Guglielmo Marconi Biographie

1895 : Guglielmo Marconi and his first experiments in Salvan (Switzerland)

by Yves Fournier, historian

Since a very early age, Guglielmo Marconi had a passion for sciences and in 1894 he became obsessed after reading an article describing Hertz's experiments on electromagnetic waves. Marconi was then vacationing at Andorno near Santuario di Oropa in the italian Alps and he immediately started to develop a system using these waves to communicate without wire.

It is most probably the following summer, in 1895, that Marconi came to the health resort of Salvan (Switzerland), already famous beyond our borders. With the help of a teenager from Salvan, Maurice Gay-Balmaz, Marconi worked for more than a month and a half within the surrounding areas and successfully sent a message farther than a kilometer away. Wireless was born.

The « en vogue » resort of Salvan had unconsciously lent its idyllic decor to one of the greatest discoveries of our time.