International Marconi Day will take place this year on 27th of April when amateur radio stations will operate from various locations around the world with historical connections to Marconi.
Amateur radios, point-to-point contacts, high-frequency wave transfers, a mysterious yet attractive prize for the most connected stations. All of this sounds like the beginning of a quirky yet adorable B-movie. In reality, it is the essence of International Marconi Day, a 24-hour amateur radio event which celebrates the career of Italian wireless communications pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The event takes place annually on the Saturday closest to his birthday (April 25, 1874).
To commemorate the Nobel laureate’s achievements, fans use HF radio to make direct point-to-point contact between stations, relying on the same technology Marconi developed and utilized in his time. Although nowadays the Internet is the medium of choice for global communications, the idea behind International Marconi Day is to keep the spirit of invention alive. The event also provides an exciting throwback to the days when a connected planet Earth was but a bold dream and only a few exceptional people, such as Marconi, saw the value in it.
Marconi proved the feasibility of radio communication. He sent and received his first radio signal in Italy in 1895. By 1899 he flashed the first wireless signal across the English Channel and two years later received the letter "S", telegraphed from England to Newfoundland. This was the first successful transatlantic radiotelegraph message in 1902.
The debate about who invented radio remains interesting - this is from Wiki:
"The invention of radio communication, although generally attributed to Guglielmo Marconi in the 1890s, spanned many decades, from theoretical underpinnings, through proof of the phenomenon's existence, development of technical means, to its final use in signalling.
The idea that the wires needed for electrical telegraphy could be eliminated, creating a wireless telegraph, had been around for a while before radio based communication. Inventors attempted to build systems based on electric conduction, electromagnetic induction, or on their own theoretical ideas. Several inventors/experimenters came across radio waves before they were proven to exist but it was written off as electromagnetic induction at the time.
The discovery of electromagnetic waves, including radio waves, by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz in the 1880s came about after over a half century theoretical development on the connection between electricity and magnetism starting in the early 1800s and culminated in a theory of electromagnetism developed by James Clerk Maxwell by 1873, which Hertz finally proved.
The development of radio waves into a communication medium did not follow immediately afterwards. After their discovery Hertz considered them of little practical value and other experimenters who explored the physical properties of the new phenomenon, such as Oliver Lodgeand Jagadish Chandra Bose, while transmitting radio waves some distance, did not seem to see any value in developing a communication system based on them. In their experiments they did develop electronic components and methods to improve the transmission and detection of electromagnetic waves.
In the mid 1890s, building on techniques physicists were using to study electromagnetic waves, Guglielmo Marconi developed the first apparatus for long distance radio communication. On 23 December 1900, the Canadian inventor Reginald A. Fessenden became the first person to send audio (wireless telephony) by means of electromagnetic waves, successfully transmitting over a distance of about 1.6 kilometers, and six years later on Christmas Eve 1906 he became the first person to make a public radio broadcast.
By 1910 these various wireless systems had come to be referred to by the common name "radio"."
I should add that Nikola Tesla gave a public demonstration of the wireless transmission of energy on March 1, 1893. He had created an induction coil to transmit and receive radio signals. Years later while he was preparing to transmit signals at a distance, so was another inventor: Guglielmo Marconi. Tesla died in 1943 and six months after his death the US Supreme Court ruled that all of Marconi's radio patents were invalid and awarded the patents for radio to Tesla.
(Mike Terry via WOR io group)