Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov

Russian engineer and inventor

• Born: March 16, 1859
• Birthplace: Turinskiye Rudniki (now Krasnoturinsk), Perm, Russia
• Died: January 13, 1906
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

A member of the first wave of important twentieth century Russian engineers, Popov was a pioneer in the invention of radio and its applications. He also contributed to the development of X-ray photography. Outside Russia, he contributed to the development of radio in France.

Early Life

Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov (pah-pahf) was born in a village in Perm, a marshy area of northeastern Russia, just west of the Ural Mountains. Despite its relative isolation, Perm was an area of ancient Russian settlement, first made famous by Saint Stephen of Perm. Saint Stephen converted the pagan Permians after he proved incombustible when they attempted to burn him at the stake. For many generations, the clergy provided Perm’s only intelligentsia. Popov was the fourth child in a priest’s family of seven children. Though Popov left his village, he loved Perm and in later life took numerous photographs of his native landscape, which form an important collection.

By Popov’s time, copper and iron mines, as well as a few factories, were in operation near his village. As a child, he is supposed to have built models of factory and mining equipment. He was educated in seminaries and seemed destined to enter the priesthood, but at the age of eighteen he decided instead to pursue his growing interest in mathematics and physics. He moved to St. Petersburg to attend the university, which was then nearing the apogee of its reputation in science. Among Popov’s distinguished teachers were the chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev and the physicists Fyodor Petrushevsky and Orest Khvolson. The University of St. Petersburg was one of the first to offer courses on the physics of electricity and magnetism and had a fine physics laboratory run by Popov’s mentor Vladimir Lermantov.

While a student from 1878 to 1882, Popov always worked, not only to support himself and to contribute to the support of his siblings but also to support his wife, Raisa Gorbunov, whom he married before graduating. Gorbunov pursued medical studies and eventually became a physician. Popov found most congenial employment with a newly founded St. Petersburg company, Elektrotekhnik, which built and maintained small electric stations around the city.

As a student, Popov took part in the world’s first electrical exhibition, in 1880, organized by a branch of the Russian Technical Society, which had just founded a new journal, Elektrichestvo. The exhibition was intended to raise money to fund the new publication and was a great success; it ran for a full month, attracting thousands of visitors. Popov worked as a guide throughout the exhibition, explaining the new marvels of technology to the public—a role that he was later to continue in public lectures and demonstrations, overcoming his initial shyness. A photograph of him from his student years shows a handsome, rather delicate-looking youth; later, he suffered from heart problems.

Popov was graduated from the faculty of mathematics and physics of the University of St. Petersburg with the degree of candidate (equivalent to a doctorate without a dissertation). His earliest research papers, published in Elektrichestvo, focused on the generation of electricity and the conversion of thermal energy into mechanical energy. He was trained in the spirit of concrete application of science, not for personal gain but for the good of others.

Upon his graduation, Popov accepted a position at the Russian navy’s most prestigious training institute, the Mine Officers’ (or Torpedo) School in Kronstadt, on the Gulf of Finland, where he worked from 1883 to 1901. The Kronstadt facility had Russia’s most advanced physics laboratory, and Popov was soon in charge of it. He also gave free public lectures, in which he shared his advanced knowledge, delighting in finding ways to make technology accessible to the average person. He had only the most limited funds at his disposal and learned cabinetmaking and glassblowing in order to construct innovative apparatuses himself. Every summer, he supplemented his income by running the electrical power plant for the annual fair at Nizhni-Novgorod (modern Gorky).

Life’s Work

At the Mine Officers’ School in 1889, Popov reproduced Heinrich Hertz’s experiments with electromagnetic waves. In the same year, in order to popularize both the Hertz oscillator and the field of electrical engineering in general, Popov gave a series of public lectures on the recent research done on the relationship between light and electric phenomena. These lectures made him see the need for an apparatus to demonstrate, before a large audience, the presence of the waves generated by the Hertz oscillator.

Popov constructed a better detector of electromagnetic waves, which led to his invention of a lightning-storm detector and a radio in 1895. He began with the electromagnetic-wave detector (later called a coherer) invented by the French physicist Édouard Branly and improved it so that it could be used reliably outside laboratory conditions. By the beginning of 1895, Popov had evolved the primitive coherer into a complete radio receiver. By the spring of 1895, Popov had a radio transmitter ready to complement his receiver; it was based on a modified Hertz oscillator excited by an induction coil. Using the two devices, he conducted radio communication experiments in the physics laboratory and in the garden of the Mine Officers’ School. In the course of these experiments, he added a new element of his own, the radio antenna.

Popov successfully demonstrated his system of wireless communication and presented a formal paper to an audience of scientists from the Russian Physics and Chemistry Society on May 7, 1895. A report on his demonstration appeared in the Russian press on May 12, 1895, followed by other reports in late 1895 and early 1896. It is on the basis of this work that Russia claims primacy for the invention of wireless radio communication, although the young Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi secured a patent on his own radio in the summer of 1896, won the Nobel Prize in 1909, and superseded Popov’s achievements.

Initially, the components of Marconi’s radio, being tested by the British Telegraph Agency in 1896, were kept secret. When the structure of Marconi’s radio was finally revealed in 1897, however, it was identical to Popov’s: an enhanced coherer with antenna and Hertz oscillator excited by an induction coil. The detailed description of Marconi’s invention was published in the British professional engineering journal, The Electrician, in 1897. Popov and other Russian engineers read it and were shocked by the coincidence. Popov declined to accuse Marconi of theft, saying in an address to the First All-Russian Electrotechnical Congress in 1900:

Was my instrument known to Marconi or not? The latter is very likely more probable. At any rate my combination of the relay, tube, and electromagnetic tapper served as the basis of Marconi’s first patent as a new combination of already known instruments.

Popov had no interest in a vainglorious contest for primacy but did wish his achievements to be acknowledged. In an 1897 article published in The Electrician, he took exception to a lengthy article just published by the British journal on the subject of the coherer and the radio, in which Popov’s contribution was not even mentioned.

From May of 1895 onward, Popov continued to work with his wireless system, to lecture, and to give demonstrations. Noting that the device was sensitive to lightning discharges, he set it to record oscillations on paper, clearly indicating the approach of storms. From the summer of 1895, Popov’s lightning-storm detector was put to effective, long-term use by the Russian Forestry Institute.

On March 24, 1896, Popov sent the world’s first wireless message in Morse code across a distance of 250 meters, between two buildings. The message consisted of two words: “Heinrich Hertz.” The witnesses were scientists of the St. Petersburg Physics Society, holding a meeting at the University of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately for his future fame outside Russia, Popov was distracted from his radio work by his curiosity about the latest scientific phenomenon, X rays, discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen late in 1895. Popov was drawn to investigate these in 1896 and was the first in Russia to take X-ray photographs of objects and human limbs.

Newspaper reports of Marconi’s patent broke in the fall of 1896, spurring Popov to fresh efforts. Popov increased the distance of radio communication. He achieved ship-to-shore communication across six hundred meters in 1897; by 1901, he had expanded that to 150 kilometers. His work was simultaneously experimental and practical, being applied in rescue missions at sea almost immediately. He experimented with wavelengths lying on the boundary between the decimeter and meter ranges. He predicted the development of broadcasting and the possibility of detecting the directionality of radio waves.

Popov was energetic about making foreign contacts and broadening his expertise. In 1893, he attended the Chicago World’s Fair, where he delivered a lecture; he witnessed the Third International Electrical Congress being held in Chicago at the same time. In a letter sent from the United States, he expressed a strong intention to visit Thomas Edison’s laboratory, but it is not known whether he actually did so. He visited New York and Philadelphia. During the late 1890’s, he made several trips to France and Germany to examine radio stations there. In Russia, he was much in demand as a consultant on the establishment of electrical power plants and civilian wireless telegraph stations.

In 1899, Popov built a headphone message receiver and then went to Paris to work with the French engineer Eugène Ducretet. As a result, Popov’s headset (patented in 1901) was manufactured in Russia and France from 1901 to 1904 and was widely used. In 1900, he returned to Paris to collaborate with Lieutenant Tissot, one of the pioneers of French radio, on numerous improvements in radio design.

While civilian use of wireless radio was expanding, the Russian navy was slow to apply it. Because of Popov’s on-site work, Russia’s Baltic Fleet, harbored at Kronstadt, was supplied with both radios and trained personnel. Under the prodding of Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov, a commander based in Kronstadt who took an interest in Popov’s work, Popov began to receive modest funding. Unfortunately for Russia, there was no radio equipment aboard its Pacific fleet at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

At this point, Popov was at last given a position worthy of his standing and achievement. Having been a professor at the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute since 1901, he was unanimously elected rector in late 1905. Two weeks after his election, his entire faculty passed a resolution condemning “any forcible interference by the authorities in the life of the institute,” referring chiefly to police searches of student dormitories and to student arrests.

Popov, who suffered from a weak heart and high blood pressure, was summoned to the office of the St. Petersburg governor for a stormy interview. He refused to back down and returned home in a shaken state. He died of cerebral hemorrhage a few days later, at the age of forty-six.

Significance

Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov belongs to the long line of Russian scientists not much appreciated by their government in their lifetimes. There is a consistent succession, from Paul von Schilling-Cannstadt, who in 1832 installed one of the world’s first telegraph connections (which ran between the Communications Ministry and the czar’s Winter Palace but was never used), to Dmitry Mendeleyev (who was dismissed from his university post under government pressure), to Andrei Sakharov (who wasted years in the closed city of Gorky for political reasons).

While the rest of the world raced to master the wireless radio and its applications, funding teams of researchers, the Russian government—of which Popov was an employee—let Popov work alone, in his limited spare time. On two occasions, in 1925 and again in 1945, the Soviet government remembered Popov and effusively honored him. The regime had so little credibility on other fronts, however, that such honors added nothing to, and may have actually harmed, Popov’s international repute.

Popov—who did invent a wireless radio, the components and operating principles of which were in essence the same as those of the Marconi radio patented a year later—disparaged suggestions that he had been copied, modestly noting that he had simply put together components that individually were already known. In a time of intense scientific interest in electromagnetic waves, the hour was ripe for such an invention, whose appearance was perhaps inevitable. Popov was content to be part of the world of scientific discovery and to share his knowledge even with the nonscientific public.

Popov belonged to the first wave of what became the substantial, proud, and little-understood caste of Russia’s early twentieth century engineers. Like the highly educated characters in the plays of his scientifically trained contemporary Anton Chekhov, Popov and other members of the technical intelligentsia looked forward to a humane, enlightened future that they did not expect personally to see.

Bibliography

Popov, Alexander. “An Application of the Coherer.” The Electrician, 1897. Popov’s article translated into English, reflecting his precise mind and talent for educating.

Radovsky, M. Alexander Popov: Inventor of Radio. Translated by G. Yankovsky. Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1957. The most comprehensive study of the life and work of Popov. This work is intended for the general reader as part of the Men of Russian Science series. Contains abundant footnotes to sources but no bibliography. Photographs of persons, equipment, and sites are included.

Smith-Rose, R. L. “Marconi, Popov, and the Dawn of Radiocommunication.” Electronics and Power 10 (1964): 76-79. This article presents the British view that Marconi should be given primacy.

Süsskind, Charles. “Popov and the Beginnings of Radiotelegraphy.” Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 50 (1962): 2036-2047. Reprinted as a separate pamphlet by the San Francisco Press in 1962 and 1973, this article utilizes Soviet sources and is favorable to the Russian view of Popov’s primacy.

Weightman, Gavin. Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: The Remarkable Invention of the Nineteenth Century and the Amateur Inventor Whose Genius Sparked a Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003. Although there is only one mention of the Popov-Ducretet wireless system, and two references to Popov in the text, this book provides an overall context in which to understand the invention of radio.