In 1924 he convinced the British government to girdle the world with a chain of wireless stations using the latest technology that he had devised, shortwave radio. In 1901 he succeeded in signalling across the Atlantic, from the west coast of England to Newfoundland, despite the claims of science that it could not be done. Some like to refer to him as a genius, but if there was any genius to Marconi it was this vision. Marconi was really interested in only one thing: the extension of mobile, personal, long-distance communication to the ends of the earth (and beyond, if we can believe some reports). He was also a skilled and sophisticated organizer, an entrepreneurial innovator, who mastered the use of corporate strategy, media relations, government lobbying, international diplomacy, patents, and litigation. Marconi was the first to develop and perfect a practical system for wireless, using the recently-discovered “air waves” that make up the electromagnetic spectrum.īetween 1896, when he applied for his first patent in England at the age of 22, and his death in Italy in 1937, Marconi was at the center of every major innovation in electronic communication. What made the link from then to now was the development of wireless communication. The telegraph, the telephone, and radio were the obvious precursors of the Internet, iPods, and mobile phones. Today’s globally networked media and communication system has its origins in the 19 th century, when, for the first time, messages were sent electronically across great distances. Marconi may not have been the greatest inventor of his time, but more than anyone else, he brought about a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Not only was he the first to communicate globally, he was the first to think globally about communication. Guglielmo Marconi was arguably the first truly global figure in modern communication. Contact: A hundred years before iconic figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs permeated our lives, 60 years before Marshall McLuhan proclaimed media to be “the extensions of man,” an Irish-Italian inventor laid the foundation of the communication explosion of the 21 st century.
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