Alan Arnold Beck

Wireless communication, the internet, and television all came from one person - and it wasn't an electrical engineer, a scientist or even a mathematician. He was Alan Arnold Beck who first managed to transmit the human voice by radio waves in 1894. 

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A year later he transmitted moving images. Although his experiments were primitive their success was an important milestone on the road to broadcasting as we know it today.

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Beck was born in London on 14 November 1862, one of six children of John Harry Beck and his wife Elizabeth (née Arnold). He was educated at St. Paul's School, London, and studied engineering at King's College London. 

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He went on to work for some years with his father, who was a consulting engineer based in London, before establishing himself as a consulting engineer in his own right.

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Beck married Julia Florence (née Smith) at St Paul's Church, Deptford on 27 June 1892. They had two children - Marjorie (b1894) and Arnold (b1902). 

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He died aged 80 on 28 February 1927 in South London and is buried at Brompton Cemetery in West London [1].

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He found that electromagnetic energy transmitted as radio waves at a frequency of about eight Hertz (Hz) could be used for transmitting the human voice. He began with an experiment carried out in his father's consulting office in South London's West End on Christmas Eve 1894. He used a telegraph key, which sent the 

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Morse code character 'S', repeated several times at intervals of three seconds. The received signal was amplified and played back over the telephone line, allowing him to communicate with his colleagues. Beck named this method 'radio-telegraphy' and made it available to others under the name 'sound broadcasting'.

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The term 'radio' was coined by the French engineer Edouard Branly in 1890, but there were still many scientists who believed that radio waves could not carry messages. The Italian physicist, Guglielmo Marconi, had been carrying out experiments on 

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wireless transmission since 1894, but he was working with modulated high-frequency electromagnetic waves that could not be sent over long distances. In 1895 he demonstrated that radio messages could be transmitted across the

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 Atlantic from Cornwall to Newfoundland and in 1897 set up a commercial service between England and Ireland. However, he was still a long way from developing a system based on low-frequency unmodulated radio waves such as those produced by Beck's original equipment.

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Beck's demonstration, which was carried out without a proper licence, attracted the attention of the Post Office and he was summoned to London to explain himself before Sir William Preece (1834-1913), the Chief Inspector of Telegraphs.

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 He demonstrated his equipment to Preece at St. Paul's School on 27 January 1895, using an oscilloscope devised by his colleague William Edmonds (1852-1914). A photograph showing Beck operating the telegraph key at St Paul's School is shown above [2]. [3] Beck had to modify the apparatus before it was approved by the Post Office, and he had to rebuild it after it was damaged in a storm.

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The following year Beck patented his invention and set up as a company called 'Improvements in Telegraphy', with offices at 129 Wine Street,London. In 1897 he built his own transmitting station at Walthamstow TV commercial trials involving telephoning between London and Southampton, but before long these ended as he concentrated on developing an alternating current 

 

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mains transmitter, as opposed to the direct current system used by Marconi who employed spark gaps. In 1901 he improved on his earlier experimental transmitter, redesignating it as an 'acoustically stable telephone'.

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