Marconi and Braun - The 1909- Nobel Prize Winners

Guglielmo Marconi and Ferdinand Braun 1909 Winners

"in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy"






Biography: Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi was born at Bologna, Italy, on April 25, 1874, the second son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian country gentleman, and Annie Jameson, daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in the County Wexford, Ireland. He was educated privately at Bologna, Florence and Leghorn. Even as a boy he took a keen interest in physical and electrical science and studied the works of Maxwell, Hertz, Righi, Lodge and others. In 1895 he began laboratory experiments at his father's country estate at Pontecchio where he succeeded in sending wireless signals over a distance of one and a half miles.[[ continue reading ]]

Biography: Karl Ferdinand Braun

Karl Ferdinand Braun was born on June 6, 1850 at Fulda, where he was educated at the local "Gymnasium" (grammar school). He studied at the Universities of Marburg and Berlin and graduated in 1872 with a paper on the oscillations of elastic strings. He worked as assistant to Professor Quincke at Würzburg University and in 1874 accepted a teaching appointment to the St. Thomas Gymnasium in Leipzig. Two years later he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Marburg, and in 1880 he was invited to fill a similar post at Strasbourg University. Braun was made Professor of Physics at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe in 1883 and was finally invited by the University of Tübingen in 1885; one of his tasks there was to build a new Physics Institute. Ten years later, in 1895, he returned to Strasbourg as Principal of the Physics Institute, where he remained, in spite of an invitation from Leipzig University to succeed G. Wiedemann.[[ continue reading ]]

Legacy: Wireless Telegraphy


Muirhead Morse inker Apparatus similar to that used by Marconi in 1897.

Wireless telegraphy is a historical term used today to apply to early radio telegraph communications techniques and practices, particularly those used during the first three decades of radio (1887 to 1920) before the term radio came into use.
Wireless telegraphy originated as a term to describe electrical signaling without the electric wires to connect the end points. The intent was to distinguish it from the conventional electric telegraph signaling of the day that required wire connection between the end points. The term was initially applied to a variety of competing technologies to communicate messages encoded as symbols, without wires, around the turn of the 20th century, but radio emerged as the most significant.

References :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_telegraphy

http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/radio.htm

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/489241/radiotelegraphy