Radio

The whole telecommunications started with click-click-click

Guglielmo Marconi (Bologna, April 25, 1874 – Rome, July 20, 1937)

Guglielmo Marconi was born in 1874 to an Italian landowner and Annie Jameson, a daughter of the wealthy Jameson whiskey dynasty from Dublin.

In the years 1886-1888, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz was the first to succeed in generating radio waves and determining their length and speed. He also showed that lights are radio waves of the same nature and have the same speed, which is 300,000 kilometers per hour.

As soon as young Marconi became acquainted with Hertz's work in the spring of 1894, he began experimenting on his father's estate. Wireless telegraphy, sending the existing Morse codes wirelessly, that was his goal. It started with a distance of 10 meters.

Soon it was 1 kilometer.

His older brother Alfonso helped him signal the reception, first with a white flag, later, in the mountains, with gunshots. Neither his father nor the Italian government showed any interest in his work. His mother was his biggest fan. She contacted a British patent office and the chief engineer of the British Post Office. British patent 12,039 of June 2, 1896 on 'a system for the transmission of electrical impulses and signals' concealed a true revolution.

The prehistoric age of radio and telephone history has seen dozens of pioneers – including the famous Nicola Tesla – but there is no doubt that Marconi was the first to bring together the right, practical elements.

For example, he connected his antenna to the earth, making the earth part of the antenna, as it were. He kept up speed in his research. His mother's financial backing was equally important.

As early as July 1896, he sent a one-mile radio signal across central London; 2 miles on Salisbury Hill in September; in May 1897 across the Bristol Channel, a 15 km wide estuary; in December from the Isle of Wight to a ship in the English Channel.

Marconi's noble birth opened many doors and he spoke perfect English.

When the Prince of Wales was ill on the royal yacht off the coast in the summer of 1898, Marconi arranged for Queen Victoria to be kept informed of his condition daily at her villa Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

For sixteen days; 150 telegrams ran in both directions, at an average speed of 15 words per minute.

Marconi was now, at 24, the center of attention of the entire Western world. Nevertheless, no one could believe that he conceived the plan to bridge the Atlantic Ocean, 3500 kilometers. Straight ahead, the signals had to pass through a wall of water 100 miles high.

Otherwise they just disappeared into the universe. How could Marconi succeed?

Marconi built a huge transmitter in Poldhu, Cornwall: 'A beast of a thing.' And in late 1901, he traveled with his perpetual assistant George Kemp to St. John's, New Foundland, Canada. The receiving station was extremely primitive and the weather conditions
today in that December were extremely bad. From noon to 3 p.m. Poldhu continuously broadcast three dots, the three dots of the Morse letter 'S'. No dashes – that would make it too complicated – and no snoopers, because Marconi wasn't sure if this would work.

Although radio waves propagate in a straight line, they still bend with the curvature of the Earth as an ionized layer in the atmosphere bounces them off, something Marconi didn't know beforehand.

And the experiment worked. At 12:30 pm Marconi was sure he heard the three clicks. According to his own story, he then gave Kemp his headphones and said, "Can you hear anything, Kemp?" Kemp confirmed the weak but clear signal.

And Marconi noted, "Signals at 12:30, 1:10, and 2:20." It was a historic moment. Everything called telecommunications comes from that 'click-click-click'.

Marconi's equipment broadcast on what we know today as the medium wave. According to experts, Marconi's stunt could only have been successful at night.

Under the influence of the sun, the height of the ionosphere, the layer around the earth that conducts the waves, falls, after sunset the ionosphere rises, so that greater distances are reached with the medium wave.
Had Marconi and his assistant Kemp imagined the clicks? Did they just make those clicks up? Because Marconi needed this success to raise capital for his company.

However, it is also possible that short waves – spanning very long distances – had also unintentionally departed from Poldhu. This part of the spectrum was still unknown territory in 1901.

Either way, inventing it was child's play compared to the work required to make the system work effectively and quell any resistance.

In 1909, the self-taught scientist became the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. By 1920, the Marconi Company had radioed the entire British Empire. In 1923 Marconi himself returned to Italy where, to Mussolini's delight, he joined the fascists.

In 1930 Mussolini appointed him president of the Italian Royal Academy. A year later, Marconi himself built the Vatican's radio station, Radio Vaticana.

His marriage broke down and his heart was struggling. He was banned from the BBC in 1936 because of his fascist sympathies, ironically for the inventor of radio communication. When he died of a heart condition in 1937, Mussolini gave him a state funeral.

Radio stations around the world held a two-minute silence.

(See also: electromagnetic fields)