A lot is being said about the beginning of Cinema one hundred years ago but not a lot about the beginning of wireless telegraphy which led to radio broadcasting.
In June 1896 Guglielmo Marconi was granted a British patent for his system of transmitting telegraph signals without the use of wire.
James Clark Maxwell, a Scottish physicist predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves in 1864. Later Heinrich Hertz and Sir Oliver Lodge demonstrated the existence of these waves experimentally. However it was the Italian Guglielmo Marconi who was the first to put electromagnetic radiation to practical use.
Marconi was the son of a wealthy Italian business man and an Irish-Anglo mother whose family was the Jameson Distillers of Belfast. He learned about Faraday's theories, Maxwell's equations and Hertz's experiments while studying physics at Bologna University.
Although only a novice he realised the potential of what he was learning and worked on an idea that he had to send telegraph messages through the ether.
He improved Hertz's spark transmitter and loop aerial receiver. For a transmitter he used his professor's more powerful spark gap design which produced waves of higher frequency that could travel a greater distance. To this he attached a telegraph Morse key in order to make and break the power supplied to the transmitter. For a receiver he adapted a detector of electrical impulses invented by the French scientist Eduard Branley and improved by English scientist Oliver Lodge. This device was called a 'Coherer'.
The Coherer was a small glass tube with a metal rod inserted in each end. The rods were connected to the aerial and inside the tube between the rods was a small quantity of iron filings. When a current was induced in the aerial by an electromagnetic wave the filings in the tube would cling (cohere) to the rods and so complete the circuit. The small impulse then activated a 'Morse Inker', the machine used to record the dots and dashes sent by a wired telegraph on to a paper tape. When the wave stopped a small hammer outside the Coherer tapped the glass tube to loosen the filings and prepare it for the next wave.
The most remarkable discovery Marconi made was while experimenting on his father's estate. He absently placed one part of his aerial on the ground while holding the other part in the air and noted that there was a great improvement in reception. He then grounded both transmitter and receiving aerials and found he was able to send signals several miles across the estate and over hills.
Marconi worked on his system for the next two years when he then felt it was ready to be demonstrated publicly. The Italian government showed no interest so his mother took her son and his two trunks of equipment to Great Britain where using the influence of the Jameson name, she secured a hearing before Sir William Preece, then in charge of Post Office Technological Improvements.
Preece immediately saw the importance of Marconi's apparatus and in June 1896 Marconi took out a patent on his system of wireless telegraphy. With the help of the Jameson family money and connections he set up the Wireless Signal Telegraph Company which later became the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.
In just three years Marconi had taken his scientific experiments from the laboratory into the market place. On December 12th 1901 he succeeded in transmitting transatlantic signals. In 1909 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Marconi was not a pure scientist and discovered no secrets of the laws that govern the universe but he possessed the vision to harness the discoveries of others.