Spark-gap transmitter

A spark-gap transmitter is a device that generates radio frequency electromagnetic waves using a spark gap.

Spark gap transmitters were the first devices to demonstrate practical radio transmission, and were the standard technology for the first three decades of radio (1887–1916). Later, more efficient transmitters were developed based on rotary machines like the high-speed Alexanderson alternators and the static Poulsen Arc generators.

Most operators, however, still preferred spark transmitters because of their uncomplicated design and because the carrier stopped when the telegraph key was released, which let the operator "listen through" for a reply. With other types of transmitter, the carrier could not be controlled so easily, and they required elaborate measures to modulate the carrier and to prevent transmitter leakage from de-sensitizing the receiver.

After WWI, greatly improved transmitters based on vacuum tubes became available, which overcame these problems, and by the late 1920s the only spark transmitters still in regular operation were "legacy" installations on naval vessels. Even when vacuum tube based transmitters had been installed, many vessels retained their crude but reliable spark transmitters as an emergency backup. However, by 1940, the technology was no longer used for communication. Use of the spark-gap transmitter led to many radio operators being nicknamed "Sparks" long after they ceased using spark transmitters. Even today, the German verb funken, literally, "to spark," also means "to send a radio message or signal."

The effects of sparks causing unexplained "action at a distance", such as inducing sparks in nearby devices, had been noticed by scientists and experimenters well before the invention of radio. Extensive experiments were conducted by Joseph Henry (1842), Thomas Edison (1875) and David Edward Hughes (1878). With no other theory to explain the phenomenon, it was usually written off as electromagnetic induction.

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