British customs destroyed Marconi's first radio gear, fearing it was a bomb
In early 1896 a 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi landed at Dover with a case of strange apparatus. Amid British fears of Italian anarchists, officials suspected a bomb and had his equipment destroyed. He stayed anyway, founded a wireless company in London the following year, and shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Marconi was born in Bologna in 1874 to an Italian landowner and Annie Jameson, a granddaughter of the founder of Jameson Irish whiskey. He spent part of his early childhood in Bedford, England, and never attended school in the ordinary way, learning science from private tutors. At 18 he befriended Augusto Righi, a Bologna physics professor who had studied Heinrich Hertz's experiments and who let the young man use the university's laboratory and library.
Hertz had shown in 1888 that electromagnetic waves could be generated and detected, but physicists treated them as invisible light, limited to line of sight and of no practical interest. After reading Righi's tribute to Hertz, the 20-year-old Marconi set up a laboratory in a former silkworm room in the attic of the family villa at Pontecchio, helped by the butler. His first gadget was a storm alarm that rang a bell when it caught the radio pulses from lightning. In December 1894 he woke his mother to show her a button on one side of the room ringing a bell on the other.
Outdoors on his father's estate the next summer, his signals stalled at about 800 metres, the limit Oliver Lodge had predicted. The breakthrough was raising the antenna and grounding both transmitter and receiver, a trick borrowed from wired telegraphy, which pushed signals roughly 2 kilometres and over a hill. His letter asking Italy's postal ministry for funding went unanswered; a popular story that the minister scrawled a reference to a Rome insane asylum on it has never been proved.
On the advice of Italy's ambassador in London, he patented before revealing details, and Britain proved a better place to raise money. The business became the Marconi Company. Later he was made a marquess by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1929, and in 1931 he built Vatican Radio for Pope Pius XI.
Source: Guglielmo Marconi
