This is Guglielmo Marconi.
Italian inventor and physicist.
He is known for his work in the field of long
distance radio transmission
and is often regarded as the “Father of
radio”.
Marconi was born in April 1874 in Bologna,
Italy.
He was half Italian and half Irish.
His great grandfather was a famous Whisky
distiller.
Luckily for us Marconi preferred drinking
from the well of scientific knowledge instead.
One of the scientific developments during
his teen years
was the discovery by Heinrich Hertz,
that one could produce and detect electromagnetic
radiation or as it is now better known:
radio waves.
Now, one could always generate waves by splashing
in a bath,
but in the late 19th century if one could
artificially produce radio waves
then the dream of long distance communication
could be conquered.
Marconi built his own wave-generating equipment
at his family’s estate
and was soon sending or transmitting long
distance signals to locations a mile away.
After failing to interest the Italian government
in his work,
Marconi decided to try his luck in London.
Britain recognized and valued his work
and he established The Wireless Telegraph
and Signal company in 1897.
In 1901 Marconi built the first wireless telegraph
capable of naturally transmitting long-distance electric-telegraphic signals.
In other words:
A textual or symbolic message could be sent
independently of what it was written on!
This invention was the starting point for
the radio that we listen to today.
In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics
for the development of the radio telegraph system
and the discovery of Marconi’s law
which established the relationship between the height of an antenna
and the maximum signaling distance of radio
transmissions.
Grateful survivors of the RMS Titanic disaster
presented Marconi with a gold medal
in recognition of his radio,
which helped save their lives in the 1912
disaster.
He died in 1937 in Rome.
In his honor, radio stations in America, England
and Italy,
which had been broadcasting since the 1920s,
broadcast several minutes of silence.
