Discovering radio waves (1864) : an amazing piece of maths

The story of radio began almost 30 years before Marconi with a Cambridge professor called James Clerk Maxwell. Though he had never seen or experienced radio waves, Maxwell successfully forecast most of the laws that govern their propagation, calculating their speed and noting their resemblance to light waves.
Maxwell showed how radio waves could be reflected, absorbed and focused like the beam from a torch - and could change the very nature of the object on which they were focused.
Hardly anybody believed Maxwell in 1864; however, the theories were later quantified by Oliver Heaviside into two equations, and in 1879, Prof. David Hughes walked up Portland Place with a device that caught the sound of radio waves.
In 1887, German scientist Heinrich Hertz carried out a famous set of experiments that proved Maxwell had been right all along - and in 1894, the British scientist Oliver Lodge succeeded in transmitting wireless signals over 150 yards.