Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna in 1874 to a wealthy Italian landowner and Annie Jameson, granddaughter of the founder of Jameson whiskey. Tutored at home and never at university, he set up a lab in 1894 in a family attic once used for silkworms, pairing a spark oscillator with Édouard Branly’s coherer, a tube of metal dust that conducts when radio waves hit it. In December 1894 he rang a bell across the room without wires. In 1895 he raised his antenna and grounded both ends, producing ground waves that followed the land, and his brother fired a rifle to confirm a signal about two kilometers away. Italy’s postal ministry never answered him, so in 1896 he went to London, where customs officers at Dover wrecked his equipment, and William Preece of the Post Office backed him.

His claimed transatlantic reception at Signal Hill, Newfoundland in December 1901 left no paper record and is doubted, but in February 1902 aboard the SS Philadelphia he printed messages on tape from over 1,500 miles away, signed by the captain. His company leased sets and operators, and Titanic’s Jack Phillips and Harold Bride were Marconi employees whose calls brought the Carpathia to rescue more than 700 people; he himself had skipped the voyage and sailed on the Lusitania. He joined the National Fascist Party in 1923, led the National Research Council and the Royal Academy of Italy, and sat on the Fascist Grand Council. Historian Annalisa Capristo found he marked Jewish candidates’ files with an E for ebreo, and none were admitted.

• He passed on free Titanic passage because he needed a public stenographer working on the Lusitania.
• The mercury iron coherer from the 1901 test is also claimed by Jagadish Chandra Bose and the Italian Navy.
• His company clung to spark transmitters long after continuous waves made voice broadcasting possible.
• He built Vatican Radio for Pope Pius XI in 1931 after converting to Catholicism and annulling his first marriage.
• Stations worldwide observed two minutes of radio silence when he died in 1937, and in 1943 the US Supreme Court struck down several of his patents.