Tributes have often been paid to Michael Faraday as the outstanding pioneer of the electrical industry, a reputation which is perhaps largely founded upon his discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831. It has been far less common, however, to regard Faraday as the scientist upon whose work the whole theory and practice of radio communication has developed. Yet such is the case, for without Faraday there would have been no Clerk Maxwell, no Hertz, no Marconi, and it is almost certain that the advent of wireless telegraphy would have been delayed by many years. Faraday's work was in fact fundamental to the development of electromagnetic theory and to the propagation of electromagnetic waves and it is therefore appropriate here to review briefly the stages by which, over a period of more than thirty years, his ideas and theoretical concepts developed to form the foundations for the work of Clerk Maxwell.

To Heinrich Rudolf Hertz clearly belongs the honour of being the first actually to demonstrate the reality of electromagnetic waves in the air; to Lodge, whose interest in electromagnetic waves was aroused earlier than that of the rather younger Hertz, unquestionably belongs the credit of playing a vital role in the introduction and early development of practical radio communication.

This chapter reverts to the mid-1890s but, before considering the events which followed upon young Marconi's arrival from Italy in the early spring of 1896, it is necessary to refer to the claims which have been so widely made in recent years on behalf of Aleksandr Popov, whose work during 1895 is alleged to constitute him the 'true inventor of radio'. The claims, which have a background of political propaganda, have been disseminated so widely that it is necessary to take serious notice, even if only to demolish them. The development of radio was, like that of so many other inventions, not the work of any single individual but the ultimate outcome of a whole succession of observations, theories and discoveries at the hands of a number of physicists and mathematicians extending over a very considerable period of time. Each stage in the progression was essential, none was redundant and each was completely dependent on what had gone before. Thus it is inappropriate, as it is with so many other inventions, to cite any particular individual as the sole 'inventor'; indeed to do so distorts the real history.