Nathan B. Stubblefield was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 inventor and Kentucky

Kentucky

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

 melon farmer. It has been claimed that Stubblefield invented the radio

Invention Of Radio

Within the history of radio, several people were involved in the invention of radio and there were many key inventions in what became the modern systems of wireless. Radio development began as "wireless telegraphy"...

 before either Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer...

 or Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and indeed he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand...

, but his devices seem to have worked by audio frequency induction

Electromagnetic induction

Electromagnetic induction is the production of an electric current across a conductor moving through a magnetic field. It underlies the operation of generators, transformers, induction motors, electric motors, synchronous motors, and solenoids....

 or, later, audio frequency earth conduction (creating disturbances in the near-field region) rather than by radio frequency radiation for radio transmission

Radio propagation

Radio propagation is the behavior of radio waves when they are transmitted, or propagated from one point on the Earth to another, or into various parts of the atmosphere...

 telecommunications

Transmission (telecommunications)

Transmission, in telecommunications, is the process of sending, propagating and receiving an analogue or digital information signal over a physical point-to-point or point-to-multipoint transmission medium, either wired, optical fiber or wireless...

.

Though there were contemporaneous experiments by others such as William Preece, Stubblefield has been proposed as a claimant for the invention of wireless telephony, or wireless transmission of the human voice

Human voice

The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal folds for talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, etc. Its frequency ranges from about 60 to 7000 Hz. The human voice is specifically that part of human sound production in which the vocal folds are the primary...

, which would, however conflict with the four documented patents for the photophone

Photophone

The photophone, also known as a radiophone, was invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and his then-assistant Charles Sumner Tainter on February 19, 1880, at Bell's 1325 'L' Street laboratory in Washington, D.C...

, invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....

 and Charles Sumner Tainter

Charles Sumner Tainter

Charles Sumner Tainter was an American scientific instrument maker, engineer and inventor, best known for his collaborations with Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, Alexander's father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard, and for his significant improvements to Thomas Edison's phonograph, resulting in the...

 in 1880.