Imagine hearing a human voice emerge from a pair of headphones for the first time.

There was no person standing nearby and no phonograph record turning on a machine. The words had traveled invisibly through the air, picked up by a wire stretched outside the house and delivered through a homemade receiver.

For a New Glarus resident experiencing radio in the early 1920s, it must have seemed almost impossible.

Radio did not arrive in the village with the opening of a local station or a tower rising on the horizon. It came gradually, one receiver at a time, connecting New Glarus farmhouses and village homes with Madison, Chicago and eventually the rest of the country.

From Wireless Signals to Human Voices

The story began decades before most Americans owned a radio.

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves during the 19th century. German physicist Heinrich Hertz later demonstrated that those waves could be produced and detected.