wireless

The Italian pioneer of radio telegraphy Guglielmo Marconi, speaking from his 700-ton yacht, Elettra in Genoa, Italy, to an audience in Sydney, Australia. The yacht, purchased in 1919, was converted into a floating laboratory where he tested short-wave reception and transmission. By the end of the 1920s he had set up a worldwide system of short-wave stations.

Original name for a radio receiver. In early experiments with transmission by radio waves, notably by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in Britain, signals were sent in Morse code, as in telegraphy. Radio, unlike the telegraph, used no wires for transmission, and the means of communication was termed ‘wireless telegraphy’. The term has returned to describe technologies that enable devices to communicate by radio or infrared - for example, Wireless LAN.