Marconigram

   , MARCONIGRAPH

   The great electrical engineer and inventor Marchese Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) gave the world wireless telegraphy, a form of communication of extreme usefulness. He was born of Italian-Irish parentage at Bologna and was educated privately. He exhibited an interest in electrical communication at an early age, and commenced experiments with telegraphic communication through space by means of electromagnetic waves. After the government of Italy refused his offer of the invention, he went to England and had it patented. He succeeded in establishing communication across the English Channel, and three years later he bridged the Atlantic, receiving signals at St. John's, Newfoundland, from a sending station in Cornwall, England, thus proving that the curvature of the earth was no obstacle to further communications. After demonstrating the value of telegraphic communication in warfare, Marconi turned his attention to developing the magnetic detector, the horizontal direction antenna, and the time-spark system for generating continuous waves. Many honors were bestowed on him, and in 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun. The English language is indebted to Marconi for the marconigram, a message transmitted by wireless telegraphy, and for the verb form marconigraphed.