When was the radio invented guglielmo marconi

The incrementing of each rotor is programmed by setting pins, which are just visible in the horizontal rotor. Just as worrisome was that CAG was a privately owned Swiss company, selling to any government, business, or individual. But traffic encrypted by the HX would be unbreakable. Friedman and Hagelin were good friends. During World War II, Friedman had helped make Hagelin a very wealthy man by suggesting changes to one of Hagelin's cipher machines, which paved the way for the U.

Army to license Hagelin's patents. The resulting machine, the MB , became a workhorse during the war, with some , units fielded. Hagelin agreed not to sell his most secure machines to countries specified by U. He convinced Hagelin not to manufacture the new device, even though the machine had taken more than a decade to design and only about 15 had been built, most of them for the French army.

However, was an interesting year in cryptography. Machine encryption was approaching a crossroads; it was starting to become clear that the future belonged to electronic encipherment. Even a great rotor machine like the HX would soon be obsolete. That was a challenge for CAG, which had never built an electronic cipher machine.

Introduced in , the machine was a failure. Also in , Hagelin's son Bo, who was the company's sales manager for the Americas and who had opposed the transaction, died in a car crash near Washington, D.

Although the H was a failure, it was succeeded by a machine called the H, of which thousands were sold. The H was designed with NSA assistance. To generate random numbers, it used multiple shift registers based on the then-emerging technology of CMOS electronics. This mathematical algorithm was created by the NSA, which could therefore decrypt any messages enciphered by the machine.

From then on, its electronic machines, such as the HC series, were secretly designed by the NSA, sometimes with the help of corporate partners such as Motorola. This U. The backdooring of all CAG machines continued until , when the company was liquidated.

William F. Friedman [top] dominated U. National Security Agency. His friend Boris Hagelin [bottom], a brilliant Swedish inventor and entrepreneur, founded Crypto AG in in Zug, Switzerland, and built it into the world's largest cipher-machine company. TOP, U. Parts of this story emerged in leaks by CAG employees before and, especially, in a subsequent investigation by the Washington Post and a pair of European broadcasters, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , in Germany, and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen , in Switzerland.

The Post 's article , published on 11 February , touched off firestorms in the fields of cryptology, information security, and intelligence. The revelations badly damaged the Swiss reputation for discretion and dependability. They triggered civil and criminal litigation and an investigation by the Swiss government and, just this past May, led to the resignation of the Swiss intelligence chief Jean-Philippe Gaudin, who had fallen out with the defense minister over how the revelations had been handled.

In fact, there's an interesting parallel to our modern era, in which backdoors are increasingly common and the FBI and other U. Even before these revelations, I was deeply fascinated by the HX, the last of the great rotor machines.

This particular unit, different from the one I had seen a decade before, had been untouched since I immediately began to plan the restoration of this historically resonant machine. People have been using codes and ciphers to protect sensitive information for a couple of thousand years. The first ciphers were based on hand calculations and tables.

In , a mechanical device that became known as the Alberti cipher wheel was introduced. Then, just after World War I, an enormous breakthrough occurred, one of the greatest in cryptographic history : Edward Hebern in the United States, Hugo Koch in the Netherlands, and Arthur Scherbius in Germany, within months of one another, patented electromechanical machines that used rotors to encipher messages.

Thus began the era of the rotor machine. Scherbius's machine became the basis for the famous Enigma used by the German military from the s until the end of WW II. To understand how a rotor machine works, first recall the basic goal of cryptography: substituting each of the letters in a message, called plaintext, with other letters in order to produce an unreadable message, called ciphertext. It's not enough to make the same substitution every time—replacing every F with a Q , for example, and every K with an H.

Such a monoalphabetic cipher would be easily solved. A simple cipher machine, such as the Enigma machine used by the German Army during World War II, has three rotors, each with 26 positions.

Each position corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. Electric current enters at a position on one side of the first rotor, corresponding to a letter, say T. The current travels through two other rotors in the same way and then, finally, exits the third rotor at a position that corresponds to a different letter, say R.

So in this case, the letter T has been encrypted as R. The next time the operator strikes a key, one or more of the rotors move with respect to one another, so the next letter is encrypted with an entirely different set of permutations. In the Enigma cipher machines [below] a plugboard added a fixed scramble to the encipherment of the rotors, swapping up to 13 letter pairs.

A rotor machine gets around that problem using—you guessed it—rotors. Start with a round disk that's roughly the diameter of a hockey puck, but thinner. On both sides of the disk, spaced evenly around the edge, are 26 metal contacts, each corresponding to a letter of the English alphabet. Inside the disk are wires connecting a contact on one side of the disk to a different one on the other side.

The disk is connected electrically to a typewriter-like keyboard. When a user hits a key on the keyboard, say W , electric current flows to the W position on one side of the rotor. The current goes through a wire in the rotor and comes out at another position, say L.

However, after that keystroke, the rotor rotates one or more positions. So the next time the user hits the W key, the letter will be encrypted not as L but rather as some other letter. Though more challenging than simple substitution, such a basic, one-rotor machine would be child's play for a trained cryptanalyst to solve.

So rotor machines used multiple rotors. Versions of the Enigma, for example, had either three rotors or four. In operation, each rotor moved at varying intervals with respect to the others: A keystroke could move one rotor or two, or all of them. Incorporating the earlier scientific work of Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge in electromagnetic radiation, he was able to develop a basic system of wireless telegraphy. Though not a scientist, Marconi recognized the value of wireless technology and was adept in putting the right people together to invest in it.

In he received his first patent in England. Marconi founded the London-based Marconi Telegraph Company in Though his original transmission traveled a mere mile and a half, on December 12, , Marconi sent and received the first wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean, from Cornwall, England, to a military base in Newfoundland.

His experiment was significant, as it disproved the dominant belief of the Earth's curvature affecting transmission. Beginning in , Marconi worked on experiments that stretched the distance that wireless communication could travel, until he was finally able to establish transatlantic service from Glace Bay in Nova Scotia, Canada, to Clifden, Ireland.

Not long after, Marconi's wireless system was used by the crew of the RMS Titanic to call for assistance. Marconi held several positions in the Italian Army and Navy during World War I, starting the war as a lieutenant in and finishing as a naval commander.

He was sent on diplomatic missions to the United States and France. After making his name with four scientific articles published in , he went on to win worldwide fame for his general Live TV. This Day In History.

History Vault. Guglielmo Marconi in England The year-old Marconi and his mother arrived in England in and quickly found interested backers, including the British Post Office. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Einstein: Einstein's Nobel Prize. History of Beer in America. Einstein: Regret. Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney. Nikola Tesla Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power.

Thomas Edison In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1, patents singly or jointly and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras. In the same year he gave a demonstration to the Italian Government at Spezia where wireless signals were sent over a distance of twelve miles.

In he established wireless communication between France and England across the English Channel. In he took out his famous patent No. Between and he patented several new inventions. In December he transmitted the first complete messages to Poldhu from stations at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and later Cape Cod, Massachusetts, these early tests culminating in in the opening of the first transatlantic commercial service between Glace Bay and Clifden, Ireland, after the first shorter-distance public service of wireless telegraphy had been established between Bari in Italy and Avidari in Montenegro.

In he was commissioned in the Italian Army as a Lieutenant being later promoted to Captain, and in transferred to the Navy in the rank of Commander.

He was a member of the Italian Government mission to the United States in and in was appointed Italian plenipotentiary delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.