Scottish Inventions And Discoveries
Antennas: The Interface With Space
HISTORY OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES
The quantitative study of electricity and magnetism began with the scientific research of the French physicist Charles Augustin Coulomb. In 1787 Coulomb proposed a law of force for charges that, like Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation, varied inversely as the square of the distance. Using a sensitive torsion balance, he demonstrated its validity experimentally for forces of both repulsion and attraction. Like the law of gravitation, Coulomb’s law was based on the notion of “action at a distance,” wherein bodies can interact instantaneously and directly with one another without the intervention of any intermediary.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the electrochemical cell was invented by Alessandro Volta, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Pavia in Italy. The cell created an electromotive force, which made the production of continuous currents possible. Then in 1820 at the University of Copenhagen, Hans Christian Oersted made the momentous discovery that an electric current in a wire could deflect a magnetic needle. News of this discovery was communicated to the French Academy of Sciences two months later. The laws of force between current bearing wires were at once investigated by Andre-Marie Ampere and by Jean-Baptiste Biot and Felix Savart. Within six years the theory of steady currents was complete. These laws were also “action at a distance” laws, that is, expressed directly in terms of the distances between the current elements.
Subsequently, in 1831, the British scientist Michael Faraday demonstrated the reciprocal effect, in which a moving magnet in the vicinity of a coil of wire produced an electric current. This phenomenon, together with Oersted’s experiment with the magnetic needle, led Faraday to conceive the notion of a magnetic field. A field produced by a current in a wire interacted with a magnet. Also, according to his law of induction, a time varying magnetic field incident on a wire would induce a voltage, thereby creating a current. Electric forces could similarly be expressed in terms of an electric field created by the presence of a charge.
Faraday’s field concept implied that charges and currents interacted directly and locally with the electromagnetic field, which although produced by charges and currents, had an identity of its own. This view was in contrast to the concept of “action at a distance,” which assumed bodies interacted directly with one another. Faraday, however, was a self-taught experimentalist and did not formulate his laws mathematically.
It was left to the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to establish the mathematical theory of electromagnetism based on the physical concepts of Faraday. In a series of papers published between 1856 and 1865, Maxwell restated the laws of Coulomb, Ampere, and Faraday in terms of Faraday’s electric and magnetic fields. Maxwell thus unified the theories of electricity and magnetism, in the same sense that two hundred years earlier Newton had unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics through his theory of universal gravitation.
As is typical of abstract mathematical reasoning, Maxwell saw in his equations a certain symmetry that suggested the need for an additional term, involving the time rate of change of the electric field. With this generalization, Maxwell’s equations also became consistent with the principle of conservation of charge.
Furthermore, Maxwell made the profound observation that his set of equations, thus modified, predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves. Therefore, disturbances in the electromagnetic field could propagate through space. Using the values of known experimental constants obtained solely from measurements of charges and currents, Maxwell deduced that the speed of propagation was equal to speed of light. This quantity had been measured astronomically by Olaf Romer in 1676 from the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites and determined experimentally from terrestrial measurements by H.L. Fizeau in 1849. He then asserted that light itself was an electromagnetic wave, thereby unifying optics with electromagnetism as well.
Maxwell was aided by his superior knowledge of dimensional analysis and units of measure. He was a member of the British Association committee formed in 1861 that eventually established the centimeter-gram-second (CGS) system of absolute electrical units.
Maxwell’s theory was not accepted by scientists immediately, in part because it had been derived from a bewildering collection of mechanical analogies and difficult mathematical concepts. The form of Maxwell’s equations as they are known today is due to the German physicist Heinrich Hertz. Hertz simplified them and eliminated unnecessary assumptions.
Hertz’s interest in Maxwell’s theory was occasioned by a prize offered by the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1879 for research on the relation between polarization in insulators and electromagnetic induction. By means of his experiments, Hertz discovered how to generate high frequency electrical oscillations. He was surprised to find that these oscillations could be detected at large distances from the apparatus. Up to that time, it had been generally assumed that electrical forces decreased rapidly with distance according to the Newtonian law. He therefore sought to test Maxwell’s prediction of the existence of electromagnetic waves.
In 1888, Hertz set up standing electromagnetic waves using an oscillator and spark detector of his own design and made independent measurements of their wavelength and frequency. He found that their product was indeed the speed of light. He also verified that these waves behaved according to all the laws of reflection, refraction, and polarization that applied to visible light, thus demonstrating that they differed from light only in wavelength and frequency. “Certainly it is a fascinating idea,” Hertz wrote, “that the processes in air that we have been investigating represent to us on a million-fold larger scale the same processes which go on in the neighborhood of a Fresnel mirror or between the glass plates used in exhibiting Newton’s rings.”
It was not long until the discovery of electromagnetic waves was transformed from pure physics to engineering. After learning of Hertz’s experiments through a magazine article, the young Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi constructed the first transmitter for wireless telegraphy in 1895. Within two years he used this new invention to communicate with ships at sea. Marconi’s transmission system was improved by Karl F. Braun, who increased the power, and hence the range, by coupling the transmitter to the antenna through a transformer instead of having the antenna in the power circuit directly. Transmission over long distances was made possible by the reflection of radio waves by the ionosphere. For their contributions to wireless telegraphy, Marconi and Braun were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909.
Marconi created the American Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company in 1899, which competed directly with the transatlantic undersea cable operators. On the early morning of April 15, 1912, a 21-year old Marconi telegrapher in New York City by the name of David Sarnoff received a wireless message from the Marconi station in Newfoundland, which had picked up faint SOS distress signals from the steamship Titanic. Sarnoff relayed the report of the ship’s sinking to the world. This singular event dramatized the importance of the new means of communication.
Initially, wireless communication was synonymous with telegraphy. For communication over long distances the wavelengths were greater than 200 meters. The antennas were typically dipoles formed by long wires cut to a submultiple of the wavelength.
Commercial radio emerged during the 1920s and 1930s. The American Marconi Company evolved into the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) with David Sarnoff as its director. Technical developments included the invention of the triode for amplification by Lee de Forest and the perfection of AM and FM receivers through the work of Edwin Howard Armstrong and others. In his book Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Tom Lewis credits
de Forest, Armstrong, and Sarnoff as the three visionary pioneers most responsible for the birth of the modern communications age.
Stimulated by the invention of radar during World War II, considerable research and development in radio communication at microwave frequencies and centimeter wavelengths was conducted in the decade of the 1940s. The MIT Radiation Laboratory was a leading center for research on microwave antenna theory and design. The basic formulation of the radio transmission formula was developed by Harald T. Friis at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and published in 1946. This equation expressed the radiation from an antenna in terms of the power flow per unit area, instead of giving the field strength in volts per meter, and is the foundation of the RF link equation used by satellite communication engineers today.
About the Author
The Applied Technology Institute (ATI) specializes in short course technical training in space, communications, defense, sonar, radar, and signal processing. Since 1984 ATI has provided leading-edge public courses and on-site technical training to defense and NASA facilities, as well as DOD and aerospace contractors. The courses provide a clear understanding of the fundamental principles and a working knowledge of current technology and applications. Boost your career. Courses are led by world-class design experts. Learn from the proven best.
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