Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi made wireless telegraphy a practical technology and built the industry around it. Born in Bologna in 1874 to an Italian landowner and Annie Jameson, of the Irish whiskey family, he was educated privately and never took a degree, but was tutored by the physicist Augusto Righi and read Hertz's demonstration of electromagnetic waves in 1894. Others had produced and detected the waves; Marconi's contribution was engineering and persistence. Working in the attic and grounds of the family villa, he added a raised aerial and an earth connection, which extended the range from metres to over two kilometres by 1895 — the key practical insight. The Italian ministry showed no interest, so his mother took him to London in 1896, where he patented the system and demonstrated it to the Post Office. He formed his own company in 1897, established a station at Poldhu in Cornwall, and concentrated on ship-to-shore communication, where the commercial case was obvious. On 12 December 1901 he reported receiving the letter S transmitted from Cornwall at Signal Hill in Newfoundland — 3,500 kilometres, across the curvature of the earth, which contemporary physics said was impossible. The result was doubted then and is still debated, but it drove investment and led to the discovery of the ionosphere. His company operated by leasing equipment with its own operators, and refused to communicate with rival systems. Marconi operators aboard Titanic in 1912 summoned the Carpathia, and the resulting publicity made wireless mandatory at sea. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun. He joined the Italian Fascist Party in 1923 and presided over the Royal Academy under Mussolini. He died in 1937.

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