Marconi Dies: Wireless Communication Pioneer at Rest

He proved the scientists wrong by doing it. The physics establishment had calculated that radio waves, traveling in straight lines, couldn't curve over the horizon. Guglielmo Marconi ignored this and transmitted a Morse code signal from Cornwall to Newfoundland in 1901, covering about 3,500 kilometers across the Atlantic. He was right because the ionosphere bounces radio waves in ways nobody had modeled yet. Born in Bologna in 1874 to an Italian father and an Irish mother, Marconi began experimenting with Hertzian waves as a teenager in his family's attic. The Italian government showed no interest, so his mother arranged introductions in England, where the British Post Office recognized the commercial potential immediately. He founded the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company in 1897 and spent the next decade building a global communications network. His equipment saved hundreds of lives during the Titanic disaster in 1912, when wireless operators transmitted distress signals that brought the Carpathia to rescue over seven hundred survivors. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909, sharing it with Karl Ferdinand Braun. During the 1920s and 1930s he experimented with shortwave and microwave radio, pushing the technology toward the radar and television systems that would emerge after his death. He died in Rome on July 20, 1937, at sixty-three. Radio operators around the world went silent for two minutes in his honor. Every device in your house that broadcasts without a wire is his inheritance.