This day in history

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.

16 people are killed in Milan, Italy, in what is known as the Piazza Fontana massacre, as a bomb planted by the right wing group Ordine Nuovo explodes in a bank in Milan.

In China, in what is known as the Xian Incident, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek is kidnapped by his own generals and forced to call a truce with the communists and form a united front against the Japanese.