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For the inventor of radio, see the competing claims in history of radio and the invention of radio
Guglielmo Marconi, Marchese, GCVO (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". Later in life, Marconi was an active Italian Fascist[1] and an apologist for their ideology (such as the attack by Italian forces in Ethiopia).
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 young child Marconi didn't do very well in school. Baptized as a Catholic, he was brought up Protestant by his mother and was a member of the Anglican Church. He formally converted to Catholicism after his second marriage.
During his early years, Marconi had an interest in science and electricity. One of 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 became to find a way to use radio waves to create a practical system of "wireless telegraphy"—i.e. the transmission of telegraph messages without the need for the connecting wires used by the electric telegraph. This was not a new idea—numerous investigators had been exploring various wireless telegraph technologies for over 50 years, but none had yet 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.[2] Marconi's system had the following components:[3]
Similar configurations using spark-gap transmitters plus coherer-receivers had been tried by other experimenters, 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. [4][5]
At first, Marconi could only signal over limited distances. However, 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 position the antenna so that it was allowed to touch the ground, the transmission range increased significantly.[6] (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.[7]) Soon he was able to transmit signals, over the crest of a hill, to 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 even greater distances, and thus would prove valuable both commercially and for military use.
Finding limited interest in his work in his native Italy, in early 1896, at the age of 21, Marconi traveled to London, England, accompanied by his mother to seek someone who could support his findings. (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 possesses at this time is strikingly similar to that of the one in 1882 by A. E. Dolbear, of Tufts College, which used a spark coil generator and a carbon granular rectifier for reception.[8][9] 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". [10]
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 in May, 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". [11]
<div style="font-size:115%"></div> 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 122-metre (400-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). Although widely heralded as a great scientific advance, there was also some skepticism about this claim, in part because the signals had only been heard faintly and sporadically. In addition, there was no independent confirmation of the reported reception, and the transmission, which merely consisted of the three dots of the Morse code letter S sent repeatedly, came from a transmitter whose signals were difficult to differentiate from the noise made by atmospheric static discharges. (A detailed technical review of Marconi's early transatlantic work appears in John S. Belrose's work of 1995.)[12] The Poldhu transmitter was a two-stage circuit.[13][14] The first-stage possessed lower voltage and provided the energy for the second stage in resonance. Nikola Tesla, a rival in transalantic transmission, stated after being told of Marconi's reported transmission that "Marconi [... was] using seventeen of my patents."[15][16]
Feeling challenged by skeptics, Marconi prepared a better organized and documented test. In February, 1902, the S.S. 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 thus these tests were the first to show that, for mediumwave and longwave transmissions, radio signals travel much farther at night than during the day. During the daytime, signals had only been received up to about 1,125 kilometres (700 miles), which was 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 successfully prove that radio signals could be sent for hundreds of kilometres, in spite of the fact that some scientists had believed 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 in an eastward direction. 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 turned out to be very difficult to establish.
Marconi hereabout began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in order 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 ocean-going 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 on-board 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.[17] 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.[18]
<div class="noprint">Main articles: invention of radio and history of radio.</div>
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 what had been utilized by many other experimenters, and in particular with that employed by Oliver Lodge in a series of widely reported demonstrations in 1894. Marconi's main claim for novelty was that through his work he had been able to signal for much greater distances than anyone else had achieved when using the spark-gap and coherer combination. The Fascist regime in Italy credited Marconi with the first improvised arrangement in the development of radio.[19] There was controversy, though, whether his contribution were of a sufficient enough breakthrough to deserve patent protection, or if his devices were too close to the original ones developed by Hertz, Branley, Tesla, and Lodge to be patentable.
Moreover, 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 given geographical area without causing mutually disruptive interference. (Continuous-wave transmitters were naturally more selective, thus 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 mixed 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 proven prior work conducted by others, such as by Nikola Tesla, Oliver Lodge, and John Stone Stone, from which some of Marconi patents (such as ) 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."[20] 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 litigations, but by careful study of the merits of their respective contentions and proofs."[21] 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."[22]
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 various observers to posit that the government nullified Marconi's other patents in order to moot any 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.
<div style="font-size:115%"> </div> Over the years, the Marconi companies began to gain a reputation for being technically conservative, in particular by continuing to use relatively inefficient spark-transmitter technology, which could only be used for radiotelegraph operations, long after it was becoming apparent that the future of radio communication lay with continuous-wave transmissions, which were more efficient and could also be used to make audio transmissions. Somewhat belatedly, the company did begin to do 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 transmitted in the United Kingdom—one of these featured Dame Nellie Melba. In 1922, regular entertainment broadcasts commenced from the Marconi Research Centre at Writtle near Chelmsford. When the British Broadcasting Company was formed in 1922, the Marconi company was a prominent participant.
In 1914 Marconi was both made a Senatore in the Italian Senate, and appointed Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in the United Kingdom. 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. <div style="font-size:115%"> </div> Marconi joined the Italian Fascist party in 1923. In 1930, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini appointed him to be the President of the Accademia d'Italia, which also 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, being notorious enough for the BBC to ban him from talking about 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.[23] Following his death in 1937 at age 63, Italy held a state funeral commemorating Marconi's life. As a tribute, many radio stations throughout the world observed two minutes of silence.
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General:Invention of radio, List of people on stamps of Ireland, Jagdish Chandra Bose
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vs Tesla