Background

Alexander Stepanovich Popov was born on March 16, 1859, in the Ural village Turinskie Rudniky (Mines) that then was located in the province of the Perm region. His father, Stepan Petrovich Popov, was a local priest. His mother, Anna Stepanovna Popova, was a housewife. Besides Alexander, the family had 6 other children. Family income was not very high and they lived low on the hog.

Education

Popov received a free seminary education to encourage him to follow his father’s profession. After graduating from the seminary in Dalmatovo, Yekaterinburg, and Perm, he did not continue his clerical education, for he had become interested instead in physics, mathematics, and engineering.

After preparing privately for the entrance examinations, he was admitted to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University in 1877. While still a student, Popov began in 1881 to work at the Elektrotekhnik artel, which ran the first small electric power stations in Russia and the first electric lighting installations using arc lamps. He successfully defended his dissertation in 1882.

Career

After finishing his studies and defending his dissertation (1882), Popov declined an offer to remain at the university in order to prepare for an academic career, because there was no opportunity there to conduct experimental research in electrical engineering. In 1883 he became an assistant at the Torpedo School in Kronstadt, which trained naval specialists in all branches of electrical engineering. An instructor at the school from 1888, Popov lectured and conducted laboratory sessions in electricity and magnetism, as well as on electrical machines and motors. He stayed at Kronstadt until 1900.

Having screened the receiver from outside variable fields and having equipped it with a wire antenna, Popov demonstrated the possibility of receiving signals sent by Hertz’s oscillator, at a distance of up to eighty meters.

In a public lecture, “Ob otnoshenii metallicheskikh poroshkov k elektricheskim kolebaniam” (“On the Relation of Metallic Powders to Electrical Oscillations”), presented on 7 May 1895 to the Physical Section of the Russian Physicochemical Society in St. Petersburg, Popov demonstrated the reception of electromagnetic signals for the first time. In January 1896 he published a more extensive account in “Pribor dlya obnaruzhenia i registratsii elektricheskikh kolebany” (“An Apparatus for Detecting and Recording Electrical Oscillations”), in which he introduced a detailed circuit diagram. The article concluded with “the hope that my apparatus, when perfected, may be used for the transmission of signals over a distance with the help of rapid electrical oscillations, as soon as a source of such vibrations with sufficient energy is discovered.”

In the summer of 1895, Popov had adapted his instrument for the automatic registration of atmospheric oscillatory discharges; it was later called a storm indicator. Experiments with it led Popov to study the possible influence of atmospheric obstacles to the transmission of signals. By the beginning of 1896, Popov had substantially improved his receiver and had obtained important results in transmitting and receiving signals. Before the summer of 1896, the improved apparatus had been publicly demonstrated three times, in Kronstadt and St. Petersburg.

In the fall of 1896, the first published notice of Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph appeared; his claim dated from June 1896. When he was issued a patent in 1897 and the diagram of his apparatus was published, it appeared to coincide almost completely with the description published in January 1896 by Popov. A commission of competence, established in 1908 by the Physical Section of the Russian Physicochemical Society to investigate the question of priority, concluded that Popov “was justified as being recognized as the inventor of the wireless telegraph.”

Popov’s improvements (1897-1900) in his radiotelegraph led to its practical use by the Russian navy and its introduction into the army, but the development of radio in the tsarist armed forces proceeded very slowly, compared with those of other nations.

In 1901 Popov became a professor at the St. Petersburg Institute of Electrical Engineering, and in 1905 he was elected its director. In December 1905 he was ordered by the governor of St. Petersburg to take repressive measures against student political disturbances. Popov refused, and this event severely affected his health and was fatal for his life.

Achievements

• 

  Popov's major achievement consists in his discovery and study of the high-frequency electrical phenomena. 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. Today, this date is celebrated in the Russian Federation as Radio Day. In the demonstration that occurred on March 24, 1896, he successfully used radio waves to transmit a message between different campus buildings in St. Petersburg.
  
  Also, his other achievements include formulation of the basic principles of radio communication, development of the idea of amplification of weak radio signals through setting of relay, invention of the grounding and the receiving antenna, establishment of the first civil and military radio station, and claiming the effectiveness of radio applications in aeronautics, land forces, and navy.
  
  A minor planet, 3074 Popov, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova in 1979, is named after him. The postal and telecommunications museum in Saint Petersburg, the leading museum in its field in the Russian Federation, has since 1945 obtained the name A.S. Popov Central Museum of Communications.
  
  

Works

More photos

• Invention

  • receiver

    (One of Popov's receivers, with a chart recorder (white cy...)

    1895

  • Telphone receiver

    (Telphone receiver of the Popov-Ducrete system.)

    1900

  • Radio receiver

    1895

Views

Popov became interested in electromagnetic waves following their discovery by Hertz in 1888. In 1890 E. Branly discovered the decrease of electrical resistance in metallic powders under the influence of electrical discharges. In 1894 Oliver Lodge used this discovery to construct an indicator of electromagnetic waves, which he called a coherer. Lodge’s first indicator had a serious flaw: under the action of electromagnetic waves, the grains of powder stuck together and the sensitivity of the apparatus declined sharply. Lodge, and later Popov, improved this indicator, equipping it with an electric bell-like apparatus that automatically tapped the powder tube when the impulse of current was produced and thereby restored its sensitivity for receiving the original signal. By constructing the first continuously operating indicator, Popov made it possible, as he wrote in 1895, “to note separate, successive discharges of an oscillatory character.”

Quotations: "I can express my hope that my apparatus will be applied for signaling at great distances by electric vibrations of high frequency, as soon as there will be invented a more powerful generator of such vibrations."

Membership

Popov served as a president and was a member of the Russian Physicochemical Society and an honorary member of the Russian Technical Association.

Personality

Even as a child, Popov was keen on creating different driving mechanisms. This caused considerable surprise from his peers who chose ball, dibs, and other entertainments for children.

Later in life, Popov had a reputation of a very modest man who was always ready to help everyone. He willingly lent money even to his students.

Connections

Alexander Popov was married to Raisa Alexeeyevna with whom he had four children.

Father:

Stepan Petrovich Popov

Mother:

Anna Stepanovna Popova

Wife:

Raisa Alexeeyevna Popova

associate:

Guglielmo Marconi

In 1895 Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began work on a purpose-built wireless telegraphy system based on "Hertzian" (radio) waves, developing a spark-gap transmitter and a much improved automatically-reset coherer receiver. By mid-1895 Marconi had transmitted messages 1/2 mile (1600 meters). He then came up with the idea grounding his transmitter as well as his receiver and by mid-1896 he was transmitting radio messages a mile and a half (2400 meters). Popov and Marconi's early work seems to have been done without the knowledge of each other's system although reading Marconi's June 1896 patent disclosures led Popov to develop a long-range wireless telegraphy system.

Sister:

Maria Stepanovna Levitskaya (Popova)

associate:

Oliver Joseph Lodge

Popov read an 1894 article about British physicist Oliver Lodge's experiments related to the discovery of radio waves by German physicist Heinrich Hertz 6 years earlier. On 1 June 1894, after the death of Hertz, British physicist Oliver Lodge gave a memorial lecture on Hertz experiments. He set up a demonstration on the quasi-optical nature of Hertzian waves (radio waves) and demonstrated their transmission at distances up to 50 meters.

Lodge used a detector called a coherer, a glass tube containing metal filings between two electrodes. When received waves from an antenna were applied to the electrodes, the coherer became conductive allowing the current from a battery to pass through it, with the impulse being picked up by a mirror galvanometer.

After receiving a signal, the metal filings in the coherer had to be reset by a manually operated vibrator or by the vibrations of a bell placed on the table nearby that rang every time a transmission was received. Popov set to work to design a more sensitive radio wave receiver that could be used as a lightning detector, to warn of thunderstorms by detecting the electromagnetic pulses of lightning strikes using a coherer receiver.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  1975
• Popov and the Beginnings of Radiotelegraphy
  1962