Marconi in December 1901 at Signal Hill, St. John's, Newfoundland, with instruments used to receive the first Transatlantic wireless signals. Guglielmo Marconi (April 25, 1874 - July 20 1937) was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun. As an entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of the The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in Britain in 1897, Marconi succeeded in making a commercial success of radio by innovating and building on the work of previous experimenters and physicists. In 1924, he was ennobled as Marchese Marconi. Marconi joined the Italian Fascist party in 1923. In 1930, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini appointed him President of the Royal Academy of Italy, which made Marconi a member of the Fascist Grand Council. He died in 1937 at age 63, following a series of heart attacks. As a tribute, all radio stations throughout the world observed two minutes of silence on the next day.