This breakthrough was made possible through the work of Canadian-American Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, who patented a high-frequency alternator. Previous to his discovery, intermittent impulses were used for transmission of wireless signals; his system used a continuous wave. Fessenden founded the National Electric Signalling corporation, and Swedish-American engineer Ernst Frederik Werner Alexanderson built an alternator for the station at Brant Rock.

While most of the information related to electromagnetic waves was discovered inadvertently by scientists studying electricity, radio history begins in 1873 when British physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his theory on electromagnetic waves. His theory was mainly targeted at light waves, but 15 years later Heinrich Hertz applied the findings by generating the waves electrically. He supplied an electric charge to a capacity, which he then short-circuited through a spark gap. An electric discharge resulted, building up an opposite charge on the capacitor, and surging back and forth creating an oscillating electric discharge in the form of a spark. Energy from this oscillation radiated from the spark gap as electromagnetic waves, which Hertz measured to determine wavelength and velocity . The findings were not entirely new; the concepts were already applied using light to carry Morse code, but the research was still quite valuable. Electromagnetic waves are superior to light waves because they can travel long distances and still be understood.

Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi is considered the actual inventor of the radio. Starting in 1895 he began to completely enhance practically every aspect of the technology. Using an ordinary telegraph key as a transmitter, his implementation of the radio transmitted signals exceeding 1.6 km (about 1 mile). In 1897 he managed 29 km (18 miles) from a ship at sea, and in 1899 established a commercial communication system between England and France. In 1901 he was able to receive signals 322 km (200 miles) away, but his true feat was sending a single letter across the Atlantic Ocean from what is know known as Signal Hill in Saint John's, Newfoundland, Canada that same year. In 1902 messages were regularly send across the Atlantic, and by 1905 it commonly became a much-needed form of communication for ships and shore stations. For his work in the field, he received a Nobel Prize in physics in 1909 alongside German physicist Karl Ferdinand.