To see part two of the collection, click here.

History of Radio - Valerii Iotov

Two Czechoslovakia 1959 Radio Inventors first day covers - pictured on the stamps are Henry Hertz, Édouard Branly, and Nicola Tesla, as well as Edwin Armstrong, Alexander Popov, and Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi. The text on the caches reads " Czechoslovakia Post Radio Inventors".

Two USSR covers (1959) celebrating the centenarian of Alexander Popov.

Alexander Stepanovich Popov was a Russian physicist, who was one of the first persons to invent a radio receiving device. Working with his assistant P. N. Rybkin, he invented a radio recieveing device and presented the paper "On the Relation of Metallic Powders to Electric Oscillations", which described his lightning detector to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society in St. Petersburg on May 7, 1895. On March 24, 1896 is the first account of communication by Popov, during a demonstration at the Physical and Chemical Society, when some accounts say the Morse code message "ГЕНРИХ ГЕРЦ" ("HEINRICH HERTZ" in Russian) was received from a transmitter 250 meters away and written down on the blackboard by the Society president. In 1900 radio transmission was first used successfully when a radio station was established under Popov's instructions on Hogland island (Suursaari). The station was established to provide communication between the Russian naval base on the island and the crew of the battleship General-Admiral Apraksin. The battleship had been stuck on Hogland island in the Gulf of Finland since November 1899. The crew of the Apraksin were not in immediate danger, but the water in the Gulf began to freeze. Due to bad weather, the crew of Apraksin did not arrive until January 1900 to establish a wireless station on Hogland Island. By February 5, however, messages were being received reliably. The wireless messages were relayed to Hogland Island by a station some 25 miles away at Kymi (nowadays Kotka) on the Finnish coast. Kotka was selected as the location for the wireless relay station because it was the point closest to Hogland Island served by telegraph wires connected to Russian naval headquarters. By the time the Apraksin was freed from the rocks by the icebreaker Yermak at the end of April, 440 official telegraph messages had been handled by the Hogland Island wireless station. 

More of the 1959 covers and a letter featuring Popov. 

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bonch-Bruevich was a Russian engineer, scientist, and professor. Considered by many to be the leading authority on radio in Russia in the first decades of the 20th century, he greatly influenced the pre-radar development of radio-location in the nation. In 1918, Bonch-Bruevich went to the city of Nizhny Novgorod in the Volga Federal District and began an affiliation with a prestigious private Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory, where he continued with research in vacuum tubes, and developed a 40-kilowatt, water-cooled tube that he used to build Komintern Radio in Moscow, one of the most powerful radio station in the world. He then became the national proponent of radio broadcasting, building 27 stations in various cities across Russia. Vladimir Lenin personally sought him out for advice on radio and its uses. On 5 February 1920 he wrote to Bonch-Bruevich as follows:

"I take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude and sympathy for the great work and inventions in the field of radio you do. Newspaper without paper and without distance that you create will be a great thing. Fully and I promise you all possible assistance to this and similar works. With best wishes." Ulyanov (Lenin).

The cache on this envelope celebrates the 70 year anniversary of the the Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory (named after V.I. Lenin), where M.A. Bonch-Bruevich did most of his research.

A FDC celebrating the 125 th  birthday of Adolf Karl Heinrich Slaby, who was a German electronics pioneer and the first Professor of electro-technology at the Technical University of Berlin (1886).