The tragedy of the RMS Titanic that fateful night of April 14, 1912 could have claimed all 2,205 passengers. The Californian, a passenger ship within sight, but ten miles away when the Titanic struck the iceberg, missed the distress flares of the Titanic, nor was its new wireless radio turned on. The passenger ship Carpathia, 58 miles from the doomed Titanic, did hear the wireless distress call got there in time to rescue 705 survivors adrift in lifeboats.

Communication by wireless had just emerged because Guglielmo Marconi discovered an application for Hertzian waves. The commercial intent was profit from transmission and receipt of messages. The Titanic was equipped with a wireless system to derive revenue from passenger “MarconiGrams.” The tragedy of the Titanic brought wireless to everyone’s attention and spurred the growth of the radio, communications, and electronics industries that today are said to provide the greatest number of jobs in the history of civilization.

Guglielmo Marconi did not “invent” radio — Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Righi, and Tesla had something to do with it. Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1874. His father was a wealthy Italian businessman and his Irish mother came from a wealthy distilling family. As a child, he pursued his interest in science, particularly electricity. Marconi learned about electromagnetism and the mathematical work of Maxwell; about experiments with electromagnetism by Hertz, the work of Lodge in England, of Slaby in Germany, of Branly in France, plus the induction coils of Faraday, the spark gap of Righi, and the telegraph cable system of Morse. He set up a laboratory in his home and began to send wireless signals over short distances with his first success in 1894. He went on to develop wireless telegraphy in 1896 and the amplifying valve in 1906, both based on the modulation of a signal over a carrier wave.