Inventions & Inventors: Guglielmo Marconi

Italian physicist and inventor who is credited with the invention of radio or wireless telegraphy. Guglielmo Marconi was born in a wealthy family of Bologna. In 1895 he was able to transmit wireless telegraph signals to two kilometers, which is considered the birth of radio.
Son of an Italian father and Irish mother, he studied at Leghorn and later at the Universities of Bologna and Florence, where he became interested in experiments on the airwaves.

By 1894 he began to investigate the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves in his father's house in Bologna, gradually increasing the distance between transmitter and receiver from 30 cm up to hundreds of meters.
In 1895 he discovered that by placing a Hertz spark generator on top of a rod, the reception range could be increased to several kilometers. He built a small device, whose range was 2.5 km, consisting of a transmitter, a Hertz spark generator and a receiver based on the effect discovered by the French engineer Edouard Branly in 1890. After seeing not much response with the Italian authorities, Marconi decided to go to the UK. Soon after arriving in London he received the support of the chief engineer of the Post Office, and in July 1896 after a series of improvements, he manged to patented the invention, which caused a stir among scientists of the time.