History of Wirless

            
             Radio telephones have been used for decades, but have not been widely available due to limited system capacity. The breakthrough that addressed this capacity problem was the development of the cellular concept, which allows frequency reuse. Needless to say, the use of wireless communications has increased exponentially since that breakthrough. The discovery of electromagnetic waves by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz in 1887 is generally considered to be the take-off date for wireless communication. This is understandable, because all kinds of wireless communication nowadays work with Hertzian waves, wireless telephony, radio, live television, or wireless computing in its various technical appearances, e.g. Bluetooth or the wireless local area networks (WLAN or "WiFi"). .
             The textbook version of the history of "the wireless" usually continues with the Italian engineer and businessman Guglielmo Marconi, who introduced wireless telegraphy in large scale in the British Empire and who was the first to transmit wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Wireless telephony was developed and, shortly before and during World War I, the success story of radio broadcasting began. The idea of wireless television also was in the air from the very beginning of TV-history, but technical difficulties were enormous and so it was not before 1960 when "Echo", the first communication satellite was launched by the NASA. Wireless computing, finally, took off somewhat late at the end of the 20th century and is right now in its crucial phase of development.
             Retrospectively, all this sounds pretty straight forward. At the times, it was not always very straight forward, though. The target of this work is to take a closer look at some of the crucial moments or years during the history of wireless communication and to try and find out, why and when certain technological decisions were made that gave the whole wireless enterprise new directions.