Aleksandr Popov, in full Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov, (born March 4 [March 16, New Style], 1859, Turinskiye Rudniki [now Krasnoturinsk], Perm, Russia—died Dec. 31, 1905, [Jan. 13, 1906], St. Petersburg), physicist and electrical engineer acclaimed in Russia because the inventor of radio. Evidently he constructed his first primitive radio receiver, a lightning detector (1895), with out data of the modern work of the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The genuineness and the worth of Popov’s profitable experiments should not critically doubted, however Marconi’s precedence is normally conceded.
Popov was the son of a village priest. He obtained his early training in an ecclesiastical seminary college and deliberate to enter the priesthood. But in 1877 his pursuits modified to arithmetic, and he entered the University of St. Petersburg, from which he was graduated with distinction in 1883. Joining the educating school of the college, he lectured in arithmetic and physics in preparation for a professorship.
Popov’s major curiosity quickly modified to electrical engineering, nevertheless; and, as a result of Russia in that interval lacked faculties that taught the topic, he turned an teacher on the Russian Navy’s Torpedo School at Kronstadt (Kronshtadt), close to St. Petersburg, the place college students have been skilled to take cost {of electrical} gear on Russian warships. Popov took benefit of the varsity’s library, which was stocked with international books and periodicals, and likewise of its well-equipped laboratory to comply with scientific developments overseas and perform experiments. Recognizing the significance of German physicist Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, Popov started to work on strategies of receiving them over lengthy distances.
Popov constructed an equipment that might register atmospheric electrical disturbances and, in July 1895, put in it on the meteorological observatory of the Institute of Forestry in St. Petersburg. In a paper revealed just a few months later, Popov urged that such an equipment may very well be used for the reception of alerts from a man-made supply of oscillations, offered a adequate energy supply turned accessible. On May 7, 1895, he appeared earlier than the St. Petersburg Physicochemical Society and demonstrated the transmission of Hertzian waves—as they have been then termed—between totally different components of the University of St. Petersburg buildings. Evidence means that on that event the phrases “Heinrich Hertz” have been transmitted in Morse code and that the aural alerts obtained have been transcribed on a blackboard by the society’s president, who was the chairman of the assembly.
During the educational yr 1895–96 on the Torpedo School, nevertheless, Popov turned fascinated with establishing experiments on Röntgen rays (X rays), which had simply been found. Therefore, he discontinued for a time the additional growth of his lightning, or thunderstorm, detector. He then learn the primary newspaper accounts of Marconi’s demonstrations in September 1896. It appears clear that neither Marconi nor Popov was conscious of the shut similarity between their experiments.
The information of Marconi’s work, as disclosed in his patent of June 1896, aroused Popov to recent exercise. Working along with the Russian navy, he effected ship-to-shore communication over a distance of 10 km (6 miles) by 1898. The distance was elevated to about 50 km (30 miles) by the tip of the next yr, throughout which he had additionally visited wi-fi stations in operation in France and Germany.
Popov was given remarkably little help by the Russian authorities till 50 years later, when nationwide attitudes and enthusiasms had modified. On May 7, 1945, the Bolshoi Theatre was full of a distinguished viewers to have fun the fiftieth anniversary of the “invention of the radio” by A.S. Popov. On the stage sat scientists, marshals, admirals, commissars, leaders of the Communist Party, and Popov’s daughter. It was introduced that sooner or later the seventh of May can be celebrated because the day of the radio.
Although it's agreed that Popov’s experimental work in reference to Hertzian waves is deserving of recognition, it has not been usually accepted that radio communication was really invented by him. Popov’s description of his receiving equipment, which he revealed in January 1896, coincides intently with that described in Marconi’s patent declare of June 1896. Popov is credited, nevertheless, with being the primary to make use of an antenna within the transmission and reception of radio waves.
In 1901 Popov returned to St. Petersburg as a professor on the electrotechnical institute, of which he was later elected director. He died 5 years later.