If there is a specific day on which Guglielmo Marconi’s star began to shine, that day is December 12, 1896. That day in London, at Toynbee Hall, the young Italian (he was just 22 years old) conquered an audience of experts and enthusiasts summoned by William Henry Preece, who was the chief engineer of the British post office.
The room was packed: there was something on the program a presentation entitled Telegraphy Without Wires: Marconi had arrived in London a few months earlier, he had left Italy disappointed by the fact that the Italian Post Minister, to whom he had written a letter explaining the important discovery he thought he had made, had not replied. Through his mother, who was Irish, he had presented the Italian ambassador in London and applied for a patent there, obtaining it immediately. In London it was all very fast. He met Preece, did some private demonstrations of the wireless telegraph and finally on December 12 the first public event: “Preece had sensed the value of the wireless telegraph to replace the system with wires used by the British Post Office. The room had been carefully prepared before. Marconi was at the transmitter, Preece carried around the box with the receiver demonstrating that there were no hidden wires, yet a receiver bell rang every time Marconi sent the signal ”. It was a triumph, the audience was amazed and in the following days the newspapers praised the young Italian.
For a strange fate, exactly five years later, on 12 December 1901, Marconi, now established and head of a company that bore his name, will send the first signal across the Atlantic Ocean, from Cornwall to Newfoundland, Canada. And then the Nobel Prize will come.
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