Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), Italian inventor. Marconi is 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 began experimenting with radio signals in his early 20s, coming to Britain in 1896 and forming the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company (later Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company) in 1897. He established the first wireless communication across the English Channel in 1899, and across the Atlantic in 1901. 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.