Casa del Suono Museum, Niche 2 - Transitted souns: the birth of Radio Casa del Suono Museum, Niche 2 - Transitted souns: the birth of Radio

Exhibition of the first radios. During the same period in which sound reproduction was developed, the basis for its transmission over distance was laid. At the end of the nineteenth century, Guglielmo Marconi realised that electromagnetic waves could be used in order to transit messages at a distance regardless of obstacles and whitout connecting wires. This discovery laid the basis not only for the developement of the radio, but also for the construction of the current system of telecommunications. The first radios could be listened to through headphones. They used the properties of galena, a mineral capable of amplifying weakly the electric impulse of the received signal. However, the real diffusion of radio coicided with the invention of the valve: an electronic tube that resolved the problems caused by the weakness of the signal and that would constiute the core of every radio apparatus up until the 1950s

Crystal radio receiver, also called crystal set, used only the power of the received radio signal to produce sound. It is named for its most important component, a crystal detector, originally made from a piece of crystalline mineral such as galena. Then crystal sets were superseded by the first amplifying receivers, which used valves.