12 December 1901 : Marconi sends first Atlantic wireless message

Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. In Newfoundland, Canada Marconi received the message, simply the Morse Code signal for the letter S, after it travelled over 2,000 miles from Cornwall, England. Marconi’s earlier wireless efforts went largely unappreciated. After his transatlantic transmission, his discoveries received world attention. In 1909, he received the Nobel Prize in physics