For better or worse, wireless communications have become integrated into many aspects of our daily lives. When communication systems work well, they almost magically enable us to access information from distant, even remote, sources. If one were to take a modern “smart” phone a couple of hundred years into the past, one would notice a couple of things very quickly. First, most of the capability of the phone would be lost because a significant portion of the phone's capabilities are based upon access to a communications network. Second, being burned at the stake as a witch can make for a very bad day.

There are many texts that present the history of wireless communications in great detail, for example in References [186, 48, 146, 304, 61]. Many of the papers of historical interest are reprinted in Reference [348]. Because of the rich history of wireless communications, a comprehensive discussion would require multiple texts on each area. Here we will present an abridged introduction to the history of wireless communications, focusing on those topics more closely aligned with the technical topics addressed later in the text, and we will admittedly miss numerous important contributors and events.

The early history of wireless communications covers development in basic physics, device physics and component engineering, information theory, and system development. Each of these aspects is important, and modern communication systems depend upon all of them. Modern research continues to develop and refine components and information theory. Economics and politics are an important part of the history of communications, but they are largely ignored here.