From youth, Marconi was interested in science and electricity. In the early 1890s, he began working on the idea 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 and inventors had been exploring wireless telegraph technologies and even building systems using electric
conduction,
electromagnetic induction and optical (light) signalling for over 50 years, but none had proven technically and commercially successful. A relatively new development came from
Heinrich Hertz, who, in 1888, demonstrated that one could produce and detect
electromagnetic radiation, based on the work of
James Clerk Maxwell. At the time, this radiation was commonly called "Hertzian waves", and is now generally referred to as
radio waves. There was a great deal of interest in radio waves in the physics community, but this interest was in the scientific phenomenon, not in its potential as a communication method. Physicists generally looked on radio waves as an invisible form of light that could only travel along a
line of sight path, limiting its range to the visual horizon like existing forms of visual signalling. Hertz's death in 1894 brought published reviews of his earlier discoveries including a demonstration on the transmission and detection of radio waves by the British physicist
Oliver Lodge and an article about Hertz's work by
Augusto Righi. Righi's article renewed Marconi's interest in developing a wireless telegraphy system based on radio waves, a line of inquiry that Marconi noted other inventors did not seem to be pursuing.
Developing radio telegraphy . It consisted of an elevated copper sheet
(top) connected to a Righi spark gap
(left) powered by an
induction coil (centre) with a
telegraph key (right) to switch it on and off to spell out text messages in
Morse code. At the age of 20, Marconi began to conduct experiments on radio waves, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home at the Villa Griffone in Pontecchio (now an administrative subdivision of
Sasso Marconi), Italy, with the help of his butler, Mignani. Marconi built on Hertz's original experiments and, at the suggestion of Righi, began using a
coherer, an early detector based on the 1890 findings of French physicist
Édouard Branly and used in Lodge's experiments, that
changed resistance when exposed to radio waves. In the summer of 1894, he built a storm alarm made up of a battery, a coherer, and an electric bell, which went off when it picked up the radio waves generated by lightning. Late one night, in December 1894, Marconi demonstrated a radio transmitter and receiver to his mother, a set-up that made a bell ring on the other side of the room by pushing a telegraphic button on a bench. Marconi came up with a functional system with many components: • A relatively simple
oscillator or
spark-producing radio transmitter; • A
wire or metal sheet capacity area suspended at a height above the ground; • A
coherer receiver, which was a modification of
Édouard 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. In the summer of 1895, Marconi moved his experiments outdoors on his father's estate in Bologna. He tried different arrangements and shapes of antenna but even with improvements he was able to transmit signals only up to 800 metres (0.5 mile), a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves.
Transmission breakthrough A breakthrough came in the summer of 1895, when Marconi found that a much greater range could be achieved after he raised the height of his antenna and, borrowing from a technique used in wired telegraphy,
grounded his transmitter and receiver. With these improvements, the system was capable of transmitting signals up to and over hills. The
monopole antenna reduced the frequency of the waves compared to the
dipole antennas used by Hertz, and radiated
vertically polarized radio waves which could travel longer distances. By this point, he concluded that a device could become capable of spanning greater distances, with additional funding and research, and would prove valuable both commercially and militarily. Marconi's experimental apparatus proved to be the first engineering-complete, commercially successful
radio transmission system. Marconi applied to the Italian Ministry of Post and Telegraphs, then under the direction of Maggiorino Ferraris, explaining his wireless telegraph machine and asking for funding, but never received a response. An apocryphal tale claims that the minister (incorrectly named first as Emilio Sineo, later as Pietro Lacava) wrote "to the Longara" on the document, referring to the insane asylum on Via della Lungara in Rome, but the letter was never found. In 1896, Marconi spoke with his family friend Carlo Gardini, Honorary Consul at the United States Consulate in Bologna, about leaving Italy to go to
Great Britain. Gardini wrote a letter of introduction to the Ambassador of Italy in London, Annibale Ferrero, explaining who Marconi was and about his extraordinary discoveries. In his response, Ambassador Ferrero advised them not to reveal Marconi's results until after a patent was obtained. He also encouraged Marconi to come to Britain, where he believed it would be easier to find the necessary funds to convert his experiments into practical use. Finding little interest or appreciation for his work in Italy, Marconi travelled to
London in early 1896 at the age of 21, accompanied by his mother, to seek support for his work. (He spoke fluent English in addition to Italian.) Marconi arrived at
Dover, and the Customs officer opened his case to find various apparatuses. The customs officer immediately contacted
the Admiralty in London. With worries in the UK about Italian anarchists and suspicion Marconi was importing a bomb, his equipment was destroyed. While in the UK, Marconi gained the interest and support of
William Preece, the Chief Electrical Engineer of the
General Post Office (the GPO). Marconi applied for a patent on 2 June 1896. British Patent number 12039 titled "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor", which became the first patent for a communication system based on radio waves.
Demonstrations and achievements engineers inspect Marconi's radio equipment during a demonstration on
Flat Holm Island in the
Bristol Channel, 13 May 1897. The transmitter is at the centre, the coherer receiver below it, and the pole supporting the wire antenna is visible at top. Marconi made the first demonstration of his system for the British government in July 1896. A further series of demonstrations for the British followed, and, by March 1897, Marconi had transmitted Morse code signals over a distance of about across
Salisbury Plain. On 13 May 1897, Marconi sent the first ever wireless communication over the open sea – a message was transmitted over the
Bristol Channel from
Flat Holm Island to
Lavernock Point near
Cardiff, a distance of . The message read "Are you ready". The transmitting equipment was almost immediately relocated to
Brean Down Fort on the
Somerset coast, stretching the range to . in London, commemorating Marconi's first public transmission of wireless signals. 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 Institution on 4 June 1897. Numerous additional demonstrations followed, and Marconi began to receive international attention. In July 1897, he carried out a series of tests at
La Spezia, in his home country, for the Italian government. A test for
Lloyd's between The Marine Hotel in
Ballycastle and
Rathlin Island, both in
County Antrim in
Ulster,
Ireland, was conducted on 6 July 1898 by
George Kemp and
Edward Edwin Glanville. A transmission across the
English Channel was accomplished on 27 March 1899, from
Wimereux, France to
South Foreland Lighthouse, England. Marconi set up an experimental base at the
Haven Hotel,
Sandbanks,
Poole Harbour,
Dorset, where he erected a 100-foot high mast. He became friends with the van Raaltes, the owners of
Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, and his steam yacht, the
Elettra, was often moored on Brownsea or at The Haven Hotel. Marconi would later purchase the vessel after the Great War and convert it to a seaborne laboratory from where he would conduct many of his experiments. Among the
Elettras crew was
Adelmo Landini, his personal radio operator, who was also an inventor. In December 1898, the British lightship service authorised the establishment of wireless communication between the
South Foreland lighthouse at
Dover and the East Goodwin
lightship, twelve miles distant. On 17 March 1899, the East Goodwin lightship sent the first
wireless distress signal, a signal on behalf of the merchant vessel
Elbe which had run aground on
Goodwin Sands. The message was received by the radio operator of the South Foreland lighthouse, who summoned the aid of the
Ramsgate lifeboat. In 1899, Marconi sailed to the United States at the invitation of
The New York Herald newspaper to cover
that year's America's Cup international yacht races off
Sandy Hook, New Jersey. His first demonstration was a transmission from aboard the SS
Ponce, a passenger ship of the
Porto Rico Line. Marconi left for
England on 8 November 1899 on the
American Line's , and he and his assistants installed wireless equipment aboard during the voyage. Marconi's wireless brought news of the
Second Boer War, which had begun a month before their departure, to passengers at the request of "some of the officials of the American line." On 15 November the
SS Saint Paul became the first ocean liner to report her imminent return to Great Britain by wireless when Marconi's Royal Needles Hotel radio station contacted her 66 nautical miles off the English coast. The first
Transatlantic Times, a newspaper containing wireless transmission news from the Needles Station at the Isle of Wight, was published on board the SS
Saint Paul before its arrival.
Transatlantic transmissions ) used to lift the antenna at
St. John's, Newfoundland, December 1901. of Milan. At the turn of the 20th century, Marconi began investigating a means to signal across the Atlantic to compete with the
transatlantic telegraph cables. Marconi established a wireless transmitting station at Marconi House,
Rosslare Strand,
County Wexford, in 1901 to act as a link between
Poldhu in
Cornwall, England, and
Clifden in
Connemara,
County Galway, Ireland. He soon made the announcement that the message was received at
Signal Hill in
St. John's,
Newfoundland (now part of
Canada), on 12 December 1901, using a kite-supported antenna for reception – signals transmitted by the company's new high-power station at
Poldhu, Cornwall. The distance between the two points was about . It was heralded as a great scientific advance, yet there also was – and continues to be – considerable scepticism about this claim. The exact wavelength used is not known, but it is fairly reliably determined to have been in the neighbourhood of 350 metres (frequency ≈ 850 kHz). The tests took place at a time of day during which the entire transatlantic path was in daylight. It is now known (although Marconi did not know then) that this was the worst possible choice. At this medium wavelength, long-distance transmission in the daytime is not possible because of the heavy absorption of the skywave in the ionosphere. It was not a blind test; Marconi knew in advance to listen for a repetitive signal of three clicks, signifying the Morse code letter
S. The clicks were reported to have been heard faintly and sporadically. There was no independent confirmation of the reported reception, and the transmissions were difficult to distinguish from atmospheric noise. A detailed technical review of Marconi's early transatlantic work appears in John S. Belrose's work of 1995. The Poldhu transmitter was a two-stage circuit. for
Vanity Fair, 1905. Feeling challenged by sceptics, Marconi prepared a better-organised and documented test. In February 1902, the SS
Philadelphia sailed west from Great Britain with Marconi aboard, carefully recording signals sent daily from the Poldhu station. The test results produced
coherer-tape reception up to , and audio reception up to . The maximum distances were achieved at night, and these tests were the first to show that radio signals for
medium wave and
longwave transmissions travel much farther at night than during the day. During the daytime, signals had been received up to only about , less than half of the distance claimed earlier at Newfoundland, where the transmissions had also taken place during the day. Because of this, Marconi had not fully confirmed the Newfoundland claims, although he did prove that radio signals could be sent for hundreds of kilometres (miles), despite some scientists' belief that they were limited essentially to line-of-sight distances. On 17 December 1902, a transmission from the Marconi station in
Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the world's first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America. In 1901, Marconi built a station near
South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, that sent a message of greetings on 18 January 1903 from United States President
Theodore Roosevelt to King
Edward VII of the United Kingdom. However, consistent transatlantic signalling was difficult to establish. Marconi began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic to communicate with ships at sea, in competition with other inventors. In 1904, he established a commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers. A regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service was finally begun on 17 October 1907 between
Clifden, Ireland, and
Glace Bay, but even after this the company struggled for many years to provide reliable communication to others.
Titanic The role played by Marconi Co. wireless in maritime rescues raised public awareness of the value of radio and brought fame to Marconi, particularly the sinking of
RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912 and
RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915.
RMS Titanic radio operators
Jack Phillips and
Harold Bride were not employed by the
White Star Line but by the
Marconi International Marine Communication Company. After the sinking of the ocean liner, survivors were rescued by the
RMS Carpathia of the
Cunard Line. There was a distance of 93 km (58 miles) between the two ships. When
Carpathia docked in New York, Marconi went aboard with a reporter from
The New York Times to talk with Bride, the surviving operator. On 18 June 1912, Marconi gave evidence to the Court of Inquiry into the loss of
Titanic regarding the marine telegraphy's functions and the procedures for emergencies at sea. Britain's
Postmaster-General summed up, referring to the
Titanic disaster: "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi ... and his marvellous invention." Marconi was offered free passage on
Titanic before she sank, but had taken
Lusitania three days earlier. As his daughter Degna later explained, he had paperwork to do and preferred the public stenographer aboard that vessel.
Sir J. C. Bose's diode detector and Marconi's first transatlantic wireless signal In Guglielmo Marconi's historic transatlantic wireless communication experiment on 12 December 1901, the inaugural signal—consisting of the
Morse code letter "S"—was received at
Signal Hill in
St. John's, Newfoundland, employing a mercury coherer detector connected to a telephone receiver. This self-restoring detector, essential for signal detection without mechanical decohering, was devised by Sir
Jagadish Chandra Bose, a professor at
Presidency College, Calcutta. Bose initially described this iron-mercury-iron or iron-mercury-carbon contact apparatus in a paper submitted to the
Royal Society on 27 April 1899, acknowledged as the earliest patented solid-state diode detector (British Patent No. 7555, 1901; U.S. Patent 755840, 1904). The exhaustive inquiry into this invention and its application in Marconi's experiment is documented in a 1998 paper by Probir K. Bondyopadhyay, published by the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Marconi procured the detector during the summer of 1901 from Lieutenant Luigi Solari of the
Royal Italian Navy, who adapted Bose's configuration by encapsulating a mercury droplet between carbon or iron electrodes within a glass tube. Marconi submitted a British patent application (No. 18105, September 1901) under his own name, subsequently revised to attribute the communication to Solari. The employment of this apparatus precipitated the "Italian Navy Coherer" scandal, initiated when Professor Angelo Banti, editor of ''L'Elettricista
, asserted in May 1902 that naval signalman Paolo Castelli was its originator. This contention engendered discussions in British periodicals, such as The Electrician
and Saturday Review''. Solari repudiated Castelli's attribution, indicating that his inspiration derived from English scholarly sources, presumably Bose's 1899 publication. In 1903, Emilio Guarini proposed that Professor Tommaso Tommasina of
Genoa held precedence, referencing his experiments from 1899 to 1900. Nevertheless, Marconi's lecture at the
Royal Institution on 13 June 1902 delineated Tommasina's contributions as separate, and Solari affirmed unawareness of Tommasina's research until subsequent to the address. The affair, meticulously analyzed in Bondyopadhyay's 1998 IEEE paper, illuminates intricate matters of attribution and innovation within the emergent domain of radio communication.
Continuing work Over the years, the Marconi companies gained a reputation for being technically conservative, in particular by continuing to use inefficient spark-transmitter technology, which could be used only for radio-telegraph operations, long after it was apparent that the future of radio communication lay with
continuous-wave transmissions which were more efficient and could be used for audio transmissions. Somewhat belatedly, the company did begin significant work with continuous-wave equipment beginning in 1915, after the introduction of the oscillating vacuum tube (valve). The
New Street Works factory in
Chelmsford was the location for the first entertainment radio
broadcasts in the
United Kingdom in 1920, employing a vacuum tube transmitter and featuring
Dame Nellie Melba. In 1922, regular entertainment broadcasts commenced from the
Marconi Research Centre at
Great Baddow, forming the prelude to the
BBC, and he spoke of the close association of aviation and wireless telephony in that same year at a private gathering with
Florence Tyzack Parbury, and even spoke of interplanetary wireless communication. In 1924, the Marconi Company co-established the
Unione Radiofonica Italiana (now
RAI). == Politics and military service ==