Guglielmo Marconi amazes London in 1896 by demonstrating wireless communication across a room. Exactly five years later, he works wireless across an ocean.
Marconi started by replicating Heinrich Hertz’s experiments on Hertzian waves, detecting sparks in one circuit with another circuit a few yards away. By 1895, he extended the range to over a mile. Marconi tried to interest the Italian government in transmitting messages without wires, but the burocrati weren’t buying. Marconi’s mother was Irish whiskey heiress Anne Jameson, so he used her connections in Britain to meet chief post office engineer W.H. Preece.
Preece arranged a public demonstration of Marconi’s advanced apparatus. Marconi tapped a telegraph key in one part of the room, and Preece walked around with a receiver box. Every time Marconi hit the key, a bell rang. Look, Ma, no wires! The crowd was impressed.
Tickle me, Guglielmo. Marconi was twenty-two years old. He received the world’s first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy and opened the world’s first radio factory.
He sent radio signals twelve miles in 1897 and across the English Channel (twenty-one miles) in 1899. He patented “tuned or syntonic telegraphy” in 1900: different frequencies prevent simultaneous transmissions from interfering with one another. The improved signal quality also increased transmission range. Still, many people believed the curvature of the earth would limit radio to local use. Marconi proved them wrong. Assistants telegraphed the letter S (three clicks in Morse code) from southwestern England to Marconi in Newfoundland on December 12, 1901.
By transmitting more than 2,100 miles across the Atlantic, Marconi demonstrated the practicality of worldwide wireless communication. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Germany’s Karl Ferdinand Braun, who’d strengthened Marconi’s transmitters to make them practical.—RA