Introduction

When radio was born around the turn of the 20th century, various inventors, who are not celebrated today, created their own peculiar radio technologies, which are largely ignored today. Among these inventors is Nikola Tesla, though there are others, like Nathan Stubblefield and Mahlon Loomis, who are even more obscure. The radio technology that is peculiar to Tesla, though it got a few years of public exposure in its time, gets even less acceptance in today's technology than Tesla's disk turbine, his tesla coil, or his high frequency lighting, and Tesla's radio is as taboo in official science as his wireless power, which works on the very same principles.

In 1943, only a few months after Tesla's death, the U.S. Supreme Court, yielding finally to the pressure of a suit fought over many years, declared that Tesla's radio patents were among those that had been infringed upon by Marconi and thus, in effect, wrote into the official record Tesla's status as a founder of radio. This was a purely symbolic victory, for Tesla's radio was suppressed, and the technology that developed is distinctly different in many essential respects.