Guglielmo Marconi, Italian Inventor

Caricature of Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) holding a pure electric current pie. The text at top right reads: The Marconi pie, made wholly of electric currents, is said to be nourishing, and the pocket telephone, by means of which a man in New York can ring up a friend in San Francicso, is likely to work a revolution in telephony. The illustrations show The Crowless Rooster, Jim Jam Less Jam, Wireless and Springless Bed, and two people talking across the Atlantic Ocean, one of whom is saying, Say, John, How About That Peaceless Peace of Yours in South Africa? Marconi was an Italian physicist, Nobel laureate and developer of wireless telegraphy. He came from a wealthy family, and was privately tutored. In 1894 he read about the radio waves of Hertz, and set about applying this theory to sending signals. Making his own instruments, Marconi managed to send messages in morse code over increasingly longer distances. He moved to England in 1898, by then sending signals over 20 miles. In 1901 he reached his crowning achievement, by sending a radio message across the Atlantic Ocean. For this he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, and was given the title Marchese by the Italian Government. He is shown here on his floating laboratory, the yacht Elettra, aboard which his short-wave experiments became the basis of the beam wireless system in 1922

Picture No

10799331

Media ID

47599010

Size

2550px x 3106px (2.1MB)

Credit

©Photo Researchers / Mary Evans Picture Library

Source

Photo Researchers