Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi, (April 25, 1874 - 1937) was born in Bologna, Italy, the second son of an Italian landowner and an Irish mother. He was the founder of the Marconi corporation[?] and the joint 1909 recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics.

Although many scientists and inventors contributed to the invention of wireless telegraphy, including Ørsted, Faraday, Hertz, Tesla, Edison, and others, Marconi's was the first practical system to achieve widespread use, so he is often credited as the "father of radio".

Marconi was awarded what is sometimes recognised as the World's first patent for Radio with British Patent 12039, Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus there-for.

He made his first ever wireless transmission across water from Ballycastle (Northern Ireland) to Rathlin Island in 1898.

In July 1897, Marconi formed the London based Wireless Telegraph Trading Signal Company[?] (later renamed the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company), which opened the World's first "wireless" factory in Hall Street, Chelmsford, England in 1898, employing around 50 people.

He received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal on December 12, 1901 in St. John's, Newfoundland (now in Canada) using a 400-foot kite-supported antenna for reception. The transmitting station in Poldhu, Cornwall used a spark-gap transmitter to produce a signal with a frequency of approximately 500kHz and a power of 100 times more than any radio signal previously produced. The message received was three dots, the Morse code for the letter S. To reach Newfoundland the signal would have to bounce off the ionosphere twice.

Dr. Jack Belrose[?] has recently contested this, however, based on theoretical work as well as an actual reenactment of the experiment; he believes that Marconi heard only random atmospheric noise and mistook it for the signal. Marconi didn't achieve fully reliable transatlantic communication until 1907.

In 1922 the World's first regular wireless broadcasts for entertainment commenced from the Marconi Research Centre at Writtle near Chelmsford.

Away from his life in Radio, Marconi joined the Italain fascist party in 1923. Benito Mussolini made Marconi President of the Accademia d'Italia[?], which also made him a member of the Fascist Grand Council. He made fascist speeches on the Radio in a number of countries. In 1935, after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the BBC that he had helped found, banned him from broadcasting.