Follow Up : The History of Wireless Systems

There are two fantastic books about the history of wireless. As I earlier said, if one wants to innovate or revolutionize anything, it is necessary to understand the origin. For innovation in wireless technology and standards, it is important to know the origin of the wireless systems. In the the post for this month, I have already discussed the history. As this is the follow up post, I will be writing about the two books I found particularly interesting. There are number of books available on this subject but I loved these two.

1. History of Wireless By : T. K. Sarkar, Robert Mailloux , Arthur A. Oliner, M.Salazar-Palma , Dipak L. 
                                          Sengupta

2.The History of Wireless: How Creative Minds Produced Technology for the Masses By Ira Brodsky

I am just trying to give a summary of these.

The first book, History of wireless. This book contains everything!! The chronology of events is all inclusive and it starts from 2637BC, since the development of magnetism. I am still reading the Maxwell's equations part of it. The authors have covered the theoretical and historical details starting from the development of magnetism covering telegraphy, radio upto modern wireless systems.

The second book is an interesting read. It is almost like a novel. Different chapters for different developments. The author starts with the magic/science debate behind the wireless and then after describing all these technical developments he talks about the future of communication. This book is a must read for any tech-enthusiast.

Another great video from Ericsson covering major milestones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5jPoQzEh-M

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And it all began..

Lets go back and trace the history of the world of wireless. Did it all begin with with Guglielmo Marconi showing us how the radio works? No it goes a generation back..

It all started with Maxwell's equations!! I am sure everyone remembers Maxwell's equations..I always struggled to understand then and most importantly solve problems based on those in my exams..:):)

So in 18th centure James Clerk Maxwell laid the foundation of modern communication systems. He proved the existence of the existence of Electromagnetic waves.  

This set of equations is the foundation for development and evolution of wireless communication systems.

Then later in the same century, Prof Hertz validated the Maxwell's equations by certain experiments. The eighteenth century ended on a very high note as Guglielmo Marconi sent morese radio signals over a distance more than a mile. Who would have thought that this distance of a mile is going to change to hundreds of miles in the coming century. Marconi demonstrated the wireless telegraph to British post office and hence became the father of long distance transmission of radio transmission.

The nineteenth century came with the betterment of radio communications.

In the first year of the century Marconi achieved another "impossible tasks" when he showed the transmission of radio signal across the Atlantic ocean. Now there was a new possibility on the horizon "Wireless communication"..

Later first voice over radio was shown in the United states. Around 1920s to 1940s this voice transmission over radio waves was mostly used in the police cars. The world wars were another strong driving force in the development and evolution of wireless communication.

From late 1940s a completely new system of mobile telephony was introduced. There onwards the the mobile phones have seen PSTN, AMPS(first generation) , GSM, IS-95 etc..Then in 1990s Qualcomm came up with the CDMA technology and the third generation came into picture. As we are already witnessing the fourth generation and moving towards the advanced long term evolution the communication standards have traveled from voice to high speed data traffic.

Also the number of connected devices is said to reach 15 billion by 2015!!

Thats more than twice the current world population!!

Now as we are getting higher data rates and increasing voice and data traffics we have a brand new set of challenges and many problems to solve.

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