Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) is often regarded by many people as the 'inventor' of wireless. He was the first person to put wireless into the realm of a practical means of communication, rather than a laboratory experiment. However, many other inventors are also associated with the earlier development of the theory of communication without wires. One of the early pioneers was James Clerk Maxwell (1831 -1879). Basing his theories on the experimental research work of Michael Faraday (1791-1867) he gave to the World his Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, in 1864. He supported his findings with mathematical proofs, and so paved the way for numerous subsequent investigations. However, it was not until twenty-four years after James Clerk Maxwell had predicted the possibility of producing ether waves that they were produced experimentally by the German physicist, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857-1894). Hertz succeeded in creating electric waves, and in detecting their presence, thus confirming James Clerk Maxwell's predictions. At that time, practical wireless communication over any distances had not been achieved, nor had tuning been discovered; it was not possible to pick out a particular wireless transmission from any number of those that were being made on different frequencies.
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