Few business leaders in the 3G industry will likely take the time this week to note the centennial of the first wireless trans-Atlantic transmission, but celebrations are planned in Newfoundland and in Cornwall, United Kingdom, from where the first signals — the hissing dit-dit-dit of a Morse Code "S" — were transmitted. The signals were received Dec. 11, 1901, at Marconi's station on Signal Hill, St. John's, but the need to verify reception pushed the internationally recognized date of transmission to Dec. 12.

In the United States, the IEEE Communications Society kicked off its recognition of the event with a special retrospective of Marconi's life in a Nov. 28 seminar at the IEEE Globecom conference in San Antonio, Texas.

A day earlier, conference keynote speaker Steve Grady, vice president and regional marketing officer for Marconi USA, had stressed the relevance of Marconi's business career to entrepreneurial engineers.

Unlike Oxford University's Oliver Lodge — the scientist largely credited with proving the first radio transmission over a distance longer than 100 meters — Marconi was as much a businessman as an engineer. Indeed, Marconi distinguished himself from other followers of Heinrich Hertz by continuously scouting business applications for radio systems.

Grady told the IEEE audience that Marconi's ability to strike the right alliances with financiers, government officials and the media was as important as his research extensions to the work of Hertz and Lodge. "At the end of the day, applying the technology means finding a broad base of utility, first for government and military users and later for the public at large," he said.

Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy, on April 25, 1874, the second son of wealthy landowner Giuseppe Marconi and whiskey distillery heir Annie Jameson. In 1895, he surpassed the Lodge's original Oxford experiments, achieving 2-kilometer transmission, and asked his family to provide seed financing for promoting applications in England and France.

During two trips to England in 1896, Marconi met with radio researcher A.A. Campbell-Swindon, filed for his first British patent in wireless telegraphy and publicly demonstrated the technology even before incorporating a company.

When Wireless Telegraph and Signal Co. was incorporated in Great Britain in July 1897, Marconi bowed to the inevitable by presuming in advance that the British Post Office and Royal Navy would demand control over his critical patents. At the same time, he showed business acumen by retaining rights to wireless patents in Italy.

Marconi received a mix of government and private financing in Britain to establish coastal stations on the Isle of Wight and at Bournemouth in mid-1898. Late that year, as government leader William Ewart Gladstone lay dying in Bournemouth, a snowstorm took out the local wireline telegraph. Marconi demonstrated his media savvy by allowing journalists to transmit the news of Gladstone's illness via wireless. He also showed his commitment to moving to volume wireless production by establishing a radio system factory in Essex.

Marconi spent 1899 attempting to sell France and United States on the value of long-range wireless systems. A station was set up in France with the help of French financiers, and by midyear successful transmissions were made across the English Channel. In the United States, Marconi met with less success among his government contacts: Initial Navy experiments involving U.S. warships experienced self-jamming problems, and the government elected to stick with homing pigeons for intership communications.

But Marconi was undeterred. He incorporated Wireless Telegraph Co. USA, which later became RCA.

"We see an inventor 100 years ago realizing something many entrepreneurs don't understand today: You must pursue multiple regional markets, and multiple application bases, simultaneously," Grady said. "If you wait for one application to succeed or fail before examining another, you could lose your advantage."

By the spring of 1900, Marconi had solved the jamming problem through a new method of syntonic tuning, for which the inventor received his famous "Four Sevens" patent (No. 7777). The U.S. Navy expressed mild interest in conducting new experiments, but by this time, the government of Canada was even more anxious to invest in Marconi's experiments.The inventor already had shifted his focus from Cape Cod, Mass., to Newfoundland for trans-Atlantic experiments, since landfall of the transmitted radio waves would occur sooner there — and the Canadian government was only too happy to oblige.

At the turn of the century, physicists such as Lord John William Rayleigh were highly skeptical that radio waves could bend around the surface of the earth, since light showed no such propensity, and all electromagnetic radiation was believed to follow the same principles. It was not until decades after Marconi's experiment that Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Edwin Kennelly described the properties of the upper atmosphere that allowed the forward-scattering of radio waves that made transoceanic transmissions possible.

Indeed, Marconi in 1895 placed his transmitter near his house and a receiver three kilometers away, behind a hill, to prove that a signal could travel distances and overcome objects.

Through the summer of 1901, Marconi's team assembled an "elephant cage" suite of masts in Newfoundland and Cornwall, rapidly spending the bulk of the 50,000 pounds Marconi had cobbled together for initial financing. In Sept 1901, storms in Cornwall toppled the original array. Rather than postpone experiments, Marconi set up a series of temporary antennas, held aloft by balloons and kites, while permanent wooden towers were constructed as replacements.

Hence the controversy over whether signals were received. It seems safe to say the signals were received on Dec. 11, but a balloon holding up one aerial on Signal Hill in Newfoundland was blown down, so the experiment was not verified until Dec. 12, 1901. Approval for permanent stations in Cornwall, Cape Cod and Newfoundland's Glace Bay rapidly followed.

In its early days, the Marconi family of companies preserved its lead through a unique arrangement for shipboard communications under which Marconi personnel were required to run the wireless sets. The early years were crucial in assuring that Marconi's companies would be strong enough to withstand the later transfer of patents to U.K.-based Cable & Wireless.

Today, Marconi's name lives on through the rechristening of General Electric Co. plc (a unit of Marconi that became GEC in 1897) as Marconi plc in 1999. While Marconi may be struggling as desperately as other telecom OEM giants, the wireless experiments a century ago spawned a multibillion-dollar global industry.

Stations KPH and K6KPH will be on the air Dec. 12 to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first wireless signal to cross the Atlantic. Both stations will use the original transmitters, receivers and antennas of famous ex-RCA coast station KPH. More information can be found at www.alpcom.it/hamradio/100.htm. Additional information about wireless radio and the Marconi celebration can be found at www.alpcom.it/hamradio/ and www.falara.org/OpEvents/Marconi/links.html.