The discovery of wireless telegraphy

In today’s increasingly connected world, it’s hard to imagine a time when worldwide communication required serious effort. Some visionaries could imagine a future where near-instantaneous communication was possible, but for most of the world it was only a pipe dream.

One of those visionaries was Guglielmo Marconi.
Marconi was born to a life of privilege: his father was a wealthy Italian land owner and his mother was an heiress to the Jameson Whiskey fortune.

As a child, Marconi was interested in physics and math, and had an early start in communications science; at 21 at his father’s estate in Italy, he managed to send wireless telegraphy signals over two kilometres.

His work was inspired by Heinrich Hertz, who discovered wireless waves, James Clerk Maxwell, who first described electromagnetic waves, Oliver Lodge, a professor at Oxford University, and Augustus Righi, a physics professor at Bologna University and close family friend.

In 1896, Marconi and his mother moved from Italy to London where Marconi set up shop. Within a few months, he submitted his first patent on wireless transmission using Hertzian waves.

Almost instantly, Marconi became a celebrity and had the support of the public, the British and Italian Navies, the British General Post Office, and Queen Victoria. The public was enchanted by the idea of coded messages travelling through the air (what we call radio waves today) rather than through wires like traditional telegrams

Read the full story at:
http://thevarsity.ca/articles/29188