Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy, to an Italian landowner and an Irish-Scottish mother. Educated mostly at home, he read about Heinrich Hertz's experiments with electromagnetic waves and began trying to send signals without wires at his family's estate. By 1895 he could send signals over a hill more than a mile away. Finding little interest in Italy, he went to England, patented his system in 1896, and founded a wireless company. He steadily increased the range, sending signals across the English Channel in 1899, and on 12 December 1901 at St. John's, Newfoundland, he reported receiving the letter S in Morse code sent from Cornwall across the Atlantic. Ships began carrying Marconi wireless sets, and in 1912 the operators on the sinking Titanic used one to call for help, bringing the ship Carpathia to rescue the survivors. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 with Karl Ferdinand Braun. In later life he supported Mussolini's government in Italy. He died in Rome in 1937.

Faith: Baptized Catholic but brought up Anglican; later he was confirmed in the Catholic faith and became a devout member. Source: Wikipedia