Irish-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi ushered in a new era of global communications, sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean on this day in history, Dec. 12, 1901.
The message was merely the letter “s” in Morse code (dot-dot-dot). But it proved after years of advances by Marconi that radio could make the world a smaller place.
The wireless signal traveled 2,000 miles from a transmitting station in Poldhu, Cornwall, in the far southwestern corner of England, to a receiving station in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
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“Today, our world of smartphones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, satellite TV and radio, Global Positioning Systems and wireless computer networking was largely imagined by and based on Marconi’s electrical experiments,” says the Pioneer Institute, in independent think tank.
“He was the first person to systematically use radio waves to communicate over long distances, develop wireless telegraphy, and is considered the ‘father of radio.’”
Guglielmo Marconi with his electrical wireless apparatus. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Marconi’s invention proved its value during one of the great disasters in human history.
“His radio apparatus is widely considered to be the reason that over 700 people survived the Titanic disaster in 1912, instead of dying as they likely would have if ships at sea were still using carrier pigeons to communicate over great distances,” writes the Federal Communications Commission.
“His radio apparatus is widely considered to be the reason that over 700 people survived the Titanic disaster in 1912.”
A Marconi wireless telegraph machine was installed on the doomed Titanic just weeks before it set sail.
Operators began frantically transmitting distress signals via radio to several nearby ships, similarly equipped, at 12:15 a.m. on the morning of April 15.
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