Italy Honors the Inventor of Radio

Today, when we accept the wonders of radio as a commonplace, it is difficult to realize that this marvelous invention is less than 50 years old. Yet it was in 1896, only 42 years ago, that a pale young Italian in Bologna, Italy, announced to an incredulous world that he had succeeded in telegraphing without the use of wires!

When this resourceful man died at Rome on July 20 last summer, so far had radio outgrown the original conception of its inventor that few newspapers gave more than a brief obituary notice to the passing of Guglielmo Marconi. It remains for Italy, his native land, to pay a fitting tribute to Marconi by issuing a special series of three commemorative stamps bearing his portrait. The values are 20c red, 50c purple, and 1.25L blue.

It has often been said that Marconi was not the true inventor of wireless telegraphy — that he merely exploited the previous inventions of more able scientists than himself. Stamp collectors will recall that in 1925 Soviet Russia issued a stamp portraying Professor A. S. Popoff with the inscription “Inventor of Radio.” Years before Marconi’s invention the great electrical wizard, Thomas Edison, had taken out patents for wireless communication, and its possibilities had already so been predicted by the Jugoslavian-American scientist, Nikola Tesla, whose portrait appeared two years ago on a Jugoslavian postage stamp. Why then is Marconi rightfully honored as radio’s inventor?

The answer is that Marconi was the first to combine the crude apparatus of his day into a wholly original device that gave really practical results. It is true that other scientists before him had made ingenious designs on paper and had even succeeded in hearing wireless signals for short distances in their own laboratories, but none of them had made wireless work effectively for more than a few dozen yards at the most. Marconi alone had the genius, the perseverance, and the financial backing to make this visionary dream a reality.

Guglielmo Marconi was born at Bologna, Italy, on April 25, 1874, son of an Italian father and an Irish mother. He was deeply interested in electricity from boyhood and the idea of wireless first came to him in 1894 while reading the work of the German physicist, Heinrich Hertz. Hertz had been the first scientist to realize the existence of the electro-magnetic, or “Hertzian,” waves that make radio communication possible. He had noticed in his laboratory that when a spark leaped the gap between two small metal balls connected to an induction coil, a similar spark could be observed in a small metal ring on the other side of the room. Since there were no wires or other contact between the small ring and the spark gap, it was obvious that the electrical current had actually travelled through the intervening space. Without knowing it, Hertz had been on the threshold of discovering radio!