Guglielmo Marconi

Born on 25 April 1874 in Bologna, Italy, Guglielmo Marconi was a Nobel laureate and inventor of wireless telegraphy. Marconi was privately educated and then attended the Livorno Technical Institute. Fascinated by physical science and electricity, he was inspired by Heinrich Hertz’s work with radio waves and the possibility of using them to send messages without the need for telegraph wires. Marconi built his own wireless apparatus and conducted experiments at his father’s country estate near Bologna. Unable to interest the Italian government in his wireless telegraphy system, Marconi traveled to England in 1896, where he was granted a patent. In 1899 he sent the first wireless communication across the English Channel, and in 1901 he transmitted the first transatlantic radio signal, between Cornwall and Newfoundland, a distance of more than 2000 miles. The demonstration was groundbreaking as it defied many scientists’ assumption that radio waves couldn’t be broadcast beyond the horizon because of Earth’s curvature. For his contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy, Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with German physicist Karl Braun. Marconi’s radio telegraph proved particularly useful to the shipping industry for communication and navigation. One of the most famous uses for the new technology occurred when the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on 14 April 1912 and the ship’s wireless operator was able to send out a distress signal. Marconi spent the next two decades refining his inventions. He died of a heart attack in Rome in 1937.

Date in History: 25 April 1874