Marconi Memorial

The Marconi Memorial is a tribute to the Italian who is credited for the groundbreaking invention of “wireless telegraphy,” or radio.

Guglielmo Marconi, born into Italian nobility in 1874, he never attended a classroom. Instead, he studied the sciences and mathematics at home with private teachers. At the age of 18 he started studying the potential for wireless telegraphy, building on Hertz’s work on electromagnetic waves.  With the help of his butler, he built the first radio transmitter in his attic in 1894. He later went on to considerable commercial success in the United Kingdom and was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909.

Carved from Westerly granite, the Marconi Memorial was a gift from the Italian-American community to Roger Williams Park. It took 16 years of planning, fundraising, and design from the date of Marconi’s death before this monument became a reality.