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For the inventor of radio, see the competing claims in history of radio and the invention of radio.
| Guglielmo Marconi | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | April 25 1874 Palazzo Marescalchi, Bologna, Italy |
| Died | July 20 1937 (aged 63) |
| Known for | Radio |
| Notable awards |  Nobel Prize for Physics (1909) |
| Religious stance | Roman Catholic |
Marchese Guglielmo Marconi [guʎ\'ʎe:lmo mar\'ko:ni] (25 April 1874 - 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor, 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".Nobelprize.org, "Guglielmo Marconi: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1909" Later in life, Marconi was an active Italian FascistPhysicsworld.com, "Guglielmo Marconi: radio star", 2001 and an apologist for their ideology (such as the attack by Italian forces in Ethiopia).
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Marconi was born near Bologna, Italy, the second son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian landowner, and his Irish wife, Annie Jameson, granddaughter of the founder of the Jameson Whiskey distillery. Marconi was educated in Bologna, Florence and, later, in Livorno. As a child Marconi didn\'t do well in school.Robert McHenry, "Guglielmo Marconi," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1993. Baptized as a Catholic, he was a member of the Anglican Church.
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 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.Williams, H. S., & Williams, E. H. (1910). Every-day science. New York: Goodhue Company. Page 54. Marconi\'s system had the following components:Marconi delineated his 1895 apparatus in his Nobel Award speech. See: Marconi, "Wireless Telegraphic Communication: Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1909." Nobel Lectures. Physics 1901-1921. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1967: 196-222. Page 198.
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 metres. This was not the case for all researchers in the field of the wireless arts, though. In the beginning of 1894, Nikola Tesla was transmitting to a distance of 50 miles from New York City to West Point. See the PBS website, "Marconi and Tesla: Who invented radio?" (ed. this is noted as having been accomplished in Leland\'s book concerning Tesla\'s "Work with Alternating Currents")Leland I. Anderson, Priority in the Invention of Radio — Tesla vs. Marconi, Antique Wireless Association monograph, 1980, examining the 1943 decision by the US Supreme Court holding the key Marconi patent invalid (9 pages). (21st Century Books)
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. This fact was known to many as, in 1893, Tesla stated in the widely known "On Light and Other High Frequency Phenomena" speech which was delivered before the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, in February, and before the National Electric Light Association, St. Louis, in March, that "One of the terminals of the source would be connected to Earth [as a electric ground connection ...] the other to an insulated body of large surface". (Although Marconi may not have understood until later the reason, the "ground connections" allowed the earth to act as a waveguide resonator for the surface wave signal.Marconi did acknowledge this later in his Nobel Award speech. See: Marconi, "Wireless Telegraphic Communication: Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1909." Nobel Lectures. Physics 1901-1921. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1967: 196-222. Page 206.) Soon he was able to transmit signals over a hill, a distance of approximately 1.5 kilometres (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. The apparatus that Marconi possessed at that time was strikingly similar to that of one in 1882 by A. E. Dolbear, of Tufts College, which used a spark coil generator and a carbon granular rectifier for reception.Alfred Thomas Story, The Story of Wireless Telegraphy. 1904. Page 58.John J. O\'Neill, Prodigal Genius:The Life of Nikola Tesla. Ives Washburn, New York, 1944 A series of demonstrations for the British government followed—by March, 1897, Marconi had transmitted Morse code signals over a distance of about 6 kilometres (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 14 kilometres (8.7 miles). The message read "Are you ready". BBC Wales, "Marconi\'s Waves"
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.
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 Lloyds between Ballycastle and Rathlin Island, Ireland, was conducted on 6 July, 1898. The English channel was crossed on 27 March 1899, from Wimereux, France to South Foreland Lighthouse, England, and in the fall of 1899, the first demonstrations in the United States took place, with the reporting of the America\'s Cup international yacht races at New York. According to the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute by the United States Naval Institute, the Marconi instruments were tested around 1899 and the tests concerning his wireless system found that the "[...] coherer, principle of which was discovered some twenty years ago, [was] the only electrical instrument or device contained in the apparatus that is at all new". United States Naval Institute, Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute. The Institute, 1899. Page 857.
| “ | See if you can hear anything, Mr. Kemp!Page, Walter Hines, and Arthur Wilson Page, The World\'s Work. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1908. Page 9625 | ” |
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 152.4 m (500 foot) kite-supported antenna for reception, the message was received at Signal Hill in St John\'s, Newfoundland (now part of Canada) signals transmitted by the company\'s new high-power station at Poldhu, Cornwall. The distance between the two points was about 3,500 kilometres (2,100 miles). Heralded as a great scientific advance, there was -- and continues to be -- some skepticism about this claim, partly because the signals had been heard faintly and sporadically. There was no independent confirmation of the reported reception, and the transmission, consisting of the Morse code letter S sent repeatedly were difficult to discern from atmospheric noise. (A detailed technical review of Marconi\'s early transatlantic work appears in John S. Belrose\'s work of 1995.)Fessenden and Marconi: Their Differing Technologies and Transatlantic Experiments During the First Decade of this Century The Poldhu transmitter was a two-stage circuit. "Marconi and the History of Radio".John S. Belrose, "Fessenden and Marconi: Their Differing Technologies and Transatlantic Experiments During the First Decade of this Century". International Conference on 100 Years of Radio -- 5-7 September 1995. The first stage operated at lower voltage and provided the energy for the second stage to spark at a higher voltage. Nikola Tesla, a rival in transalantic transmission, stated after being told of Marconi\'s reported transmission that "Marconi [... was] using seventeen of my patents."Margaret Cheney, Tesla, Man Out of Time, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, Tesla: Master of Lightning, Barnes&Noble, 1999.
Feeling challenged by skeptics, Marconi prepared a better organized 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 2,496 kilometres (1,551 miles), and audio reception up to 3,378 kilometres (2,099 miles). Interestingly, the maximum distances were achieved at night, and these tests were the first to show that for mediumwave and longwave transmissions, radio signals travel much farther at night than in the day. During the daytime, signals had only been received up to about 1,125 kilometres (700 miles), 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, despite some scientists\'s belief they were essentially limited to line-of-sight distances.
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 from North America. 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. 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 a commercial service was established to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers. A regular transatlantic radiotelegraph service was finally announced in 1907, but even after this the company struggled for many years to provide reliable communication.
The two radio operators aboard the Titanic were not employed by the White Star Line but by the Marconi International Marine Communication Company. Following the sinking of the ocean liner, survivors were rescued by the Carpathia. When it docked in New York, Marconi went aboard with a reporter from the New York Times.John P. Eaton & Charles A. Haas Titanic - Triumph and Tragedy, A Chronicle in Words and Pictures. 1994 On 18 June 1912, Marconi gave evidence to the Court of Inquiry into the loss of the Titanic regarding the marine telegraphy\'s functions and the procedures for emergencies at sea.Court of Inquiry Loss of the S.S. Titanic 1912
Marconi\'s work built upon the discoveries of numerous other scientists and experimenters. His original "two-circuit" equipment, consisting of a spark-gap transmitter plus a coherer-receiver, was similar to those used by other experimenters, and in particular to that employed by Oliver Lodge in a series of widely reported demonstrations in 1894. There were claims that Marconi was able to signal for greater distances than anyone else when using the spark-gap and coherer combination, but these have been disputed (notably by Tesla).
Marconi’s late-1895 transmission of signals was for around a mile. This was small compared to Tesla\'s early-1895 transmissions of up to 50 miles. For more see "Nikola Tesla On His Work with Alternating Currents and Their Application to Wireless Telegraphy, Telephony, and Transmission of Power", Leland I. Anderson, Twenty First Century Books, 2002, pp. 26-27.
In 1900 Alexander Stepanovich Popov stated to the Congress of Russian Electrical Engineers that: "[...] the emission and reception of signals by Marconi by means of electric oscillations [was] nothing new. In America, the famous engineer Nikola Tesla carried the same experiments in 1893.""The Guglielmo Marconi Case; Who is the True Inventor of Radio".
The Fascist regime in Italy credited Marconi with the first improvised arrangement in the development of radio. Gianni Isola, "Italian radio: History and Historiography"; Special Issue: Italian Media Since World War II. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, August, 1995 There was controversy whether his contribution was sufficient to deserve patent protection, or if his devices were too close to the original ones developed by Hertz, Popov, Branley, Tesla, and Lodge to be patentable.
While Marconi did pioneering demonstrations for the time, his equipment was limited by being essentially untuned, which greatly restricted the number of spark-gap radio transmitters which could operate simultaneously in a geographical area without causing mutually disruptive interference. (Continuous-wave transmitters were naturally more selective and less prone to this deficiency). Marconi addressed this defect with a patent application for a much more sophisticated "four-circuit" design, which featured two tuned-circuits at both the transmitting and receiving antennas. This was issued as British patent number 7,777 on 26 April 1900. However, this patent came after significant earlier work had been done on electrical tuning by Nikola Tesla. (As a defensive move, in 1911 the Marconi Company purchased the Lodge-Muirhead Syndicate, whose primary asset was Oliver Lodge\'s 1897 tuning patent.) Thus, the "four-sevens" patent and its equivalents in other countries was the subject of numerous legal challenges, with rulings which varied by jurisdiction, from full validation of Marconi\'s tuning patent to complete nullification.
In 1943, a lawsuit regarding Marconi\'s numerous other radio patents was resolved in the United States. The court decision was based on the prior work conducted by others, including Nikola Tesla, Oliver Lodge, and John Stone Stone, from which some of Marconi patents (such as U.S. Patent 763,772) stemmed. The U. S. Supreme Court stated that,
The Tesla patent No. 645,576, applied for September 2, 1897 and allowed March 20, 1900, disclosed a four-circuit system, having two circuits each at transmitter and receiver, and recommended that all four circuits be tuned to the same frequency. [... He] recognized that his apparatus could, without change, be used for wireless communication, which is dependent upon the transmission of electrical energy.U.S. Supreme Court, "Marconi Wireless Telegraph co. of America v. United States". 320 U.S. 1. Nos. 369, 373. Argued April 9-12, 1943. Decided June 21, 1943.
In making their decision, the court noted,
Marconi\'s reputation as the man who first achieved successful radio transmission rests on his original patent, which became reissue No. 11,913, and which is not here [320 U.S. 1, 38] in question. That reputation, however well-deserved, does not entitle him to a patent for every later improvement which he claims in the radio field. Patent cases, like others, must be decided not by weighing the reputations of the litigants, but by careful study of the merits of their respective contentions and proofs."Wireless Telegraph co. of America v. United States.
The court also stated that,
It is well established that as between two inventors priority of invention will be awarded to the one who by satisfying proof can show that he first conceived of the invention."Wireless Telegraph co. of America v. United States.
The case was resolved in the U.S. Supreme Court by overturning most of Marconi\'s patents. At the time, the United States Army was involved in a patent infringement lawsuit with Marconi\'s company regarding radio, leading observers to posit that the government nullified Marconi\'s other patents to render moot claims for compensation (as, it is speculated, the government\'s initial reversal to grant Marconi the patent right in order to nullify any claims Tesla had for compensation). In contrast to the United States system, Mr. Justice Parker of the British High Court of Justice upheld Marconi\'s "four-sevens" tuning patent. These proceedings made up only a part of a long series of legal struggles, as major corporations jostled for advantage in a new and important industry.
| “ | Have I done the world good, or have I added a menace?William John Baker, "History Of The Marconi Company 1874-1965". 1996. 416 pages. Page 296 | ” |
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 only be used for radiotelegraph 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). In 1920, employing a vacuum tube transmitter, the Chelmsford Marconi factory was the location for the first entertainment radio broadcasts in the United Kingdom—one of these featured Dame Nellie Melba. In 1922 regular entertainment broadcasts commenced from the Marconi Research Centre at Writtle.
| “ | His Excellency the Senator Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, president of the Royal Academy of Italy, Member of the Fascist Grand Council | ” |
In 1914 Marconi was made a Senator in the Italian Senate and appointed Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in the UK. During World War I, Italy joined the Allied side of the conflict, and Marconi was placed in charge of the Italian military\'s radio service. In 1924, he was made a marchese by King Victor Emmanuel III.
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. Marconi also made speeches as an apologist for the actions of the fascist regime in Italy.
In 1935, Italian forces occupied the African nation of Ethiopia, resulting in near universal condemnation of Italy. Marconi made numerous radio speeches supporting the unprovoked attack, notorious enough that the BBC banned him from speaking on the subject. Marconi was pro-war in the era between the First and Second World War, and he was condemned for such beliefs by many.EPN, "The Unseen Marconi"
Marconi died in Rome in 1937 at age 63, and Italy held a state funeral for Marconi. As a tribute, all radio stations throughout the world observed two minutes of silence. His remains are housed in the Villa Griffone at Sasso Marconi, Emilia-Romagna, which assumed that name in his honour in 1938.
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vs Tesla
vs Popov
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Ernst Alexanderson | IRE Medal of Honor 1920 | Succeeded by Reginald Fessenden |
| Academic offices | ||
| Preceded by Jan Smuts | Rector of the University of St Andrews 1934 - 1937 | Succeeded by Robert MacGregor Mitchell |
| Nobel Laureates in Physics |
|---|
Wilhelm Röntgen (1901) · Hendrik Lorentz / Pieter Zeeman (1902) · Henri Becquerel / Pierre Curie / Marie Curie (1903) · Lord Rayleigh (1904) · Philipp Lenard (1905) · J. J. Thomson (1906) · Albert Michelson (1907) · Gabriel Lippmann (1908) · Guglielmo Marconi / Ferdinand Braun (1909) · Johannes van der Waals (1910) · Wilhelm Wien (1911) · Gustaf Dalén (1912) · Kamerlingh Onnes (1913) · Max von Laue (1914) · W. L. Bragg / W. H. Bragg (1915) · Charles Barkla (1917) · Max Planck (1918) · Johannes Stark (1919) · Charles Guillaume (1920) · Albert Einstein (1921) · Niels Bohr (1922) · Robert Millikan (1923) · Manne Siegbahn (1924) · James Franck / Gustav Hertz (1925) |
Complete roster | (1901-1925) | (1926-1950) | (1951-1975) | (1976-2000) | (2001-2025) |
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marconi, Guglielmo Marchese |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Electrical engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 25 1874 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Palazzo Marescalchi, Bologna, Italy |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 20 1937 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Rome, Italy |
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