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.
Guglielmo Marconi up on the ideas of physicists who were experimenting with radio waves. He developed 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. Marconi came up with a functional system with many components: In the summer of 1895, Marconi moved his experiments outdoors on his father's estate in Bologna. He tried different arrangements and shapes of antenna but even with improvements he was able to transmit signals only up to one half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the