The greatest strength of Guglielmo Marconi was not his ability to innovate, but his mastery of synthesis. Assimilating the ideas and inventions of others, Marconi brilliantly fashioned a working technology. Born in Bologna, Italy, on April 25, 1874, Marconi was the son of a wealthy Italian landowner and his second wife. Educated by private tutors as a child, Marconi was later sent to the Technical Institute in Leghorn, where he studied physics and electromagnetism.

A number of key events set the stage for Marconi's experiments. British physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) had established a theory about the existence and behavior of invisible electromagnetic radiation in the 1860s. About twenty five years later, German physicist Heinrich Hertz successfully generated such radiation, which he dubbed "Hertzian waves," using a spark-gap device. In 1894, English physicist Oliver Lodge invented a "coherer " capable of detecting Hertzian waves with relative efficiency, and a year later in...