Twenty-two-year-old Guglielmo Marconi, having failed to interest the Italian government in his wireless experiments, traveled to London and filed patent application number 12,039, describing a system for transmitting signals through the air without wires. It became the foundational patent of the radio age, and within months Marconi was demonstrating transmissions across Salisbury Plain to skeptical British postal officials.
Marconi had built his first wireless apparatus in the attic of his family's villa near Bologna, cobbling together a spark-gap transmitter and a coherer receiver based on the theoretical work of Heinrich Hertz and the practical experiments of others. When he rang a bell wirelessly across the length of his family's estate and, satisfied, tried to interest the Italian Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, officials reportedly dismissed him as a crank chasing an impossible idea.
His Irish mother, Annie Jameson, had connections in England, and the family decided London offered better prospects. Marconi arrived in February 1896 with equipment reportedly damaged by suspicious customs officials who assumed the strange boxes might be a bomb. Undeterred, he rebuilt his apparatus and, on June 2, filed for patent protection covering his complete system, receivers, transmitters, and the method of tuning them together.
The patent, granted the following year as British Patent No. 12,039, gave Marconi commercial leverage he used aggressively, founding the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company within months. Within a decade, wireless telegraphy would save lives at sea, most famously during the Titanic disaster of 1912, and lay the groundwork for the entire broadcast radio industry that followed. Marconi, only in his early twenties when he filed, would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909.
Key people: Guglielmo Marconi