Timeline of radio
The timeline of radio lists within the history of radio, the technology and events that produced instruments that use radio waves and activities that people undertook. Later, the history is dominated by programming and contents, which is closer to general history. Origins and developments. Although development of the first radio wave communication system is attributed to Guglielmo Marconi, his was just the practical application of 80 years of scientific advancement in the field including the predictions of Michael Faraday, the theoretical work of James Clerk Maxwell, and the experimental demonstrations of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Spark-gap telegraphy . Using various patents, the ""Marconi Company"" was established and began communication between coast radio stations and ships at sea. This company, along with its subsidiary Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, had a stranglehold on ship to shore communication. It operated much the way American Telephone and Telegraph operated until 1983, owning all of its own equipment and refusing to communicate with non-Marconi equipped ships. Around the turn of the century, the Slaby-Arco wireless system was developed by Adolf Slaby and Georg von Arco (later incorporated into Telefunken). Later 20th-century developments. Telex on radio. Telegraphy did not  go away on radio. Instead, the degree of automation increased. On land-lines in the 1930s, Teletypewriters automated encoding, and were adapted to pulse-code dialing to automate routing, a service called telex. For thirty years, telex was the absolute cheapest form of long-distance communication, because up to 25 telex channels could occupy the same bandwidth as one voice channel. For business and government, it was an advantage that telex directly produced written documents. Telex systems were adapted to short-wave radio by sending tones over single sideband. CCITT R.44 (the most advanced pure-telex standard) incorporated character-level  error detection and retransmission as well as automated encoding and routing. For many years, telex-on-radio (TOR) was the only reliable way to reach some third-world countries. TOR remains reliable, though less-expensive forms of e-mail are displacing it. Many national telecom companies historically ran nearly pure telex networks for their governments, and they ran many of these links over short wave radio.