Alfonso Marconi Alfonso Marconi Alfonso Marconi (18651936) was an Italian businessman and collector of stringed instruments, most famous for assisting his younger brother Guglielmo Marconi in his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission Alfonso Marconi was born into the Italian nobility in 1865, the first son of Giuseppe Marconi (an Italian aristocratic landowner from Porretta Terme) and of his Irish/Scots wife, Annie Jameson (daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in County Wexford, Ireland, and granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of whiskey distillers "Jameson & Sons"). Alfonso was educated at Bedford School in England between 1876 and 1880, during his peripatetic childhood.
History of radio pursuing. Marconi read through the literature and used the ideas of others who were experimenting with radio waves but did a great deal to develop devices such as portable transmitters and receiver systems that could work over long distances, turning what was essentially a laboratory experiment into a useful communication system. By August 1895 Marconi was field testing his system but even with improvements he was only able to transmit signals up to one-half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves. Marconi raised the height of his antenna and hit