Gugliemo Marconi, Italian radio pioneer, c 1900.

Gugliemo Marconi (1874-1937) discovered a way in which waves could be used to send mesages from one place to another without wires or cables. Having read about Hertz's work with electromagnetic waves, he began to carry out his own experiments and in 1894 he succesfully sounded a buzzer 9 metres away from where he stood. Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel prize for physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850-1818).