Alexander Stepanovich Popov

Who was Alexander Stepanovich Popov?

Alexander Stepanovich Popov was a Russian physicist who is acclaimed in his homeland and eastern European countries as the inventor of radio.

Popov's work as a teacher at a Russian naval school led him to explore high frequency electrical phenomenon. On May 7, 1895 he presented a paper on a wireless lightning detector he had built that worked via using a coherer to detect radio noise from lightning strikes. This day is celebrated in the Russian Federation as Radio Day. In a March 24, 1896 demonstration he used radio waves to transmit a message between different campus buildings in St Petersburg. His work was based the work of other physicist such as Oliver Lodge and contemporaneous with the work of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.