Guglielmo Marconi was stubborn. He probably got that from his mother, an Irish noblewoman who had moved to Italy to marry his father, an aristocrat from Porretta Terme, Italy.

He also seems to have had no intention of fitting in — not only did he never attend school, he never went to university. He had tutors who accompanied the family as they traveled between England, Florence, and Bologna. His education wasn’t well-rounded either. Marconi was interested in physics, so his tutors taught him that. (READ MORE: What Happens When Men Choose Robot Brides?)

There was good reason to be interested in physics in the late 19th century. It was an exciting age. Just a few decades prior, Samuel Morse had discovered that you could send messages through a telegraph wire using an electric pulse, and in the 1880s — when Marconi was hardly a teenager — Heinrich Hertz proved that radio waves existed.

So the young Marconi hatched a dream. What if, he thought, you could send messages around the world without a wire?

At 21 years old, Marconi found himself dreaming a dream of global interconnectedness on the invisible end of the light spectrum, and he became obsessed with figuring it out. By the end of 1895, he had managed to transmit the first radio signal at a distance of 1.5 miles (or 2.4 kilometers).

It was a breakthrough moment for physics, but Marconi was far from done. He had become convinced that radio waves could connect the world — but to prove it, he had to transmit across open water. Not only did his Italian colleagues believe it was impossible, but Italy didn’t have an ideal waterway he could use. So Marconi moved to England and set out to transmit across the English Channel. (READ MORE: Spectaire Could Help Global-Warming Alarmists See Clearly Now)

Five years later, he erected a 100-foot antenna on the coast of England off the roof of a hotel and sent a message to a lighthouse on the coast of France. The feat made the inventor famous but Marconi wasn’t done. He set his sights on the Atlantic.

There’s a problem with the Atlantic. The distance from Rosslare Strand in County Wexford to Newfoundland is more than 2500 miles. The issue wasn’t the distance necessarily, but that at that distance, the earth’s curvature could block the signal entirely. Marconi believed his signal would just follow the earth’s curves. His detractors weren’t convinced and told him that the signal would just fly out into space.

Nevertheless, on Dec. 12, Marconi announced that his radio broadcasting company had transmitted the first transatlantic message. It was the letter ‘S’.

As it turns out, Marconi’s detractors were correct. His message didn’t follow the curvature of the earth. Instead, it shot out to space, hit the ionosphere, and reflected down to earth to Newfoundland. There’s even some debate about whether Marconi managed to transmit a signal — he had done so at the worst time of day, and he already knew what the transmission would be when he sat down to receive the message at his desk in Newfoundland. (READ MORE: Some Idiots Want to Genetically Induce Climate Change Altruism)

But to some extent, it doesn’t matter. Marconi’s invention would go on to change the world. Even today, a third of the world depends on radio signals to receive their news. Thousands of lives at sea have been saved (it’s tough to send a telegraph when your ship is sinking) and the technology has fueled communication for the largest wars in history.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on Dec. 11, 2023.