The early history of radio is the history of technology that produces and uses radio instruments that use radio waves. Within the timeline of radio, many people contributed theory and inventions in what became radio. Radio development began as "wireless telegraphy". Later radio history increasingly involves matters of broadcasting. In an 1864 presentation, published in 1865, James Clerk Maxwell proposed theories of electromagnetism and mathematical proofs demonstrating that light, radio and x-rays were all types of electromagnetic waves propagating through free space.
Between 1886 and 1888 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz published the results of experiments wherein he was able to transmit electromagnetic waves (radio waves) through the air, proving Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.