Marconi Born: Wireless Communication's Pioneer

Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless telegraph signal across the Atlantic Ocean on December 12, 1901, from a transmitting station at Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to a receiving station at Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland. Born on April 25, 1874, in Bologna, Italy, to an Italian father and an Irish mother, Marconi became fascinated with the work of Heinrich Hertz, who had demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves in 1888. Marconi's contribution was not theoretical but practical: he figured out how to make radio waves carry information over useful distances. He began experimenting at his family's estate near Bologna in 1894, initially transmitting signals across a room, then across the grounds of the estate, and finally over hills that were out of the line of sight. The Italian government showed little interest. Marconi moved to England, where the British Post Office recognized the commercial potential. He was 22. Within five years, he had established wireless communication across the English Channel. The transatlantic transmission was his great gamble. The physics establishment had calculated that radio waves, traveling in straight lines, could not follow the curvature of the earth. Marconi ignored the math and tried it anyway. He was right because the ionosphere bounces radio waves back toward the earth's surface in ways that had not been modeled. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909, was elected to the Italian Senate, and supported Mussolini's fascist regime. He died in Rome on July 20, 1937, at age 63. Radio operators around the world observed two minutes of silence in his honor, and every device in the modern world that transmits information wirelessly is his inheritance.