On December 12th 1901, Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi was successful in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, refuting detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message, simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”, travelled more than 2,000 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada.

Born in Bologna, Italy, in 1874 to an Italian father and an Irish mother, Marconi studied physics and became fascinated in the transmission of radio waves after learning of the experiments of the German physicist Heinrich Hertz. He began his own experiments in Bologna beginning in 1894 and soon succeeded in sending a radio signal over a distance of 1.5 miles. Receiving little encouragement for his experiments in Italy, he went to England in 1896.
He formed a wireless telegraph company and…