Marconi Receives 1st Transatlantic Radio Signal

It was on this day, December 12, 1901, that Italian inventor, Marconi receives 1st transatlantic radio signal, England to US.

Guglielmo Marconi (25 April 1874 - 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor of Italian and Irish descent, best known for his development of a radiotelegraph system, which served as the foundation for the establishment of numerous affiliated companies worldwide. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". Later in life, Marconi was an active Italian Fascist.
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."

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 reivalued an array of facts, unified and adapted them to his system.

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 mile. 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.

Finding limited interest in his work in Italy, in early 1896 at the age of 21, Marconi traveled to London, England, accompanied by his mother to seek support for his work. (Marconi spoke fluent English in addition to Italian.) While there, he gained the interest and support of William Preece, the Chief Electrical Engineer of the British Post Office.

A series of demonstrations for the British government followed — by March, 1897, Marconi had transmitted Morse code signals over a distance of about 4 miles across the Salisbury Plain. On 13 May 1897, Marconi sent the first ever wireless communication over water. It transversed the Bristol Channel from Lavernock Point (South Wales) to Flat Holm Island, a distance of 8.7 miles. The message read "Are you ready."

Impressed by these and other demonstrations, Preece introduced Marconi's ongoing work to the general public at two important London lectures: "Telegraphy without Wires", at the Toynbee Hall on 11 December 1896; and "Signalling through Space without Wires," given to the Royal Institute on 4 June 1897.

Around the turn of the century, Marconi began investigating the means to signal completely across the Atlantic, in order to compete with the transatlantic telegraph cables. Marconi soon made the announcement that on 12 December 1901, using a 400-foot kite-supported antenna for reception, the message was received at Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland.

On 17 December 1902, a transmission from the Marconi station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the first radio message to cross the Atlantic in an eastward direction. On 18 January 1903, a Marconi station built near Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1901 sent a message of greetings from Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States, to King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, marking the first transatlantic radio transmission originating in the United States.

Marconi joined the Italian Fascist party in 1923. In 1930, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini appointed him President of the Accademia d'Italia, which made Marconi a member of the Fascist Grand Council. Marconi was a participant in rallies that fostered fascist beliefs and composed fascist propaganda.
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