Guglielmo Marchese Marconi was an Italian physicist widely recognized for his development of wireless telegraphy. Experimenting with a homemade apparatus at his father's country estate in Pontecchio, Italy in 1895, he sent long-wave signals over a distance of more than one mile. He patented his system, the first for wireless telegraphy, in England in 1896. In 1897, Marconi organized a company to develop commercial applications for wireless telegraphy and two years later, in 1899, he established wireless communication between France and England across the English Channel. In 1900, he took out his famous patent No. 7777 for “tuned” or “syntonic telegraphy.” On an historic day in December 1901, determined to prove that wireless waves were not affected by the curvature of the Earth, he used his system for transmitting the first wireless signals across the Atlantic between Poldhu, Cornwall, and St. John's, Newfoundland, a distance of 2,100 miles. Marconi received, jointly with K. F. Braun, the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for work in wireless telegraphy.

During his early years, Marconi had an interest in science and electricity. One of the scientific developments during this era came from Heinrich Hertz, who, beginning in 1888, demonstrated that one could produce and detect electromagnetic radiation—now generally known as "radio waves", at the time more commonly called "Hertzian waves" or "aetheric waves". Hertz's death in 1894 brought published reviews of his earlier discoveries, and a renewed interest on the part of Marconi. He was permitted to briefly study the subject under Augusto Righi, a University of Bologna physicist and neighbour of Marconi who had done research on Hertz's work.

Marconi began to conduct experiments, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home at the Villa Griffone in Pontecchio, Italy. His goal was to use radio waves to create a practical system of "wireless telegraphy"—i.e. the transmission of telegraph messages without connecting wires as used by the electric telegraph. This was not a new idea—numerous investigators had been exploring wireless telegraph technologies for over 50 years, but none had proven commercially successful. Marconi did not discover any new and revolutionary principle in his wireless-telegraph system, but rather he assembled and improved an array of facts, unified and adapted them to his system. Marconi's system had the following components:

• A relatively simple oscillator, or spark producing radio transmitter, which was closely modeled after one designed by Righi, in turn similar to what Hertz had used;
• A wire or capacity area placed at a height above the ground;
• A coherer receiver, which was a modification of Edouard Branly's original device, with refinements to increase sensitivity and reliability;
• A telegraph key to operate the transmitter to send short and long pulses, corresponding to the dots-and-dashes of Morse code; and
• A telegraph register, activated by the coherer, which recorded the received Morse code dots and dashes onto a roll of paper tape.

Similar configurations using spark-gap transmitters plus coherer-receivers had been tried by others, but many were unable to achieve transmission ranges of more than a few hundred meters.

At first, Marconi could only signal over limited distances. In the summer of 1895 he moved his experimentation outdoors. After increasing the length of the transmitter and receiver antennas, and arranging them vertically, and positioning the antenna so that it touched the ground, the range increased significantly. Soon he was able to transmit signals over a hill, a distance of approximately 1.5 kilometers (0.93 mi). By this point he concluded that with additional funding and research, a device could become capable of spanning greater distances and would prove valuable both commercially and militarily.

Sources

• Cleveland, Cutler (Lead Author); Peter Saundry (Topic Editor). 2009. "Marconi, Guglielmo Marchese." In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment). [Published in the Encyclopedia of Earth January 17, 2009; Retrieved July 3, 2009]. 
• Wikipedia Contributors, Guglielmo Marconi, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Accessed 3 July 2009.