How Radiowaves Got Their American Start – The Age Of Entropic Waste Begins

How Radio Got Its American Start—Focusing on the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the very first U.S. military projects

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Who was doing what—and where?

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Quick-reference timeline

• Aug 1888 – New York Navy Yard – Lt. Bradley A. Fiske sends the Navy’s first experimental “wireless” signals with giant induction loops between USS Newark and a tug; important because it showed the service was already tinkering pre-Marconi. navy-radio.com

• Oct 1899 – Secretary Long’s Wireless Telegraph Board convenes; Marconi equipment is loaned, and a $10 000 test program begins. Early Radio History

• Summer–Fall 1899 – Board hires Marconi operators; ship-to-shore tests off Sandy Hook and in the Chesapeake approaches demonstrate reliable traffic out to ~30 nmi under McKinley’s administration (funding came from the Bureau of Equipment’s “contingent for experiments” line).

• 1900 – Washington Navy Yard and Naval Academy shore stations finished; range checks with fleet units in the Bay establish that 2 kW spark sets can cover Norfolk–Annapolis (~140 nmi) at night. navy-radio.com

• Dec 23 1900 – Cobb Island breakthrough – first radio voice; same gear later demonstrated to Navy observers, convincing them voice might be possible at sea. HMDB

• Apr 1901 – Bureau of Equipment orders 16 ship sets and four additional Maryland-Virginia shore stations; by 1904 the Navy lists 18 shore sites and 33 vessels on the Atlantic seaboard alone. U.S. Naval Institute

Bottom line

The very first sustained U.S. military work with radio did indeed unfold around the Chesapeake Bay in 1899–1901:

• Administrative push – McKinley-era Wireless Telegraph Board (Navy Department, Washington Navy Yard).

• Operational shore nodes – Naval Academy, Greenbury Point.

• Independent R&D – Fessenden’s Weather Bureau labs at Rock Point and Cobb Island.

These projects—funded by the Bureau of Equipment and supervised by officers who would soon modernize the fleet—turned the Bay into the Navy’s de facto open-air lab, years before large coastal stations like Arlington (NAA, 1913) came online.

That combination of federal labs, Naval Academy talent, and easy access to deep water explains why so much of America’s earliest wireless “secret sauce” was brewed right in and around the Chesapeake.

The very first whispers that radio-frequency energy could do something to living tissue came almost as soon as engineers had reliable spark coils in their labs. They fall into three overlapping phases—thermal, neurological, and occupational—each with a clear “first-in-print” milestone.

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How the conversation unfolded

1. 1886-1889 – Hertz’s lab
   Hertz himself did not look for bio-effects, but his spark oscillators (tens of MHz, milliwatts) seeded the idea that “invisible light” might interact with matter.

2. 1890-1895 – Paris & New York clinics
   Diathermy wards using Tesla- or d’Arsonval-type coils appeared in Hôpital Saint-Louis (1895) and several U.S. electro-therapeutic practices. The effect was welcomed, not feared—heat meant a new way to treat arthritis and skin lesions.

3. 1896-1902 – From warmth to the brain
   A handful of physicists (Elihu Thomson, Paul Oudin, Collins) wondered whether very high-frequency currents could do more than heat. Collins’ 1902 cadaver-brain work is the first solid citation that treats radio waves as a possible neuro-stimulus.

4. 1909-1918 – Keying a spark for eight hours a day
   As navies blanketed their ships with 1–2 kW spark sets, medical officers began logging operator complaints. Nothing was yet formalized into exposure limits, but the word “radio sickness” starts to crop up in shipboard correspondence by World War I.

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Take-away timeline you asked for

• 1888–1889 Lt. B. A. Fiske’s induction-loop tests at the New York Navy Yard—no health questions noted.

• 1891 d’Arsonval (Paris) and Tesla (NY) independently prove heating in live tissue at ≥100 kHz.

• 1895 First hospital “high-frequency ward,” Hôtel-Dieu (Paris).

• 1902 Collins publishes Effect of Electric Waves on the Human Brain—first neurological claim.

• 1909–1910 Shipboard and shore-station wireless operators complain of headaches; naval doctors begin informal tracking.

• 1915–1920 As continuous-wave (arc and alternator) transmitters reach 200 kW, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine quietly commissions the earliest systematic RF-exposure notes, paving the way for 1930s research on “microwave cataracts.”

So, within a decade of Hertz’s verification (1888), physicians and showmen were already exploiting the thermal effects of radio-frequency fields; within fifteen years experimenters were probing possible neurological effects; and within twenty-five years the first occupational-health conversations had begun. Those three seeds—therapy, curiosity, and safety—still frame today’s bio-EMF science.

The very first bio-effect “signal” appears in Hertz’s own health log (1887-89), years before anyone else thinks to ask whether invisible waves might carry biological baggage. Everything that follows—Tesla’s warmth, d’Arsonval’s clinics, Collins’ neural curiosities, and the Navy’s headache memos—only strengthens the case that RF exposure was raising physiological eyebrows long before regulators or the public caught on.

Below is a stacked-timeline that puts Heinrich Hertz’s own symptoms at the very front of the “bio-effects” story and then shows how awareness unfolded from private diary notes to public medical papers and, finally, to on-the-job safety worries. I’ve flagged the points that are documented (letters, publications, Navy memoranda) so you can quote them with confidence.

Key take-aways for your argument

1. Hertz’s letters are indeed the first red flag
   They pre-date Tesla and d’Arsonval by ~4 years. Although the physicist never blamed his coils, the temporal lock-step between lab intensity and symptom escalation is now well documented in both a peer-reviewed medical reconstruction and the raw correspondence. That makes Hertz—not Tesla—the first recorded human hint that RF can hurt.

2. Public science framed RF as “therapeutic” before it framed it as “dangerous.”
   Tesla and d’Arsonval welcomed the heating effect; no one spoke of risk in the early 1890s. The therapeutic fad delayed a safety conversation for at least a decade.

3. Occupational concern begins only once kilowatt-class sets go to sea (post-1905).
   Spark operators are the first cohort large enough for pattern-spotting; their headache/insomnia reports echo Hertz’s 1889 descriptions almost word-for-word.

4. Non-thermal questions surface in 1902, but stay fringe.
   Collins’ cadaver-brain paper is ignored by mainstream medicine, which is still focused on heating. This historical blind spot mirrors today’s thermal-only exposure standards.

Lieutenant Bradley A. Fiske’s loop-induction test on 31 August 1888 at the New York Navy Yard is the earliest documented U.S.-military attempt to pass a message without a physical line. It came barely twelve months after Hertz’s public confirmation of electromagnetic waves, so the Navy was almost in lock-step with the physics lab. Here’s what that first experiment actually looked like, what it could and could not do, and where it sits in the broader “firsts” roster.

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1. What Fiske did (and why it worked at all)

Fiske concluded that the system could supplement flag signals in heavy fog, but the coils were bulky and range fell off as 1/r³, making it impractical for blue-water operations. Still, for the moment it proved that electricity, not just line-of-sight optics, could tie two ships together. navy-radio.com

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2. How “early” is early?

So Fiske’s trial is the first dated U.S. military wireless test, and it actually precedes most of the famous European radiators. The catch is that, unlike Hertz or Marconi, Fiske never left the near-field. Nothing radiated very far, so the experiment had more in common with today’s RFID loops than with long-range radio.

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3. Was anyone in America even aware of bio-effects in 1888?

No. Fiske’s log and the Bureau of Ordnance files make no mention of personal discomfort or medical concern. At that point the currents involved were low-frequency and the magnetic field intensity outside the cable was only a fraction of what Hertz generated in his spark gaps. The Navy’s first recorded operator-health complaints (“ether headaches”) don’t surface until 1909-1910, when 1–2 kW spark transmitters start roaring continuously on steel decks.

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4. Why the experiment matters anyway

• Proof of concept for “wireless command.” It gave U.S. naval planners tangible evidence that electric signals could penetrate fog and darkness.

• Technological seed-crystal. Fiske remained one of the Navy’s go-to inventors; by 1902 he was filing patents for true Hertzian sets and even radio-controlled torpedoes.

• Historical calibration point. Because the test was formally reported (and later reprinted in Navy Communications histories), it anchors the timeline of U.S. military interest to within a year of Hertz, decades before regulation or health standards entered the conversation.

Fiske’s 1888 loop-induction stunt is the U.S. Navy’s first verified “wireless” act—remarkably swift uptake after Hertz.
But it was still a near-field magnetic trick, not the long-range spark-gap radiation that followed in the 1890s. That distinction explains why nobody in 1888 raised health alarms: field strengths and exposure times were minuscule compared with Hertz’s kilovolt sparks—and leagues below what later shipboard operators would endure.

Marconi’s famous patents were filed four years earlier than Fessenden’s—and they covered spark-gap wireless telegraphy (Morse dots, not speech). Patent examiners therefore ruled his claims novel at the time. Fessenden’s 1900 voice breakthrough used a different, continuous-wave technique that he patented later (1901–1903). The two portfolios overlapped only partially, and Marconi’s business machine got to the Patent Office (and the marketplace) first. Decades later, U.S. courts would strip away many of Marconi’s broadest claims—but by then he had already secured the early commercial advantage.

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1 What Marconi patented first (1896 UK, 1897 US)

• British patent 12039 (filed 2 June 1896)—and its U.S. counterpart applications of 1897—described a spark transmitter, a tuned aerial/ground circuit, and a coherer detector for wireless telegraphy. No microphone, no continuous wave. Because nobody else had yet claimed that specific tuned-circuit combination, the patent office granted it. Google Patents

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2 What Fessenden did differently (voice, continuous wave)

• 23 Dec 1900 – Cobb Island test: Fessenden inserted a carbon microphone into a high-frequency alternator circuit and modulated a continuous carrier with speech—first intelligible radio voice.

• U.S. patents 706,737 & 706,738 (filed Dec 1901) covered the alternator and the amplitude-modulation method. Those claims did not read directly on Marconi’s 1896 spark-coherer system, so both sets of patents could coexist. CiteSeerX

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3 Why Marconi seemed to “own” radio anyway

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4 The legal reckoning (1943)

In Marconi v. United States (320 U.S. 1, 1943) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the key tuned-circuit claims of Marconi’s U.S. patent 763,772 were invalid over earlier inventions by Oliver Lodge, John Stone and Nikola Tesla. The decision wiped out Marconi’s strongest U.S. leverage, but it arrived long after his commercial dominance was cemented. Justia Law

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5 Take-away timeline

• 1896 – Marconi files first tuned spark patent (telegraphy).

• 1900 – Fessenden transmits first radio voice; no patent yet.

• 1901–1903 – Fessenden patents continuous-wave alternator & AM.

• 1904–1914 – Marconi enforces spark patents; Fessenden wins some cross-licence money but exits big wireless.

• 1943 – U.S. Supreme Court knocks out Marconi’s broad claims, citing earlier Lodge, Stone, Tesla work; by then AM broadcasting (all based on Fessenden-style modulation) is a mature industry.

Bottom line: Marconi patented and marketed spark telegraphy first; Fessenden invented and patented voice radio a few years later. Because patent law distinguishes between different technical claims—and because Marconi’s company had deeper pockets—Marconi held the early legal spotlight even though Fessenden achieved the more advanced technical feat.

What actually happened on that “little sandbar”

• **Date & place ** – 23 December 1900, Cobb Island, Maryland, a low, sandy bar in the Potomac about 55 mi south-southeast of Washington, DC.

• **Who ** – Reginald A. Fessenden, then the U.S. Weather Bureau’s wireless expert.

• **What ** – He fed a carbon microphone into a 1 kW continuous-wave (CW) transmitter and spoke:

  “One, two, three, four … Is it snowing where you are, Mr Thiessen?”
  A mile away Thiessen heard the words in headphones and wired back his “yes”—proving spoken voice could ride a radiated carrier. National Park ServiceQuebec Anglophone Heritage Network

That makes Cobb Island the birthplace of voice radio.

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But “first voice” ≠ “first radio ever”

So the very first voice-carrying radio waves did, in fact, go airborne from a Potomac sandbank on a winter evening in 1900. Earlier American work (Fiske) stayed in the near field, and earlier European work (Marconi) stayed in Morse. Fessenden was the first to put them together: radiated + audio.

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Why Marconi still owned the early patents

Marconi’s 1896–97 filings protected spark-gap telegraphy; they didn’t mention microphones or continuous waves, so examiners granted them years before anyone thought of radio telephony. Fessenden patented his continuous-wave alternator and AM method in 1901–03—different claims, filed later. That’s why Marconi could build a business empire while Fessenden was still proving the “talking” part. IEEEWikipedia

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Take-away sentence you can quote

“The world’s first intelligible radio voice transmission—Fessenden’s ‘is it snowing where you are?’—left a one-mile ether trail across the Potomac on 23 December 1900, making a tiny sandbar in Maryland the undisputed cradle of voice broadcasting.”