Portrait of Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), Italian physicist, Nobel Laureate and developer of wireless telegraphy. Marconi came from a wealthy family, and was privately tutored. In 1894 he read about the radio waves of Hertz, and set about applying this theory to sending signals. Making his own instruments, Marconi managed to send messages in morse code over increasingly longer distances. He moved to England in 1898, by then sending signals over 20 miles. In 1901 he reached his crowning achievement, by sending a radio message across the Atlantic Ocean. For this he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, and was given the title Marchese by the Italian Government. He is shown here on his floating laboratory, the yacht Elettra, aboard which his short-wave experiments became the basis of the beam wireless system.