17 Facts About Nathan Stubblefield

Nathan Beverly Stubblefield was an American inventor best known for his wireless telephone work.

Nathan Stubblefield later went into seclusion, and died alone in 1928.

Nathan Stubblefield was the second of seven sons of William "Captain Billy" Jefferson Nathan Stubblefield, a Confederate Army veteran and lawyer, and Victoria Bowman, who died of scarlet fever.

Nathan Stubblefield grew up in Murray, Kentucky, and his education included tutoring by a governess, followed by attendance at a boarding school in nearby Farmington called the "Male and Female Institute".

However, the establishment of a local Bell Telephone franchise, whose electric telephones were far superior to Nathan Stubblefield's offerings, ended most of the acoustic sales by 1890.

In 1898, Nathan Stubblefield was issued for an "electric battery", which was an electrolytic coil of iron and insulated copper wire that was immersed in liquid or buried in the ground.

Nathan Stubblefield made the unsubstantiated claim that, combined with normal battery operation, his device drew additional power from the earth.

Information for this period is very limited, but in 1935 a former neighbor, Rainey T Wells, reported that in 1892 Stubblefield gave him a telephone receiver, and had Wells walk a short distance away from Stubblefield's shack, after which he was amazed to distinctly hear the words "Hello, Rainey", followed by additional speech from Stubblefield.

However, the unrestricted reception of signals from Nathan Stubblefield's device meant that there was still a major limitation in its intended use for personal communication.

Nathan Stubblefield quickly became distrustful of the promoters behind the Wireless Telephone Company of America, and, in a letter dated June 19,1902, severed his connections as a director after expressing his concern that the company was being fraudulently run.

Nathan Stubblefield returned to investigating using induction, rather than conduction, for his wireless telephone system.

Nathan Stubblefield carefully documented his progress, preparing affidavits that in 1903 he had transmitted 375 feet, and in 1904 reached 600 feet.

The invention of vacuum-tube radio transmitters in the mid-1910s would make possible, in the early 1920s, the nationwide broadcasting that Nathan Stubblefield had envisioned in 1902.

Nathan Stubblefield later lived in self-imposed isolation in a crude shelter near Almo, Kentucky and died around March 28,1928, although his body, "gnawed by rats", was not discovered until a couple days later.

Nathan Stubblefield was initially buried in an unmarked grave in the Bowman family cemetery in Murray, Kentucky.

Nathan Stubblefield invented, manufactured, and demonstrated such a device and did so before anyone else on the planet.

In 1991, Kentucky Governor Wallace G Wilkinson issued a proclamation declaring that Stubblefield "is the true inventor of radio" and proclaimed 1992 as "Nathan Beverly Stubblefield Year" in Kentucky.