how long has wireless technology existed?

Question

im watching a cary grant movie called "topper" and in a bar there is a wireless device that controls the music.

which makes me wonder, if Hollywood took time to put the idea in the movie, in the 1930's, and the twilight zone began having these special devices doing similiar things, albeit in a total fictional sense, how close are we to having satelites that function like the ones in dejavu movie. ?

Answer 1

The Philco Mystery Control was a wireless remote for a radio introduced in 1939. Early enough to have been 'product placement' in the two later Topper films.

Answer 2

"Topper" is about ghosts visiting our friend Cary Grant. So I wonder if what you remember seeing is really a ghost scene rather than "a remote control scene".

In any case, remote control was one of the first military applications of radio waves, so I would put that around the time of Marconi's breakthrough.

As you can read in

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi

there were many attempts to make radio of one sort or another, but they did not work well enough to be the kind of invention the world was waiting for.

Tesla seems to have had a working model in 1898:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_control

No big deal, really.

Answer 3

Well, Marconi came up with the radio, about 1900....

The Nazi's used a primitive television receiver to guide one of it's experimental missiles for attacking ships by airplane.

So far, none of these have been able to view back in time.

Answer 4

Nicola Tesla invented many of the radioapplications including radio control. This was about 100 years ago.