Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquess (25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937), was an Italian radio-frequency engineer, inventor, and politician known for his creation of a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system. This led to his being largely credited as the inventor of radio and sharing the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."
His work laid the foundation for the development of radio, television, and all modern wireless communication systems.
As an entrepreneur and a businessman, Marconi founded The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company (later the Marconi Company) in the United Kingdom in 1897. In 1929, he was ennobled as a marquess (Italian: marchese) by King Victor Emmanuel III. In 1931, he set up Vatican Radio for Pope Pius XI.
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi was born on 25 April 1874 at Palazzo Dall'Armi Marescalchi in Bologna, Italy, the son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian aristocratic landowner from Porretta Terme who lived in the countryside of Pontecchio, and his second wife, Annie Jameson, the granddaughter of Jameson Irish Whiskey founder John Jameson.
Giuseppe, who was a widower with a son, Luigi, married Annie on 16 April 1864 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Alfonso, Marconi's older brother, was born the following year.
Between the ages of two and six Guglielmo lived with Alfonso and their mother in Bedford, England. Having an Irish mother helped explain his many activities in Great Britain and Ireland.
On 4 May 1877, when Marconi was age 3, his father decided to obtain British citizenship; Marconi could have thus also opted for British citizenship at any time, since both his parents were British citizens.
Marconi did not receive any formal education during his youth. Instead, he learned chemistry, mathematics, and physics at home from a series of private tutors hired by his parents; his family hired additional tutors for him in the winter when they would leave Bologna for the warmer climate of Tuscany or Florence. An important mentor was Vincenzo Rosa, a high school physics teacher in Livorno. Rosa taught the 17-year-old Marconi the basics of physical phenomena as well as new theories on electricity.
At the age of 18, Marconi returned to Bologna and became acquainted with Augusto Righi, a physics professor at the University of Bologna, who had done research on Heinrich Hertz's work. Righi permitted Marconi to attend lectures at the university and also to use the university's laboratory and library.
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.
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. Supported by his father, Marconi continued to read through the literature and picked up on the ideas of physicists who were experimenting with radio waves. He developed devices, such as portable transmitters and receiver systems, that could work over long distances, turning what was essentially a laboratory experiment into a useful communication system. 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.