Radio Day is celebrated in the Russian Federation and some Eastern European countries on 7 May. Radio Day commemorates the pioneering work of Russian physicist Alexander Stepanovich Popov who presented a paper on a self built wireless lightning detector on 7 May 1895.
Russian physicist Alexander Stepanovich Popov (sometimes spelled Popoff; Russian: Алекса́ндр Степа́нович Попо́в; was Born in Krasnoturinsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals on March 16 [O.S. March 4] 1859. He was the son of a priest and became interested in natural sciences when he was a child. His father wanted Alexander to join the priesthood and sent him to the Seminary School at Yekaterinburg. However he developed an interest in science and mathematics and instead of going on to Theology School in 1877 he enrolled at St. Petersburg university where he studied physics. After graduation with honors in 1882, he stayed on as a laboratory assistant at the university. However the salary at the university was inadequate to support his family, and in 1883 he took a post as teacher and head of laboratory at the Russian Navy’s Torpedo School in Kronstadt on Kotlin Island.
Popov’s work as a teacher at a Russian naval school led him to explore high frequency electrical phenomena. 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 current 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.
Popov also read an 1894 article about British physicist Oliver Lodge’s experiments related to the discovery of radio waves by German physicist Heinrich Hertz 6 years earlier. On 1 June 1894, after the death of Hertz, British physicist Oliver Lodge gave a memorial lecture on Hertz experiments. He set up a demonstration on the quasi optical nature of Hertzian waves (radio waves) and demonstrated their transmission at distances up to 50 meters. Lodge used a detector called a coherer, a glass tube containing metal filings between two electrodes. When received waves from an antenna were applied to the electrodes, the coherer became conductive allowing the current from a battery to pass through it, with the impulse being picked up by a mirror galvanometer. After receiving a signal, the metal filings in the coherer had to be reset by a manually operated vibrator or by the vibrations of a bell placed on the table nearby that rang every time a transmission was received. Popov designed a more sensitive radio wave receiver that could be used as a lightning detector, to warn of thunderstorms by detecting the electromagnetic pulses of lightning strikes using a coherer receiver.
On May 7, 1895, he presented a paper “On the Relation of Metallic Powders to Electric Oscillations”, which described his lightning detector, to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society in St. Petersburg which demonstrated the principal of the 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 that of another physicist – Oliver Lodge, and contemporaneous with the work of Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi had just registered a patent with the description of the device two months after first transmission of radio signals made by Popov.
In 1900 a radio station was established under Popov’s instructions on Hogland island (Suursaari) to provide two-way communication by wireless telegraphy between the Russian naval base and the crew of the battleship General-Admiral Apraksin which had run aground on Hogland island in the Gulf of Finland in November 1899. Although The crew of the Apraksin were not in immediate danger, the water in the Gulf began to freeze. However help did not arrive until January 1900 although By February 5 messages were being received reliably and the Apraksin was freed from the rocks by the icebreaker Yermak. Then Over 50 Finnish fishermen, who were stranded on a piece of drift ice in the Gulf of Finland, were also saved by the icebreaker Yermak following distress telegrams sent by wireless telegraphy. In 1901 Alexander Popov was appointed as professor at the Electrotechnical Institute, which now bears his name. In 1905 he was elected director of the institution.
Sadly In 1905 Popov became seriously ill and died of a brain hemorrhage on January 13, 1906. However his valuable contributions have been remembered: A minor planet, 3074 Popov, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova in 1979, is named after him. At ITU Telecom World 2011, Igor Shchyogolev, Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation alongside Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General of the ITU, inaugurated the “Alexander Stepanovich Popov” conference room at ITU’s headquarters in Geneva.
Whizzbang1698 