Shipping became one of the early adopters of Marconi’s wireless system.

People used these machines to messages using a system of dots and dashes to represent individual letters. After a series of ever greater demonstrations, the first wireless transmission systems were born. With little encouragement from the Italian government, Marconi moved to London. But, he needed funding and support to continue his work. An interesting factoid that gets less attention than Marconi himself is that his butler, a man called Mignani, helped to build the first wireless machines.Īfter some initial success, Marconi had a working device that could send and send messages for up to 2 miles.

Twenty years old, and with a thirst for knowledge, Marconi began building his own equipment and conducting experiments. Read more: Remember The Maine, To Hell With Spain! The butler did it That didn’t stop him from experimenting with radio waves as a basis for a wireless telegraphy system. He never formally attended any college of higher education. (Photo: Wikimedia)Ī series of private tutors educated Marconi at home. On the right is his receiver, consisting of a coherer which rings a bell when it receives the dots and dashes of Morse code The bell and batteries are in the box. On the left is his spark gap transmitter, consisting of a dipole antenna made of two brass rods with a spark gap between them, which transmits pulses of radio waves spelling out text messages in Morse code. Publicity photo in a magazine of British-Italian radio entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi with his early wireless radiotelegraphy transmitter and receiver, invented around 1895.

Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian aristocrat with an interest in science, was one of the most prominent researchers in this field. In the late 19th century, there was a lot of interest in the idea of wireless telegraphy-the concept of transmitting signals without wires. To understand how the term SOS came into common use, we have to go back in time and look at morse code. These are bacronyms, that is, acronyms applied after the fact, and they have taken on popular value. The commonly held belief that SOS stands for Save Our Souls or Save Our Ship is untrue. But what does SOS stand for? Interestingly, it doesn’t actually mean anything. SOS is known, the world over, as a standard distress signal.

What does sos mean