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Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor. He was born in 1874 and his mother was Irish. She was actually the granddaughter of the founder of a famous whiskey distillery. Between the ages of 2 and 6, Marconi lived with his mother in Bedford in England. The rest of his time was spent in Bologna in Italy.

Marconi didn't go to school but was home schooled by tutors hired by his parents. Neither did he go to university but a man called Augusto Righi, a physics professor who Marconi got to know, allowed him to attend some lectures and use the library and laboratories at the University of Bologna, where Righi worked.

Marconi had always loved science and he became really interested in the idea of wireless telegraphy. This is quite simply what it says; the sending of messages without connecting wires. It wasn't a new idea but nobody had made it work successfully. At the time telegraph messages were sent using Morse code, more a bit later. The disadvantage of Morse code was that the sender of the message and the receiver had to be connected by wires.

As I've said a few times before this is not a science website, helped by the fact that I'm not very good at science. However, in very simple terms so I can understand my own writing, scientists had been working on developing something known as radio waves. Scientists imagined radio waves as an invisible form of light that could travel as far as you could see. Marconi had other ideas.

From about 1894 he developed some very simple experiments where he was able to transmit radio waves over short distances. He used an antenna to receive these messages but half a mile seemed to be the maximum range. The next bit makes total sense to my non-scientific brain. Marconi discovered that the higher the receiving antenna, the further the distance he could send messages. Everything else he did was way beyond my intelligence but this bit seems a bit obvious.

Marconi wanted to develop the idea further but was getting no help from Italy so he came to England in 1896 accompanied by his mother. He found more support here and in June 1896 took out a patent for his invention. A patent is a licence giving someone the right to an invention. He was able to demonstrate his invention and what it could do to many people in the UK.

Things then progressed rapidly. Lighthouses and lightships began to use wireless telegraphy and on 27th March 1899 Marconi sent a message across the English channel. This was the first international radio transmission.

Marconi now moved on to even greater distances. On 12 December 1901 he stood on a hill in Newfoundland on the east coast of Canada. Back in England, on another hill at Poldhu Cove in Cornwall, a man named Thomas Barron sent a radio signal. The signal was the Morse Code for the letter “S”. Marconi claimed he heard this signal but, as with so many things, some people weren't sure. He knew in advance what signal Barron was sending and there was no offical confirmation. However, if it was true, it was the first time a radio message had been sent over the horizon and was the start of radio, TV and many other forms of communication that remained in force until satellites took over. The distance was about 2,200 miles. The picture on the right shows Marconi's listening station on Newfoundland.

Soon more wireless messages were being used, particularly at sea. It was even said that all those aboard the Titanic who were saved, owed their lives to Marconi's invention as the wireless operators had been able to transmit the position of the ship when she hit the iceberg.

As I said earlier, before the work done by Marconi, Morse code had been transmitted along wires to send messages. The morse code was named after Samuel Morse, although it was a man called Alfred Vail who developed it. It consisted of long sounds, represented by dashes, and short sounds, represented by dots. The full morse code is shown below. The most famous message in morse is S.O.S, which is, as you can see, dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot.

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