To appreciate the modern television and radio broadcasts, you can look to the work of two European pioneers. Germany’s Henrich Hertz, for whom the frequency of radio waves is named, experimented with them in the mid-to-late 1800s. The Italian Guglielmo Marconi began studying the idea of how to transmit and receive those waves starting at the age of 20. His first successes came in transmitting signals across a room, down a corridor, and finally through a field obstructed by a windmill.

On this day, July 2, in 1897, Marconi filed a patent London, England, for his telegraph system using Herzian waves.

Marconi continued to refine his invention over strength and distance. Among his early experiments, he managed to get a radio signal across the Salisbury Plain (a distance of seven miles), then across the Bristol Channel in bad weather (a distance of eight miles), and finally between two moving ferry boats.