transmission was first recorded in the word radioconductor, coined by the French physicist Edouard Branly in 1897 and based on the verb to radiate. ‘Radio’ as a noun is said to have been coined by advertising expert Waldo Warren (White 1944). The word appears in a 1907 article by Lee de Forest, was adopted by the United States Navy in 1912 and became common by the time of the first commercial broadcasts in the United States in the 1920s. (The noun ‘broadcasting’ itself came from an agricultural term, meaning ‘scattering seeds’.) The American term was then adopted by other languages in Europe and Asia, although Britain retained the term ‘wireless’ until the mid-20th century. In Chinese, the term ‘wireless’ is the basis for the term ‘radio wave’ although the term for the device that listens to radio waves is literally ‘device for receiving sounds’.
