Thank Marconi for Radio!

Do you remember the song "We Built This City (on Rock & Roll)" by Starship?

One of the lines in the song goes like this:

Marconi played the mamba

Listen to the radio

Do you know who Marconi was or what he had to do with the radio?

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who lived from 1874 until 1937. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for his work in wireless telegraphy. Before Marconi, we had telegraphs, but they could only be used with a network of cables and wires. Marconi proved that it was possible to not only transmit information via wireless radio waves, but he was the first person to send such signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Other scientists believed, correctly, that wireless radio waves would be lost after travelling approximately 200 miles, because the would continue to travel in a straight line, rather than follow the earth's curvature; however, after much experimentation, Marconi was able to bounce signals off the Earth's ionosphere to reach a receiver in Newfoundland, Canada.

Marconi's wireless system was widely used on ships to maintain contact with the mainland. One of those ships was the RMS Titanic. The radio controllers aboard the Titanic who sent out the distress signal were employed by Marconi's company, Marconi International Marine Communication Company. Only one survived the sinking. Despite his injuries, he helped the radio controllers aboard the rescue ship, RMS Carpathia, to send wireless messages to New York regarding survivors, and to send messages from survivors to loved ones. Marconi's invention saved the lives of 706 passengers that night. Without it, more than 2,223 lives would have been lost.

Think about that the next time you turn on the radio!

September 21, 1866

Science fiction pioneer HG Wells was born today in 1866. Wells wrote such classics as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds, all of which later became classic films as well.

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles directed an narrated War of the Worlds as a radio play on the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS). The play was presented as a series of "news bulletins" and without commericial interruptions. It was intended as a spooky Halloween show. Unfortunately, many Americans had missed the beginning of the show and did not realize that it was a Halloween prank. This resulted in mass hysteria across America by people who believed that space aliens were invading the planet.