Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi (1874-1937, right) was an Italian inventor best known for his development of a wireless telegraph system, for which he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun. He established the first wireless communication across the English Channel in 1899, and across the Atlantic in 1901. Steinmetz (1865-1923) was a German-American mathematician and electrical engineer who derived theories to describe alternating current. He was a dwarf and a hunchback. This portrait is from the Bain News Service, one of America's oldest news picture agencies, which holds images dating from the 1890s to the 1930s.