Many inventions have impacted the world throughout history, but in my opinion one of the most impactful was the invention of the radio. This invention has provided society with many things including entertainment, communication, and easier access to information. Radio is still a central part of society today, but just like any other invention, radio has an interesting history of how it has progressed over time. Every invention known to man has had pioneers or people who contributed to the creation of the product. Radio had many pioneers who enabled its creation and their names are Heinrich Hertz, Nikola Tesla, Ernst Alexander, Edwin Armstrong, Guglielmo Marconi, Lee DeForest, Frank Conrad, Reginald Fessenden and Edward Armstrong. It all started with a German physicist named Heinrich Hertz who demonstrated in 1884 that it was possible to transmit and receive electrical waves without wires. Hertz thought that the work he had done was useless but he did not know that what he had done is considered the fundamental element of radio, and this is why every frequency measurement bears his name (Short). That same year a Serbian-American inventor named Nikola Tesla came to the United States and sold the patents on his inventions to a man named George Westinghouse. Tesla later established his own laboratory where he built the Tesla coil, an induction coil that is still used in radio today (Brief). The subsequent advancement of radio focused on more than just the transmission of waves: the new focus was the transmission of speech. The first to start adding voice to the radio mix was Ernst Alexander, a Swedish inventor who developed the first alternator to make voice transmission possible (Short). This was so new to s...... middle of paper ......magazine.com/2007/jun/tireless-wireless#.Up6kc8RDsco>.Head, Tom. "Radio censorship". About.com Civil Liberties. About.com and Web. December 10, 2013. "Introduction to Mass Communication." EFFECTS OF RADIO ON SOCIETY*Introduction to mass communication| Lessons Free online reading lessons. Zainbooks and Web. December 3, 2013. "A Brief History of Radio A Brief History of Radio with an Internal Focus on Mobile Radio." fcc.gov. 2003-2004 version. Np, nd Web. 4 December 2013. .Walker, Jesse. Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Print.