Stick This in Your Hat and Call it Macaroni

In 1899, Guglielmo Marconi famously broadcast the morse code signal for the letter “s” -- presumably the interrupted beginning of “Shit just got real!” -- from Cornwall, England to a radio antenna in Newfoundland over two thousand miles away, disproving a commonly held theory that the curvature of the earth would prevent long distance wireless transmission. Not only did Marconi win that bet, but ten years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work with radio waves. 

Be the douche.

The thing is, he was using somebody else’s invention. That somebody else was a scientist from India named Jagadish Chandra Bose, who had demonstrated his radio wave transmitting and receiving equipment at the Royal Institution in London two years prior. 

Marconi was actually living there at the time, and the two men are believed to have met. Otherwise, it would be even stranger that Marconi's device happened to have the exact same design as Bose's. Both men were also interviewed by McClure’s Magazine in March of 1897, during which Bose told the interviewer that he had no interest in making money off his invention. Marconi, however, had no such qualms. Ironically, a hundred and nineteen years later, Marconi's name sounds remarkably similar to one of the cheapest meals at the grocery store, and if you do a web search of “Bose” and “radio,” all you get is high-end consumer electronics. 

Marconi's name was actually popularized by the propaganda of Mussolini's fascist regime as a symbol of Italy's technological excellence. This was back in 1923, about ten years before fascism was widely considered to be an ugly word, right around the time that Benito Mussolini was first on the cover of Time magazine. 

To most Americans, fascism was just big business on steroids, and bigger business could only be better... until it wasn't. Mussolini was even the best man at Marconi's second wedding, and in 1935, Marconi is said to have attempted to demonstrate a Bond-villain-like "death ray" for Mussolini that could have later been used against the Allied forces. It was designed to incapacitate the engines of airplanes in flight. Had Marconi's experiments been successful, the war could have ended quite differently.