Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy on April 25, 1874 of an Italian father and a Scottish-Irish mother. Both parents were affluent and had good business sense. He was educated at the University of Bologna and was interested in the work of Helmholtz, Hertz and in Benjamin Franklin's experiments with lightning. He studied Physics under Professor Auguste Righi at Bologna, an experimenter of electromagnetic waves. Marconi thought of the analogy between striking a bell with a hammer to producing an electromagnetic wave with a spark.

Marconi experimented with extending the range of wireless communications by improving the transmitter, receiver and antenna. Perhaps his most important advance was to connect one terminal of the arc transmitter to an aerial wire mounted on a pole and the other terminal to a metal earth plate. For the transmitter, his source was a battery, interrupted by a telegraph key and connected by a transformer to a spark gap consisting of brass balls of Righi's design.

For the receiver, Marconi erected an antenna at the receiving end and connected the antenna by wire to a "coherer" which was then connected to earth. The coherer grew out of observations first made by Calzecchi Onesti of Italy and studied by Professor Edouard Branly in Paris that conduction of electric discharge through metallic filings in a small glass tube could be halted if the tube were mechanically shocked by a hammer. The blow decohered the metal particles, stopping current from a local battery. Marconi improved the coherer and made it more sensitive by shortening the glass tube to a few inches and using a metallic mixture of 95% nickel and 5% silver. His receiver worked by causing a tapper like the one on an electric doorbell to hit against the glass tube, thus stopping the current. Each successive impulse reaching the antenna produced the same phenomena of coherence and decoherence, hence recording dots and dashes of Morse Code. In 1904, Sir John A. Fleming, a consultant to the Marconi Company, invented the diode as a detector of wireless signals.

In 1895, Marconi was able to communicate for a distance of a mile on his father's estate. In 1898, he established a link across the English Channel. And in 1901, he performed the remarkable feat of wireless communications across the Atlantic from Cornwall, England to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In April 1912, the Titanic, equipped with Marconi wireless, was warned by four other ships of the presence of icebergs in the North Atlantic. An SOS signal was sent but the Titanic sank in three hours while rescue by the Carpathia took over four hours.

Dr. Mahlon Loomis in America in 1865, described a wireless communication scheme and coined the term "ether", and Edison observed in 1875 in his Newark laboratory the generation of sparks from electrical gaps, and actually took out a patent on a wireless telegraphy. Tesla had demonstrated the principle of tuning in 1891. The wireless, however, is called Marconi wireless.