The Radio
There is an old Russian story in which the main character is able to hear the grass grow. Until recently things like that were, of course, possible only in fairy tales. But times change, and today people are able to hear more amazing things, such as the voices of distant stars. Man's hearing has become so acute thanks to the radio, invented by the great Russian scientist Alexander Popov.
Popov demonstrated his invention, the world's first radio receiver, at a meeting of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society in 1895, and the day of that demon-stration, May 7, is now observed every year in the Soviet Union as Radio Day.
In that first demonstration, Popov's receiver had a bell, which rang in response to electromagnetic signals sent from the opposite end of a big university hall. Less than a year later the members of the Society gathered in the same hall once again. This time Popov showed them a more advanced radio receiver. In these experiments he was able to receive signals in Morse code from another building. The first radio message received consisted of two words: "Heinrich Hertz." This was the Russian inventor's tribute to the German physicist who had shown that electromagnetic waves behaved very much like the waves of light and heat.
The first radio message was transmitted over a distance that seems very small to us today. This is because of the enormous distances spanned by radio communication today. Recall the case of the Soviet interplanetary station Venus-4, which made a soft landing on the planet Venus. It radioed back information about Venus when it was descending on that planet, which was 75 million kilometres away from the Earth!
Space exploration is one of the newest fields in which radio has found application. But it is only one of very many such fields. Today it would be difficult to name an area of science and engineering that does not make use of the achievements of radio and electronics. A typical case is that of astronomy. The application of radio in this case has given rise to the young science of radio astronomy, which is developing with remarkable speed and in many directions. Radio astronomy began with scientists simply picking up "noise" from the sky. Today this new science is providing man with a more detailed picture of the structure and dynamics of our Galaxy, a picture of the Universe ...
Countless inventions have already been made in the field of radio. Countless more are sure to follow in the future. Wonderful things may be expected of radio and electronics by the time the young reader of this book grows up. Undoubtedly the Soviet Union, the land of the inventor of radio, will do much to hasten that future...