Physicist, Inventor, Radio Pioneer
Born: April 25, 1874, in Bologna, Italy
Died: July 20, 1937, in Rome Italy
Lived In: Hoboken and Wall Township, New Jersey
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2009: Enterprise

A Nobel Prize winner and prolific inventor, Guglielmo Marconi helped change the way the world communicates, doing much of his groundbreaking work at several locations in New Jersey.

The son of an aristocratic Italian father and an Irish mother, Marconi was raised mostly in Italy but spent several years of his childhood in England. Home-schooled by private tutors, he developed a fascination with chemistry, mathematics, and physics.
By the age of 20, Marconi was experimenting with radio waves in the attic of his family’s home in Bologna, Italy. Building on the achievements of his fellow physicists, Marconi developed portable transmitters and receivers that could work over greater distances than achieved by others experimenting in the field.

Marconi was 21 when he moved his experiments to London, where he felt he could gain greater attention and support. By 1896, he received his first patent for a communication system based on radio waves. Still, there was the issue of distance. Marconi’s initial radio apparatus could transmit a signal for only about a half mile. In a series of experiments on land and at sea, Marconi elevated his transmitting equipment on land-based towers and ships’ masts and gradually increased his signals to as much as 75 miles.
In 1899, Marconi sailed to America and created a sensation by using radio transmissions to cover the America’s Cup yacht races off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. He created an even greater sensation starting in 1901 with the first transatlantic radio transmissions, proving that radio waves could be received over long distances despite the curvature of the earth. Soon ships were adapting Marconi’s wireless technology for passenger and emergency transmissions; in 1912, such transmissions enabled the rescue of hundreds of lives in the sinking of the Titanic.

In the early part of the 20th century, Marconi pursued many experiments in radio technology at locations in New jersey, including Highlands and New Brunswick. In 1914, he established the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company in Wall Township, where he built a lab a laboratory and his home.

During World War I, Marconi joined the Italian Army (on the Allied side) and was put in charge of the Italian military’s radio service. After the war, he attended the peace conference in Paris and, according to Britannica.com, was among the signers of peace treaties with Austria and Bulgaria. By the 1920s, the first entertainment radio broadcasts were introduced from a Marconi facility in England, marking the advent of mass media.

Among many other honors, Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909 for the development of wireless telegraphy. His ties to New Jersey date to 1899, when he established the Marconi Wireless Company of America in Roselle Park.