How Radio Was Invented: An Outsider Beat the Experts. Then He Tried to Own the Airwaves.

In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi heard 3 faint clicks on a hill in Newfoundland, sent from England more than 2,000 miles away. The scientists of his day said that was impossible…and they were right about the physics.

So how did he hear it? And why did he spend the next 20 years trying to keep every other company out of the radio business?

This is how radio really got started, and what it cost the men who started it.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Three clicks on Signal Hill
01:28 Four men got there first
03:50 Marconi takes it outside
05:07 His own country passed
05:32 London, and a patent on other men’s parts
06:29 Ships, and the rule
07:29 Kites in a storm
09:13 Proof at sea
10:05 Why it only worked at night
10:40 A message to the President
12:13 What he lost in America
13:13 How radio really got started

SOURCES
IEEE Milestone, “Reception of Transatlantic Radio Signals, 1901”
https://ethw.org/Milestones:Reception_of_Transatlantic_Radio_Signals,_1901

IEEE Milestone, “Marconi’s Early Experiments in Wireless Telegraphy, 1895”
https://ethw.org/Milestones:Marconi’s_Early_Experiments_in_Wireless_Telegraphy,_1895

J. J. Fahie, A History of Wireless Telegraphy, 2nd ed., 1899, pp. 289–316 (David Hughes’s own account)
https://earlyradiohistory.us/1899fah.htm

Nikola Tesla, “On Light and Other High Frequency Phenomena,” lectures at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, and the National Electric Light Association, St. Louis, 1893 (in T. C. Martin, The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, 1894)

Edwin H. Armstrong, “Nikola Tesla, 1857–1943,” The Scientific Monthly, April 1943
https://www.rtm.njarc.org/resources/Armstrong%20on%20Tesla.pdf

Keith Geddes, Guglielmo Marconi 1874–1937, Science Museum, 1974
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Bookshelf/Biography/Guglielmo-Marconi-1874-1937-Geddes-1974.pdf

“The Italian Navy and Marconi’s Early Experiments,” Journal of Navigation (Cambridge University Press)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigation/article/abs/italian-navy-and-marconis-early-experiments/5B536F2B8DB0E7EB3939C902161197EC

Henry Herbert McClure, “Messages to Mid-Ocean: Marconi’s Own Story of His Latest Triumph,” McClure’s Magazine, April 1902
https://earlyradiohistory.us/1902phil.htm

Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador, “Marconi and the Anglo-American Telegraph Company”
https://www.heritage.nf.ca/society/marconi.html

Linwood S. Howeth, History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy, 1963, pp. 70–72 (the Deutschland incident and the 1903 Berlin conference)

New York Herald, July 14, 1904 (reprinted in the 1904 Inter-Departmental Wireless Telegraphy Board report)
https://www.earlyradiohistory.us/1904nan.htm

“Ignored by Marconi,” New York Times, October 28, 1904
https://www.earlyradiohistory.us/1904ignr.htm

International Radiotelegraph Convention, Berlin, November 3, 1906

Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (incorporated 1899; sold to GE/RCA 1919)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marconi_Wireless_Telegraph_Company_of_America

Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America v. United States, 320 U.S. 1 (1943)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/320/1

Edward V. Appleton, Nobel Lecture, “The Ionosphere,” December 12, 1947
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1947/appleton/lecture/

Clinton B. DeSoto, Two Hundred Meters and Down (ARRL, 1936)
https://hamradiolaunchpad.com/200-meters-down

IMAGE CREDITS
Historical photographs and film are in the public domain.
Annie Oakley Attribution: William Heise, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Map data: Natural Earth (public domain).
Additional footage licensed via Envato Elements.