Come, let us pin a point on humanity’s historical coordinates.
1887, 8 degrees 24 minutes East longitude, 49 degrees North latitude.
Karlsruhe, Germany.
This small city stands as the northern gateway to the lush Black Forest, where the Rhine River winds quietly past. It’s an ancient town where scattered buildings nestle harmoniously among verdant woods under the sunlight.
On this peaceful afternoon, sunlight slips through the curtain gaps of a Karlsruhe University building, falling upon a young man’s feet.
The room is dim, with a long wooden table on the floor.
At one end of the table sits a cylinder wrapped densely in layers of copper wire—an inductor coil.
In the middle of the table lies what appears to be a barbell—at least at first glance.
This device has hollow copper spheres the size of human heads at each end, connected by a thin solid copper tube about two meters long. While resembling an elongated barbell, it differs in one crucial way: the central copper rod is split in the middle, creating a two-centimeter gap that divides the apparatus in two.
The hollow copper spheres are connected by wires to the inductor coil behind them.
The inductor coil, in turn, connects to a battery beneath the table.
Add the open copper ring to the young man’s hand, and the equipment set is complete.
He understands precisely what each component does. The coil is a voltage transformer, capable of boosting the weak battery voltage to sufficient heights. The copper spheres are capacitors for storing charge—one positive, one negative. When enough charge accumulates in the capacitors on both sides, high-voltage current can instantly break through the air gap—
The young man closes the circuit switch.
A soft “snap” sounds.
Like lightning, pale blue electric arcs dance across the gap in the copper rod’s center.
But that’s not all.
This isn’t the experiment’s purpose.
He raises the C-shaped copper ring in his hand—the ring with a tiny gap—and slowly approaches the table, holding his breath.
One step, two steps, three steps…
An extremely faint “crack” rings out like a ghost’s whisper, but it doesn’t come from the experimental apparatus on the table—it comes from the copper ring in the young man’s hand.
Transparent, fairy-like weak electric sparks burst across the gap in the C-shaped ring.
His eyes widen with delight. After tireless effort, he has finally captured this invisible, intangible phantom floating in the air.
Mysteriously, some cryptic force has transferred energy from the spark generator on the table to the copper ring in his hand—without wires, without medium, without any connection. This isolated little copper ring springs to life with its flames. It’s truly miraculous.
Maxwell’s theory has been perfectly verified.
On this day, humanity consciously transmitted its first electromagnetic wave into the universe.
This young professor at the University of Karlsruhe was named Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.
That year, he was thirty years old.
Let us pin another point on humanity’s historical coordinates.
July 11, 1998.
The Nanjing Shortwave Group, consisting of Bai Zhen, Wang Ning, and Zhao Bowen, participates in the IARU World HF Championship. Using an Icom 725 shortwave radio, they brave the scorching sun to set up their station and antenna on Purple Mountain. Under the tree shade, they arrange a small table on the grass and begin calling out at eight o’clock that morning.
Their antenna is a dipole set up horizontally in a north-south orientation, tied between two trees with rope—from a distance, it looks like a clothesline.
“CQ! CQ! CQ!” Bai Zhen holds the hand mic in one hand and a pen in the other, speaking in his pickle-jar-soaked English, setting up shop on the frequency. “Bravo Golf Four Mike Xray Hotel Contest! BG4MXH! QSL?”
“Juliet Alfa One Delta Charlie Kilo! JA1DCK! QSL?” A clear reply soon comes through the headphones.
Bai Zhen gives an OK sign and begins recording the contact log.
The other party’s callsign is JA1… 1…
What was the rest again?
“Juliet Alfa One… again?” Bai Zhen has to ask for a repeat.
“Juliet Alfa One Delta Charlie Kilo! JA1DCK!”
A J callsign—it’s a Japanese operator.
No wonder his English is worse than mine.
Bai Zhen thinks silently while replying: “Roger! Roger! You are 59! QSL?”
“QSL! Thank you!”
“Thank you! 73!”
“73!”
Japanese people butcher English.
This is their sixty-ninth contact station, and everything is going smoothly.
The IARU HF Championship is the world’s largest amateur radio enthusiast event. Scoring is based on the number of contacts made and their distances—more contacts and greater distances earn higher scores. A contact with a Japanese station earns three points; contacts with European or American stations earn five points.
“CQ! CQ…”
Time to call the next one. Their goal is to contact five hundred stations during the 48-hour competition period.
But before Bai Zhen can finish speaking, the moment he releases the mic, an extremely sharp noise pierces through the channel, stabbing into his eardrums like needles.
“What the hell!”
“What’s wrong?” Wang Ning and Zhao Bowen, squatting nearby playing cards, turn their heads.
“Seems like interference…” Bai Zhen pulls off his headphones. “What’s going on?”
“What interference could there be up here on the mountain?” Wang Ning puts his Jianlibao drink on the table and takes the headphones. “Holy shit!”
“There’s a ghost howling.” Zhao Bowen takes a listen too. “Check the 6-meter band?”
“There’s a Sadako on 6 meters.”
“12 meters?”
“There’s a Rizi on 12 meters.”
“What ghost is Rizi?”
“Ghosts are howling on every channel.” Bai Zhen casually turns the radio’s frequency dial, somewhat puzzled. “We’re being suppressed across all frequencies.”
Wang Ning and Zhao Bowen instinctively look skyward—no aircraft passing overhead?
The competition is ruined when something like this happens, but Bai Zhen isn’t ready to give up. He turns down the volume and slowly rotates the dial, sweeping through the amateur bands.
Perhaps a powerful interference source has appeared nearby, one that shows indiscriminate suppression on any frequency, with noise overwhelming all valid signals.
“No way around it.” Wang Ning squats back down to continue playing cards. “Old Bai, forget about it. Come on, let’s play cards!”
“Cards!” says Zhao Bowen.
Bai Zhen ignores these two fools, hunching over the table to adjust the radio. After fiddling for over ten minutes, still no effect. Even for an experienced HAM like Bai Zhen, he’s never seen a situation like today’s—he secretly wonders if Nanjing is under EMP attack. Is war breaking out? Is America attacking?
“Old Bai, stop monitoring… it’s hopeless. Want a popsicle? Let’s go buy popsicles.”
Wang Ning calls out listlessly from under the tree shade, lifting the hem of his white tank top to fan himself.
Mid-July in Nanjing is so hot even dogs can’t muster any energy.
Bai Zhen wipes the sweat from his forehead, suddenly becoming animated. “Wait… wait! I hear something!”
“What sound?” Wang Ning and Zhao Bowen squat far under the tree, abandoning their card game, tongues hanging out like panting dogs in the heat.
“Someone’s talking…” Bai Zhen slowly turns the dial, furrowing his brow. “The voice is very weak, I can’t make it out clearly.”
The Icom 725 can’t filter out all the noise. Through the chaotic background, Bai Zhen can hear faint human voices. He squints, concentrating.
“CQ…”
“How do you verify your identity?”
“…look up at the sky, it’s right above your head!”
“A meteor, look, it’s a meteor!”
“We must put this thing in the designated position, otherwise we can’t kill it—even nuclear weapons have their limits.”
“They’re coming down from the sky.”
“Save me, please, save me…”
Male and female voices jumble together chaotically. Bai Zhen listens in confusion—who’s talking nonsense on the frequency?
“We’ll meet again.”
“Click!” All voices abruptly cease—Zhao Bowen has switched off the radio.
He removes the headphones from Bai Zhen’s head. “Let’s quit! Let’s go down the mountain to buy food! Let’s get old-style popsicles! Old-style pop-si-cles, yo-ho!”
That year’s world championship failed the three due to mysterious interference.
The following year, Bai Zhen failed the college entrance exam and enlisted in the military, serving twelve years as a communications operator at the North Sea Fleet’s observation and communication station. After demobilizing in 2012, he has been driving for DiDi in Nanjing city.
The same year Bai Zhen joined the military, Zhao Bowen was admitted to Nanjing University’s Physics Department. After earning his doctorate, he stayed at the university and now serves as an Associate Researcher at the Purple Mountain Observatory, continuing his research in space physics and electromagnetics to this day.
Wang Ning meandered through various paths in the following years, eventually landing at the Nanjing Radio Administration Office, where he serves as head of the Radio Monitoring Station to this day.
·
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Let us pin one final point on the long river of time.
Now.
At this very moment.
You’re looking at your phone screen—whether it’s an iPhone, Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung, or OPPO/vivo, fundamentally it’s no different from the C-shaped copper ring in Hertz’s hand. All text, images, sounds, and videos are modulated into electromagnetic waves, transmitted through communication base stations and wireless routers, received by phone antennas, and then demodulated into signals humans can understand, entering your eyes and ears.
Every second of every minute in this world, longwaves pierce through deep oceans, shortwaves oscillate in the ionosphere, and UV waves crash through cities. In places invisible to our naked eyes, they form another world.
It’s been over 130 years since humanity first captured electromagnetic waves in 1887. Theoretically, due to the conservation of energy, that first electromagnetic wave humanity actively transmitted still oscillates in this universe. Though it has weakened beyond anyone’s detection, it wanders like a tiny ghost through this noisy world. Perhaps it might cause an electron in some component of your phone’s integrated circuit to suddenly jump, flashing like a spark, so weak that nothing but the universe itself would notice.
At that moment, as you rub your sleepy eyes, you won’t realize that across 130 years of a long time, you’ve received a greeting from that young man named Hertz.
This is a radio story, taking place in 2019. Nearly two years have passed since then. During these two years, the author has invested great effort in visiting various places and organizing materials, finally gaining enough confidence to compile this manuscript for public release, striving to avoid major errors. If any persons involved happen to read this humble work, please forgive its shortcomings.
All characters appearing in the text use pseudonyms.