From Maxwell to Marconi: The genesis and birth of radio: A 30-year span saw the evolution of radio communications from an experimental novelty to an international commodity

Radio communications had its genesis in the equations of James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79). Maxwell, a Scottish physicist and teacher, first gained recognition for his research on color vision and later did important work on the kinetic theory of gases [Fig. 1]. Maxwell was also interested in the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and in 1861, while a physics professor at King's College in London, he published a paper entitled “On Physical Lines of Force,” in which he presented a mechanical model of the electric and magnetic fields. At that time scientists still believed that all space was filled with an invisible fluid medium called ether. Maxwell's model represented the electric and magnetic fields as whirling vortices that interacted with each other in the ether.