Guglielmo Marconi
1874 – 1937 · Italy
Known for: Italian inventor of practical wireless telegraphy and the first radio signal across the Atlantic
“He taught the air to carry our messages.”
Biography
Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna on 25 April 1874, the son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian landowner from the Bolognese Apennines, and Annie Jameson, an Irishwoman of the Dublin distilling family. He never sat in a classroom as a boy. Private tutors taught him chemistry, mathematics and physics at home, and in Livorno a schoolmaster named Vincenzo Rosa opened up the new science of electricity to him. At eighteen he came to know Augusto Righi, professor of physics at Bologna, who had followed the work of Heinrich Hertz and who let him attend lectures and use the university library and laboratory. Hertz had shown in 1888 that electromagnetic waves could be produced and detected. Physicists took them for a phenomenon to be studied; Marconi asked what they might be made to carry.
From 1894 he worked in an attic room at Villa Griffone, the family house at Pontecchio, assembling a spark transmitter, a coherer receiver refined from Edouard Branly's design, a telegraph key and a recorder that printed Morse dots and dashes onto paper tape. Out of doors the signals reached only about 800 metres, the distance Oliver Lodge had named as the limit. In the summer of 1895 Marconi raised his aerial high above the ground and connected both transmitter and receiver to earth, and the range grew past the horizon. A laboratory effect had become a communication system. He took it to England, founded the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company in 1897, sent signals across the English Channel in 1899, and in December 1901 heard at St John's in Newfoundland the letter S tapped out at Poldhu in Cornwall, on the far side of the Atlantic. In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Ferdinand Braun for the development of wireless telegraphy.
Wireless proved its worth first at sea. Ships that had once vanished without a word could now call for help, and the rescue of the survivors of the Titanic in 1912 fixed that fact in public memory. Marconi kept experimenting to the end of his life, turning in his later years to short waves and to the beam system that carried long distance traffic between continents. Victor Emmanuel III made him Marchese di Marconi in 1929, and in 1931 he built Vatican Radio for Pope Pius XI. He died in Rome on 20 July 1937, at the age of sixty three. As he was buried, radio stations around the world fell silent for two minutes, a tribute that could be paid at all only because of what he had made.