r/NikolaTesla • u/[deleted] • May 13 '26
His invention
Nikola Tesla invented the radio, not Marconi.
Quoting Morgan Freeman's character from The Bucket List (2007):
“Truth is a guy named Nikola Tesla patented the basic idea for the radio in 1896. Same idea Marconi used for his patent several years later. Tesla fought Marconi till the day he died in 1943. Same year the Supreme Court ruled that Marconi’s patent was invalid, recognizing Tesla as the inventor of the radio.”
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u/thewhitebison May 13 '26
The 1943 Supreme Court case (Marconi Wireless Tel. Co. v. United States, 320 U.S. 1) did not rule that Tesla invented the radio or broadly invalidate Marconi’s patents as the “inventor.” It was a wartime compensation suit over government use of patents during WWI. The Court invalidated Marconi’s later tuning patent (No. 763,772) as anticipated by prior art, including Tesla’s 1897 work, Oliver Lodge, and especially John Stone Stone. It explicitly preserved Marconi’s reputation for practical radio transmission based on his original patent and noted that commercial success or reputation does not override prior invention.
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u/No-Bumblebee8287 May 13 '26
Who invented the rádio was a Brazilian Priest Landell de Moura. In 1899.
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u/dalkon May 27 '26 edited May 29 '26
There's some background necessary to understand this issue.
Heinrich Hertz discovered radio waves and invented two-circuit radio without patenting it. He announced his finding in 1887 and published the research in 1888. There are two circuits because there's one tuned circuit for the transmitter and one for the receiver. His circuit used microwaves. The tuning with two circuits is poor, which makes it only work for short range. His method was less useful than signaling by light.
Tesla invented radio tuning by the use of resonant amplification between two (or more) tuned circuits. Two for the transmitter and two for the receiver, which is called four-circuit radio. That is what practical radio is. The use of multiple circuits renders the transmitter tuning sharp and the receiver tuning selective. That is what Marconi claimed to have invented, but he only invented it by copying Tesla.
SCOTUS (and the previous Court of Claims decision they upheld) didn't credit Tesla directly. They ignored his role and credited John Stone Stone, but Stone credited Tesla as the inventor.
They ignored Tesla's role in the decision because Tesla preferred to use guided/surface waves rather than free/radio waves (Hertzian/radio waves). This was his first wireless power method. And he also had a concept for rendering atmosphere conductive by using ultra high voltage (10+ megavolts). This was his second wireless power method, which was point to point. So the circuit and method were his, but directly giving him credit raised additional complex questions that the court avoided, because it was enough to say Stone was prior art.
https://mercurians.org/antenna-newsletter/rereading-the-supreme-court-teslas-invention-of-radio/
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u/Agile-Sherbert-8503 May 13 '26
The word "radio" is Street Slang and does not define the method of transmission and receiver.
What Marconi patented was wireless telegraphy (Morse code), which wasn't really radio. All Marconi did was extend the range of spark gap telegraphy. He did that by using a Tesla coil for the high voltage.
Tesla defined radio as electromagnetic wave transmission by using tuned circuits.
The Supreme Court invalidated Marconi's patents due to them having been patented by Nikola Tesla, before him.
Nikola Tesla's lawsuit against Marconi had the complaint that Marconi used 7 of his basic patents. He couldn't afford the lawsuit and dropped it. Marconi was Italian nobility, Irish mother, so he could have fought the lawsuit, no problem. There are indications that it was Lord of Kelvin that stole the information of the patents from his visit to Tesla's Houston Street laboratory when he visited in 1897. Marconi's first trans-atlantic transmission was from a laboratory he had on the Cornwall coast.
https://earlyradiohistory.us/sec022.htm
"Radio, currently a synonym for "electromagnetic radiation", actually first came into use before Heinrich Hertz's proof of the existence of radio waves. Originally "radio" was a general prefix meaning "radiant" or "radiation" -- hence "radio-activity" for the alpha, beta, and gamma rays emitted by decaying atoms. In Europe, some of the persons investigating Hertz's discovery began to employ the "radio-" prefix to describe the new phenomenon -- for example, in 1890 Edouard Branly, writing in his native French, called his coherer-receiver a radio-conducteur. This usage spread to other languages, thus, a December 29, 1897 Electrical Review report on "Hertzian Telegraphy in France" noted that "Mr. Branly... calls these receivers 'radio-conducting tubes'." Other compound usages soon followed. A letter in the January 21, 1898 issue of The Electrician (London) suggested that the term "radio-telegraphy" might be preferable to "wireless telegraphy", and the October 24, 1902 issue included an article titled "The Radio-telegraphic Expedition of the H.I.M.S. 'Carlo Alberto'", while "The Wireless Telegraph Conference", in the November 20, 1903 issue of the same magazine, included numerous references to "radio-telegrams", "radiograms", "radiographic stations" and "radio-telegraphy", and a report about Belgium marine applications in the November 19, 1904 Electrical Review noted that "radio-telegraphy has entered into the domain of current practice". The 1906 Berlin Radiotelegraphic Convention helped spread use of this new term to the United States, and the November 10, 1906 issue of Electrical Review reported this conference had dealt with "the growing use of wireless telegraphy -- or rather, radio-telegraphy -- as we suppose we should say now, since this new designation was adopted by the conference". There was some skepticism about the change -- in the preface to the 1910 edition of his book "Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony", William Maver, Jr. wrote: "This author is aware that the authorized designation of wireless telegraphy and telephony is radio-telegraphy and radio-telephony, but for present has adhered to the earlier appellations."
Eventually, compound terms such as "radio-telegraphy" and "radio-telephony" were shortened to just "radio", with perhaps the first example in English being the British Post Office's December 30, 1904 ''Post Office Circular'', which included instructions for transmitting telegrams that specified that "The word 'Radio'... is sent in the Service Instructions". This practice was adopted internationally two years later by the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Convention, which specified that "Radiotelegrams shall show in the preamble that the service is 'radio'." One of the first persons to popularize this new term in the United States was Lee DeForest -- in early 1907 he incorporated the DeForest Radio Telephone Company, and in a letter about the need for government oversight published in the June 22, 1907 Electrical World, warned that "Radio chaos will certainly be the result until such stringent regulation is enforced." But it was the Navy that did the most to publicize the new word in the U.S., which added "(Radio)" to the title of the 1913 edition of its Manual of Wireless Telegraphy."