Radio Day


Radio Day, Communications Workers' Day or Radio and Television Day is a commemoration of the development of radio in Russia. It takes place on 7 May, the day in 1895 on which Alexander Stepanovich Popov demonstrated a radio based lightning detector.

Origins

On 7 May 1895, Alexander Stepanovich Popov presented the paper "On the Relation of Metallic Powders to Electric Oscillations" before the Russian Physical and Chemical Society in St. Petersburg, which described his radio wave based device that used Sir Oliver Lodge's coherer as a lightning detector. Popov's device was just a radio receiver, he would not develop a radio transmitter until over a year later. The first Radio Day was observed in the Soviet Union in 1945, on the 50th anniversary of Popov's experiment, and some four decades after his death. Radio Day is officially marked in Russia and Bulgaria.