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STORIES
OF INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES
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The Radio
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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 ...
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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...
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