Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), Italian electrical engineer and Nobel laureate, known as the inventor of the first practical radio-signalling system, then called wireless telegraphy.

Marconi was born in Bologna on April 25, 1874; his father was a wealthy Italian, and his mother was the daughter of a well-known whiskey distiller from Dublin. Marconi was educated privately, and at the Technical Institute at Leghorn; he also followed classes by professor Adolfo Righi at the University of Bologna on the detection of radio waves (then called “Hertzian waves”), after he read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz in 1894. He at once saw the possibilities of wireless communication. His first experiments were performed at his father’s estate near Bologna, using a spark transmitter controlled by a Morse key, and a coherer to detect the radio waves. Through continual improvement of both this apparatus and the aerial, he progressively increased the range to about 2.4 km (1y mi), at which point he approached the Italian navy. After receiving little encouragement in Italy, he decided to seek his fortune in Britain, undoubtedly calculating that his wealthy mother’s contacts could be useful.

In London he was helped by Sir William Reece, the chief engineer of the Post Office, and Admiral Sir Henry Jackson of the Royal Navy. After patenting his system in Britain, he formed, in London in 1897, the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company Ltd (which changed to Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd in 1900). During its early years, when Marconi tried to establish this new technology, his company barely survived.

Marconi’s first important trials in England took place on Salisbury Plain in 1896 and 1897 (maximum range 7.2 km/4y mi), soon to be followed by other trials that aroused public interest. In 1899 he established communication across the English Channel between England and France, and on December 12, 1901, he communicated signals across the Atlantic Ocean between Poldhu, in Cornwall, and St John’s, in Newfoundland, Canada. This was particularly significant for the future of radio communication as it disproved those physicists who claimed that radio ranges would be limited by the Earth’s curvature. By September 1918 the technology had so improved that Marconi transmitted the first radio message from England to Australia.

As significant commercially in the early days of broadcasting were the two United States ships Marconi equipped in September 1899 to enable them to report on the America’s Cup yacht race to newspapers in New York. Soon afterwards he established the Marconi International Marine Communication Company Ltd. In 1900 he filed his famous patent No. 7777, which exploited the research by Sir Oliver Lodge on radio-tuning (overturned in 1943 by the US Supreme Court because others had priority). Tuning was a key invention as it allowed several stations to transmit and receive on different wavelengths without causing interference.

Marconi’s first experiments had been with long waves, but from 1916 (during World War I), when he was in charge of the Italian wireless service, he began to experiment with short-wave transmission. Such signals were not only much more directional, and therefore more difficult to intercept by the enemy, they also required less energy. He continued experiments on short waves and microwaves in peacetime on board his steam yacht, Elettra. In 1924, Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company was contracted by the Post Office to establish a network of short-wave radio stations between Britain and the countries of the Commonwealth. In 1932, Marconi installed a radio-telephone system, operating at a very short wavelength (about 50 cm/20 in), between the Vatican City and the pope’s palace at Castel Gandolfo.

Marconi received many honours, including the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909, which he shared with the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun. In 1929 the Italian government created him a marchese, and elected him to the Italian senate. When he died in Rome on July 20, 1937, the world’s radio stations fell silent for one minute to honour the man who had given them voice.