Guglielmo Marconi/Talk

With most major technological devices, the claim that "person A invented device B" is usually at least an oversimplification, and radio is no exception. What we call "radio" today bears little resemblance to the devices that came out in Marconi's time. As far back as Faraday and Hertz in the early 1800s, it was clear to most scientists that wireless communication was possible, and many people worked on developing many devices and improvements. The first wireless telegraphy devices started appearing in the 1860s. Edison, for example, patented one in 1885 for use by trains. Marconi's patent in 1896 was not a particularly remarkable development at the time (it primarily made use of the "coherer" invented by Branly in 1892), though his later contributions were significant improvements. Marconi and Braun shared the 1909 Nobel for "contributions to the development of vireless telegraphy". The first human voice ever transmitted wirelessly was by Canadian-American scientist Reginald Aubrey Fessenden.

A good source is the book Syntony and Spark: the Origins of Radio, Hugh G. J. Aitken, ISBN 0471018163 (amazon.com, search). --Lee Daniel Crocker

I removed a comment here that replaced the common misattribution of Marconi with the misattribution of Tesla, which was no improvement (see Lee Daniel Crocker/The Myth of the Lone Inventor. Also, the common word for someone who receives a prize is "recipient" rather than "receiver", but for some reason I hesitated before replacing it in this case... :-)