A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

Also seen: Alekxander, Aleksandr, Stepanowitsch and Popow, Poppov, and Popoff

Physicist, (b. March 16 in Turinskiye Rudniki, Russia in 1859, d. January 13, 1906), he studied at St Petersburg, and taught at the Navy's Torpedo School, returning to St Petersburg as professor in 1901. Independently of Guglielmo Marconi, Popov is acclaimed in Russia as the inventor of wireless telegraphy.

In 1896 (possibly late 1895) he improved on Oliver Lodge's receiver by adding a suspended wire as an antenna, (Popov was the first person recorded as doing so) and choking coils to neutralise the effect of local sparks.

Source: The Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia

On May 7, 1895, the first wireless telegraph message successfully transmitted, received, and deciphered. Russian scientist Alexander Popov had sent a message from a Russian Navy ship 30 miles out to sea, all the way to his lab in St. Petersburg, Russia.

It was an incredible feat, but the world wasn't told. The Russian Navy's desire to monopolize this powerful technology prompted them to seal off any news of it. They immediately declared Popov's fantastic accomplishment top secret. Poor Popov. Any chance for world fame was cut off by his government.

It was too big to keep secret for long. Soon, word got out about the "Russian Miracle". Everybody was talking about how the Russians could communicate over great distances with wireless telegraphy using "Hertzian Waves".

Source: http://www.wsone.com/fecha/electra.htm

No one person "invented" wireless electronic communications, even though Guglielmo Marconi for over 100 years has been called the inventor of radio. Marconi did take the ideas and inventions of others and put them together in a workable form to allow people to send messages through the air, invisibly, on radio waves.

But, at almost the same time Marconi was making his "discovery" in 1895, a Russian professor made the same discovery. The main difference was that Marconi was an enthusiastic entrepreneur who rushed to spread news of his discovery to the world and to sell it to them. Alexander Popov, by contrast, was apparently driven by a different spirit and never had a desire to profit from his discoveries.

According to Orrin E. Dunlap Jr.'s, Radio's 100 Men of Science...

"Popoff entered the wireless field through his attempt to develop a device to detect thunderstorms in advance. He conceived the idea of using the Branly Coherer ¹ to pick up static or atmospheric electricity - the clue to the electric storm's approach."

In a May, 1895 Popov reported sending and receiving a wireless signal across a 600 yards distance. In March, 1897, Professor Popov equipped a land station at Kronstadt and the Russian navy cruiser Africa with his wireless communications apparatus for ship-to-shore communications.

In about 1900, Russian history ² sources say either 1899 or 1901, Popov's wireless apparatus was used in what may have been the first ever use of radio communications to help a vessel in distress.

The battleship General-Admiral Apraksin was going down amidst the ice floes of the Gulf of Finland with hundreds of sailors and officers aboard, but Popov's radio system enabled them to contact Hogland and Kutsalo islands 45 kilometers away. Those wireless stations relayed the distress messages and rescue orders to the icebreaker Ermak.

Radio communications was so new at the time that it's likely few of the Apraksin's crew had even considered that help might be summoned from afar, and it's reported they had resigned themselves to an icy death. The sight of the Ermak emerging from the fog must have seemed to some a miracle and the man who invented the wireless system that saved their lives must have seemed an angel.

Ironically, according to Russian accounts, Popov was divinely inspired to invent what we now call radio. Ironic, because the critics who saw the mysterious electrical contraptions used as the first radio sets assumed it must be the work of the devil, and because Popov was, after all, trying to find a way to detect what is commonly called "an act of God" - thunderstorms - when he discovered how to send wireless communications through the air.

Popov was born in 1859 in the Turinsk mining district of Russia, the son of a priest. A popular Russian biography of Popov says he grew up in a household filled with those haunting Russian icons of martyred saints. The boy Popov, it's reported, was "blessed by the Lord" with the strong desire to be able to communicate silently and invisibly through air by means of some as yet undiscovered and incomprehensible process.

"In the long winter nights of the Ural Mountains, while the wind sang its song outside, the boy was preparing for his destiny - to be the inventor of radio."

Here's how the official U.S. Government publication History of Communications - Electronics in the United States Navy (Bureau of Ships and Office of Naval History, 1963) views the question of who invented radio:

"(In 1895), Prof. A.S. Popov improved (Oliver) Lodge's receiver by the insertion of choke coils on each side of the relay to protect the coherer and by replacing the spark gap with a vertical antenna insulated at its upper end and connected to the ground through the coherer. Popoff utilized his equipment to obtain information for a study of atmospheric electricity.

Like Lodge, he was too engrossed with teaching and science to concern himself over its practical aspects. On 7 May 1895, in a lecture before the Russian Physicist Society of St. Petersburg, he stated he had transmitted and received signals at an intervening distance of 6 hundred yards.

In the same year, Guglielmo Marconi, son of an Italian nobleman and an Irish mother, by using a Hertz oscillator and an antenna and a receiver very similar to Popov's, successfully transmitted and received signals within the limits of his father's estate at Bologna, Italy."

"Marconi can scarcely be called an inventor. His contribution was more in the fields of applied research and engineering development. He possessed a very practical business acumen, and he was not hampered by the same driving urge to do fundamental research which had caused Lodge and Popoff to procrastinate in the development of a commercial (radio) system."

Popov's radio system earned him a Grand Gold Medal for research at the Paris International Exposition of 1900 and in 1901 he was appointed director of the St. Petersburg Electro-Technical Institute. Alexander Stepanovitch Poppov died on January 13, 1906 at the age of 46.

Editor's Note: (of the U.S. Government publication)

In this new on line biography, Popov's deserved credit in creating wireless electronic communications ("radio") has been given validation by no less a source than the official history of Communications Electronics in the United States Navy, written in 1963 at the height of the Cold War when the US military certainly had no reason to give undeserved credit to a Russian scientist the Navy history cites information from other publications mentioning Popov, dating back to 1927.

But the US Navy also apparently relied on "unofficial" sources for its study of Popov's wireless work, because the Navy history includes insightful anonymous personal glimpses of Popov's working habits and personality, insights most likely gathered somewhere along the line as both sides of the Cold War routinely collected personal details - the easiest intelligence to gather - about their enemies' leaders and innovators.

The book was written by a Navy Captain with an introduction by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, and published by the Office of Naval History. One assumes they had convincing reason for giving credit to the often-derided claim that Popov had independently "invented" a wireless radio system even before Marconi (by several months).

I've often said of Popov - who was working on a way to detect thunderstorms and save lives when he came across wireless signalling - that he invented radio but didn't think it was important enough to mention to anyone, and once he did, he left it to others to pursue the discovery and went back to thunderstorms. (FECHA would like to know of information regarding his work in that area)

It's my belief the Russian military naturally saw Popov's creation as a tremendous new weapon and kept further research a state secret after the intial May 7, 1895 announcement to the Russian Physicist Society in Saint Petersburg when Popov stated he had transmitted and received signals at a distance of about 1800-feet.

Marconi's first wireless success came late in the summer of 1895.

Had Popov been an entrepreneur in in Western Europe and Marconi been a researcher in Czarist Russia, certainly their fortunes and standings in the history books would have been reversed. The invention of wireless electronic communications - radio transmissions and reception - is also said to have been the starting point for what we today know as "Electronics" a point virtually ignored in the scant coverage in the 1995 100th anniversary of wireless electronics communications or as it was known in most of the world, the Marconi Centennial.

There were wireless smoke, fire, mirrors, flags, hand signals, etc. before that, so who knows who invented the first "wireless communications system"

But maybe now is the time to recognize Marconi and Popov for what they truly were - the Inventors of Electronics.

And, to recognize what an incredible stroke of Fate it was that a discovery that would impact the world as much as electronics has, would come almost simultaneously from two such diverse people as Popov and Marconi: one of them said to have been devinely preordained for his discoveries in the laboratory, the other said to have realized his discovery while meditating on a mountaintop.

The Popov web page used additional resources for the biography, including multiple translations of official Russian biographies of Popov. Popov worked at the Faculty of Physics in Saint Petersburgh and the new Popov web page includes a link to that school's home page as well as links to the Russian Academy of Sciences and an index of Russian web hosts and on line clients.

¹ In 1892 a French inventor, Edouard Branly, created a tube containing loose zinc and silver filings, with contact plugs on each end. The shavings would stick together after the first spark was received; a method of separating them for the next signal was necessary. Alexander Popov, a Russian, came up with the idea of using a vibrator and the hammer of an electric bell to strike the tube and cause the filings to separate.

Eric B.Rhoads

² Russian history research by Victor Cherniak Books, Moscow. Translation by Eugene Kocherga

Source: http://www.wsone.com/fecha/popov.htm

Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov (b. March 4 [March 16, New Style], 1859, Turinskiye Rudniki [now Krasnoturinsk], Perm, Russia--d. Dec. 31, 1905 [Jan. 13, 1906], St. Petersburg), physicist and electrical engineer acclaimed in the Soviet Union as the inventor of radio.

Evidently he built his first primitive radio receiver, a lightning detector (1896), without knowledge of the contemporary work of the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The genuineness and the value of Popov's successful experiments are not seriously doubted, but Marconi's priority is usually conceded outside the Soviet Union.

Popov was the son of a village priest. He received his early education in an ecclesiastical seminary school and planned to enter the priesthood. But in 1877 his interests changed to mathematics, and he entered the University of St. Petersburg, from which he was graduated with distinction in 1883. Joining the teaching faculty of the university, he lectured in mathematics and physics in preparation for a professorship.

Popov's main interest soon changed to electrical engineering, however; and, because Russia in that period lacked colleges that taught the subject, he became an instructor at the Russian Navy's Torpedo School at Kronstadt (Kronshtadt), near St. Petersburg, where students were trained to take charge of electrical equipment on Russian warships.

Popov took advantage of the school's library, which was stocked with foreign books and periodicals, and also of its well-equipped laboratory to follow scientific developments abroad and carry out experiments. Recognizing the importance of German physicist Heinrich Hertz's discovery of electromagnetic waves, Popov began to work on methods of receiving them over long distances.

Popov constructed an apparatus that could register atmospheric electrical disturbances and, in July 1895, installed it at the meteorological observatory of the Institute of Forestry in St. Petersburg. In a paper published a few months later, Popov suggested that such an apparatus could be used for the reception of signals from a man-made source of oscillations, provided a sufficient power source became available.

In March 1896, he appeared before the St. Petersburg Physical Society and demonstrated the transmission of Hertzian waves--as they were then termed, between different parts of the University of St. Petersburg buildings. Evidence suggests that on that occasion the words "Heinrich Hertz" were transmitted in Morse code and that the aural signals received were transcribed on a blackboard by the society's president, who was the chairman of the meeting.

During the academic year 1895-96 at the Torpedo School, however, Popov became interested in setting up experiments on Röntgen rays (X rays), which had just been discovered. Therefore, he discontinued for a time the further development of his lightning, or thunderstorm, detector. He then read the first newspaper accounts of Marconi's demonstrations in September 1896.

It seems clear that neither Marconi nor Popov was aware of the close similarity between their experiments.

The news of Marconi's work, as disclosed in his patent of June 1896, aroused Popov to fresh activity. Working in conjunction with the Russian navy, he effected ship-to-shore communication over a distance of 10 km (6 miles) by 1898. The distance was increased to about 50 km (30 miles) by the end of the following year, during which he had also visited wireless stations in operation in France and Germany.

Popov was given remarkably little support by the Russian government until 50 years later, when national attitudes and enthusiasms had changed. On May 7, 1945, the Bolshoi Theatre was packed with a distinguished audience to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the "invention of the radio" by A.S. Popov. On the stage sat scientists, marshals, admirals, commissars, leaders of the Communist Party, and Popov's daughter.

It was announced that in the future the 7th of May would be celebrated as the day of the radio.

Although it is agreed that Popov's experimental work in connection with Hertzian waves is deserving of recognition, it has not been generally accepted that radio communication was actually invented by Popov. Thus, while it is true that historical research has brought to light indirect evidence that Popov successfully demonstrated the transmission of intelligible signals in March 1896, there is comparable evidence that Marconi demonstrated the transmission of intelligible signals at an even earlier date, though not before an audience of scientists.

In 1901 Popov returned to St. Petersburg as a professor at the electrotechnical institute, of which he was later elected director. He died five years later.

Source: Britannica Online

Back to the Top | Scientists and Engineers N - Z | Quit | eMail: Dr Russell Naughton