April 25 is Guglielmo Marconi”s 149th birthday. We cannot imagine a world without the connection, convenience, and content that his inventions have put into the hands of billions of people around the world.
The Marconi Society wishes Signore Marconi a happy birthday with messages from some of the innovators who have taken his work further than he might have ever dreamed.
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Vinton Cerf
1998 Marconi Fellow, recognized for the technical achievements and ambassadorial leadership which have been such major factors in the creation and evolution of the Internet.
Dear Sig. Marconi,
It is 2023 and your dramatic demonstration of transatlantic radio transmission in 1901 has fulfilled the promise of global radio communication in ways that might surprise you. Whole industries have been created from commercial radio services to wireless, hand-held telephones and Earth orbiting satellites that connect every square inch of the Earth to every other square inch by way of a global “Internet.”
In our homes, businesses, cars and persons, we carry radio-based devices. We connect to the global Internet with local radios using “Wi-Fi” technology. Devices with computers in them (based on transistor technology invented in 1947) are also connected to the Internet with low power radio.
As I write this, rockets are taking radio to the Moon to support long-term human research and commercial sites there. We have been using a Deep Space Network system with antennas 70 m in size to communicate with spacecraft that are 14 billion miles away from earth and entering interstellar space. We are far from fully exploring all the implications of your pioneering work. We use radio to connect our watches (!) to our smartphones to the Internet to monitor our health. Our manufacturing facilities are using radio to connect equipment together with our computers to automate manufacturing. Robots are becoming increasingly common and for mobility, they use radio to communicate status and to receive instructions.
How I wish you could return to see what has been wrought from those early experiments at Villa Griffone!
Vint Cerf
Chairman, Marconi Society
Co-inventor of the Internet
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Marty Cooper
2013 Marconi Fellow, recognized for being a wireless visionary who reshaped the concept of mobile communication.
My Dear Signore Marconi,
Over 120 years have passed since your vision of wireless communication was proven and you successfully commercialized that vision. You started us on a path that has positively revolutionized the human experience. Science has expanded the capacity of the radio-frequency spectrum by a trillion times and is opening the door to further revolutions in education, health care, and the elimination of poverty. Congratulations and Happy Birthday!
Marty
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John Cioffi
2006 Marconi Fellow, recognized for pioneering research that helped create DSL (digital subscriber line) circuits bringing broadband Internet access to hundreds of millions of people.
Giovanni Corazza
Marconi Society Board Member and President, Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi
The wireless revolution started in the outskirts of Bologna, where a young inventor had the dream to realize non-line-of-sight connections through electromagnetic wave propagation. In 1895, Guglielmo Marconi succeeded in overcoming the Celestini’s Hill in front of Villa Griffone, a milestone that the IEEE has recognized as the start of a new era.
Since then, myriad applications for telecommunications, navigation, sensing, and control followed in a restless progression that will continue in the years to come for the pursuit of Marconi’s vision of a fully interconnected planet Earth.
John Cioffi and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza
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Whitfield Diffie
2000 Marconi Fellow, recognized for his invention of public-key cryptography to protect privacy on the Internet.
Radio created the modern field of cryptography. Radio bypassed all the information security techniques known at the turn of the 20th Century, except cryptography. The result was an explosive expansion of cryptography to meet the needs of radio. Eventually, the tubes that had made radio possible became the basis for cryptographic devices. Today there is a radio (built from transistors, the successors of tubes) in everyone’s pocket and we use transistor-based cryptography to protect their communications.
Whit
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Federico Faggin
1988 Marconi Fellow, recognized for his pioneering contributions to the implementation of the microprocessor, a principal building block of modern telecommunications.
I believe your confidence in the power of electromagnetic waves to be general carriers of information at all scales, combined with the information processing capabilities of microelectronics and software, have changed our world in ways that would make you most surprised and proud.
Best regards and wishes
Federico
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Leonard Kleinrock
1986 Marconi Fellow, recognized for his scholarly pioneering work in telecommunications particularly as applied to computer networks.
Dear Sig. Marconi,
You represent the essence of what drives an inventor and an innovator. As a young man you were fascinated with the magical world of invisible electricity. You combined that which makes great scientists, namely, the search for how things work and, importantly, why they work that way.
It was your curiosity and vision that led to your huge contributions to the wonders of radio waves and their applications. In your backyard you launched those waves using equipment that you yourself crafted. How magnificent! Those breakthroughs have brought us forward for over a century of innovation and impact.
Now, as we celebrate your 149th birthday, we can only imagine what follows over the next many decades. We live in the world of the Internet today, driven in so many ways by the wonders of your wireless legacy. We can look forward and imagine how wireless could assist us in producing a pervasive global nervous system in which the Internet and its progeny will be invisible in that they will disappear into the infrastructure.
Leonard Kleinrock
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Brad Parkinson
2016 Marconi Fellow, recognized for technical leadership in the design and development of the Global Positioning System.
Happy Birthday Inventor Marconi,
You would be gratified to see the fabulous advances in communication that you pioneered. We now have the ability to transmit and receive full three-dimensional images between virtually anyone, anywhere in the world. You pioneered radio navigation that is now advanced to a worldwide submeter level capability.
In your IEEE acceptance speech, you correctly anticipated that we could use radio waves to locate and sense the shape of distance objects. This has now progressed to the point we have several such affordable devices, called radars, on many of our new automobiles.
You did not experience a technology that we call artificial intelligence. This has now reached the point that machines can simulate people in all aspects that are virtually indiscernible from the real thing. So, looking to the future, predictions are hard. But the intersection of this new artificial intelligence and the ability to re-create completely realistic images of people at a distance probably has some very profound implications. I think it will be incumbent on all of us to try to avoid any dark underside of these developments and ensure they are used for positive purposes rather than to harm humankind.
Brad
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Arogyaswami Paulraj
2014 Marconi Fellow, recognized for his pioneering contributions to developing the theory and applications of MIMO antennas.
Dr. Marconi,
Happy Birthday!
Your inventive spirit, perseverance, and business leadership made wireless telegraphy a truly global service – bridging continents and connecting ships across the vast oceans. Later, these same skills helped you build a successful radio broadcasting service reaching millions of homes with news and entertainment. You pioneered global connectivity.
Wireless has evolved in amazing ways, and today it enables anytime / anywhere access to something called the internet, allowing billions of people to connect to services that would have seemed magical in your day. Indeed, wireless has become a key transformative infrastructure of the world today. But the revolution continues, and wireless will soon connect hundreds of billions of machines and sensors, creating a new magical world in the years to come.
Your legacy lives on!
Paul
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Eric Plum
2009 Paul Baran Young Scholar, recognized for his work in dynamic control of metamaterial optical properties.
Dear Inventor Marconi,
It is the year of 2023 and there are more radio transmitters than people. Your invention of wireless communication now enables my children to find out about everything they can think of within seconds. The world is undergoing another transformation, with machines now able to perform tasks perceived as creative, imaginative, and intelligent, from writing speeches, stories, and poems to creating realistic images of paintings, sculptures, people and events that never existed. The implications for society are immense and the power of radio makes these new tools available to all.
Eric Plum
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Dennis Roberson
Marconi Society Board
Senator Marconi,
Happy 149th Birthday! Thank you for the enormous gift you bestowed on our world through the creation of the field of wireless communications. Through your tireless efforts you continuously extended the reach of your creation.
Since your time, the forms of information communications have dramatically expanded, including communications between humans and machines that store and disseminate information including the instantaneous transmission of images and video information used for academic, commercial, government, and leisure applications.
The knowledge of the world has largely been captured in massive data warehouses and is wirelessly available to an ever-increasing percentage of the world’s population. Over the coming decade, wireless and computer technologies will lead to the widespread availability of driverless automobiles, virtual or augmented reality, remote medical services, worldwide educational opportunities and much more leading to an era of global digital inclusion. These applications will run on an integrated broadband terrestrial and satellite network that will be universally available at an affordable price. To some degree these capabilities will even be available on the moon and beyond.
Though you foresaw many of the applications of wireless technology, I am sure you would be amazed and very proud of how your creation has evolved and how it has improved the quality of life for the peoples of the world. We are deeply indebted to you for the foundational contributions you made to our modern world.
Dennis Roberson
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Andrew J. Viterbi
1990 Marconi Fellow, recognized for his achievements in the field of digital communications in many adverse environments, particularly through his widely used algorithm.
Egregio Senatore Guglielmo Marconi,
When Professor Henrich Rudolf Hertz (whose name replaced the archaic “cycles-per-second” measure) experimentally validated the phenomenon of electromagnetic signal propagation in the late 1880’s, he proceeded to predict that the phenomenon would have no practical purpose. A decade later, you proved him dramatically wrong through your early transatlantic transmissions, followed by your creation of the lucrative radio broadcasting industry which began the distribution of information and entertainment worldwide and ultimately the transformation of society.
Complimenti e Distinti Saluti,
Andrew Viterbi
