Q.In which of the following year, the first radio programme was broadcast?

The History of Radio Broadcasting

Imagine shouting across a valley and having someone hear you a second later. Now imagine that shout travels hundreds of kilometres, passes through walls, and reaches thousands of people at once. That is what radio did — it turned a shout into a whisper that could circle the Earth.

The Intuition: How Did Sound Learn to Fly?

Before radio, if you wanted to send a message far away, you needed a wire (the telegraph) or a physical object (a letter). Sound itself was stuck — it travelled only as far as your lungs could push it.

The breakthrough was realising that sound could ride on invisible waves. Think of a pond. Drop a stone — ripples spread outward. Radio works the same way, except the "pond" is the electromagnetic field that fills all space. A transmitter creates ripples in that field (radio waves), and a receiver picks them up. If you modulate those ripples — change their height or spacing in a pattern that matches your voice or music — the receiver can decode that pattern and turn it back into sound.

So radio is not magic. It is sound turned into waves, sent through the air, and turned back into sound.

The Precise History: From Spark to Smartphone

Radio's story is not a single invention — it is a chain of discoveries, each building on the last.

1. The Theoretical Foundation (1860s–1880s)

James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist, wrote down equations that predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves — ripples in electric and magnetic fields that travel at the speed of light. He never built a radio, but he showed that such waves must exist.

2. The First Spark (1887–1895)

Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist, proved Maxwell right. He built a device that produced a spark — and that spark sent out electromagnetic waves that were detected a few metres away. Hertz died young, never realising his experiment would lead to global communication. But the unit of frequency — hertz (Hz) — is named after him.

3. The First "Wireless" (1895–1901)

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, took Hertz's laboratory toy and turned it into a communication tool. He sent signals across a room, then across a field, then across the English Channel. In 1901, he claimed to have received a signal across the Atlantic Ocean — from England to Newfoundland. This was the birth of wireless telegraphy (sending dots and dashes, not voice).

4. Voice on the Waves (1906)

Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian inventor, did something new: instead of sending dots and dashes, he sent a continuous wave that could carry the shape of a human voice. On Christmas Eve 1906, he broadcast a short program — a violin solo, a Bible reading, and a speech — to ships at sea. It was the first voice and music broadcast.

5. The Golden Age of Broadcasting (1920s–1940s)

The first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on air in 1920, broadcasting election results. Within a decade, radios were in millions of homes. Families gathered around a wooden box to hear news, dramas, comedies, and music. Radio became the first mass medium — it connected entire nations in real time.

6. FM and the Battle of the Bands (1930s–1950s) …