The argument over who invented radio ran through courtrooms and a posthumous Supreme Court ruling. These sixteen all have a claim to part of it.
1Guglielmo MarconiBuilt the first commercial wireless telegraph service and shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics.1000pts
2Karl Ferdinand BraunShared the 1909 Nobel with Marconi for the coupled circuits that gave radio its range.874pts
3Martin CooperMade the first handheld mobile phone call, on a Manhattan pavement in 1973.753pts
4Heinrich HertzGenerated and detected radio waves in the laboratory, proving Maxwell right.668pts
5Nikola TeslaDemonstrated radio-controlled apparatus in 1898; the US Supreme Court restored his radio priority in 1943.565pts
6Alexander PopovRussian physicist who demonstrated a radio receiver in 1895, still credited as the inventor in Russia.565pts
7Claude ShannonSet the mathematical limit on what any wireless channel can carry.565pts
8Jagadish Chandra BoseDemonstrated millimetre-wave transmission in Calcutta in 1895 and refused to patent it.565pts
9Thomas EdisonPatented an induction-based wireless telegraph in 1885 and sold the rights to Marconi.439pts
10Edwin ArmstrongInvented the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne receiver and FM broadcasting.439pts
11Lee de ForestInvented the triode vacuum tube that made radio amplification possible.439pts
12Oliver LodgeDemonstrated wireless signalling in 1894 and patented the tuning that made stations separable.439pts
13Ernst AlexandersonBuilt the high-frequency alternator that carried the first transatlantic voice transmissions.439pts
14James Clerk MaxwellPredicted electromagnetic waves mathematically two decades before anyone made one.0pts
15Reginald FessendenTransmitted the first voice and music broadcast by radio on Christmas Eve 1906.0pts
16Hedy LamarrCo-patented frequency hopping in 1942, an idea now inside Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.0pts
17David Edward HughesInventor of the carbon microphone who transmitted and received radio signals in London in 1879, years before Hertz, though nobody believed him.
18Édouard BranlyFrench physicist whose 1890 coherer was the first practical detector of radio waves and sat inside the earliest wireless receivers.
19John Ambrose FlemingDesigned the Poldhu transmitter for Marconi's 1901 transatlantic signal and invented the thermionic valve that became radio's first detector tube.
20Valdemar PoulsenDanish engineer whose arc transmitter generated continuous radio waves, powering the first long-distance voice and naval stations before valves took over.
21David SarnoffProposed the 'radio music box' and, as head of RCA, turned wireless into mass broadcasting and founded the NBC network.
22Irwin M. JacobsCo-founder of Qualcomm, whose CDMA technology carried 3G mobile networks and put powerful radios inside billions of phones.
23Andrew ViterbiCo-founder of Qualcomm and creator of the Viterbi algorithm, used to decode signals in nearly every mobile phone and satellite link.
24Vic HayesDutch engineer who chaired the IEEE 802.11 committee for a decade and is widely called the father of Wi-Fi.
25John R. PierceBell Labs engineer who pushed for communications satellites and led the Echo and Telstar projects that first relayed signals through space.
26Roberto Landell de MouraBrazilian priest and scientist who transmitted the human voice by radio in São Paulo around 1900 and patented his apparatus in the United States.
27Arthur C. ClarkeScience-fiction writer whose 1945 paper proposed geostationary communication satellites; the orbit they now occupy is often called the Clarke orbit.
28Arogyaswami PaulrajIndian-American engineer who proposed MIMO in 1992, the multiple-antenna idea behind every modern Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G connection.
