Marconi was born at Villa Griffone, near Bologna, in 1874, so that he was under thirty when he caught that first transatlantic message. He studied at Leghorn under Professor Rosa, and later at the University of Bologna with Professor Righi. He was always absorbed in science, and experimented, holiday after holiday, on his father’s estate. He was precocious to an extraordinary degree, for in 1895, when only twenty-one, he had produced a wireless transmitting apparatus that he patented in Italy. Within a year he had taken out patents in England and in other European countries, and had proposed a wireless telegraph system to the English Post-Office Department. That Department, through Sir William Henry Preece, Engineer-in-Chief of Telegraphs, took up the subject, and reported very favorably on the Marconi System. Marconi himself, at the House of Commons, telegraphed by wireless across the Thames, a distance of 250 yards. In June, 1897, he sent a message nine miles, in July twelve miles, and in 1898 he succeeded in sending one across the English Channel to France, thirty-two miles. In 1901 he covered a space of 3,000 miles. Let us now see what it was that Marconi had actually done. Wireless signals are in reality wave motions in the magnetic forces of the earth, or, in other words, disturbances of those forces. They are sent out through this magnetic field, and follow the earth’s curvature, in the same way that tidal waves follow the ocean’s surface. Everywhere about us there is a sea of what science calls the ether, and the ether is constantly in a state of turmoil, because it is the medium through which energy, radiating from the sun, is carried to the earth and other planets. This energy is transmitted through the free ether in waves, which are known as electromagnetic waves. It was this fact that Professor Hertz discovered, and the waves are sometimes called the Hertzian waves. Light is one variety of wave motion, and heat another. The ether must be distinguished from the air, for science means by it a medium which exists everywhere and is to be regarded as permeating all space and all matter. The ether exists in a vacuum, for, although all the air may have been withdrawn, an object placed in a vacuum can still be seen from outside, and hence the wave motions of light are traveling through a space devoid of air.