Today Is...Radio Day

If, on a pub quiz night, you were asked who invented the radio and you wrote Marconi, you would receive a big red tick but really you are just a victim of mass deception.
Marconi and Nikola Tesla were at each others throats over who invented it first, Tesla tried to sue the Marconi Company for infringement of his patents but was not in any kind of financial condition to litigate a case against a major corporation but while they were threatening each other with court writs, Russian Alexander Stepanovich Popov was quietly inventing his own and was declared the first person to invent a radio receiving device, in Russia anyway.
It was actually a German, Heinrich Hertz, who came up with the idea of radio waves and a Brit, Oliver Lodge, who came up with an experiment to receive these transmissions and Popov set to work to design a more sensitive radio wave receiver that could be used as a lightning detector, to warn of coming thunderstorms.
That his lightning detector doubled as a radio wave receiver was a happy accident, sending a receiving morse code from one side of his University to the other but as he continued to call it a lightning detector, it left Tesla and Marconi to argue over the first radio.
The Soviet Union were cool with it though and declared Popov later as the inventor of radio and marked it with a day of celebration which probably includes vodka.