At the age of 20, Marconi began to conduct experiments in radio waves, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home at the Villa Griffone in Pontecchio (now an administrative subdivision of Sasso Marconi), Italy with the help of his butler Mignani.
Marconi built on Hertz's original experiments and, at the suggestion of Righi, began using a coherer, an early detector based on the 1890 findings of French physicist Édouard Branly and used in Lodge's experiments, that changed resistance when exposed to radio waves.
In the summer of 1894, he built a storm alarm made up of a battery, a coherer, and an electric bell, which went off when it picked up the radio waves generated by lightning.

Late one night, in December 1894, Marconi demonstrated a radio transmitter and receiver to his mother, a set-up that made a bell ring on the other side of the room by pushing a telegraphic button on a bench.
Supported by his father, Marconi continued to read through the literature and picked up on the ideas of physicists who were experimenting with radio waves.
He developed devices, such as portable transmitters and receiver systems, that could work over long distances, turning what was essentially a laboratory experiment into a useful communication system.
Marconi came up with a functional system with many components:
A relatively simple oscillator or spark-producing radio transmitter;
A wire or metal sheet capacity area suspended at a height above the ground;
A coherer receiver, which was a modification of Édouard Branly's original device with refinements to increase sensitivity and reliability;
A telegraph key to operate the transmitter to send short and long pulses, corresponding to the dots-and-dashes of Morse code; and
A telegraph register activated by the coherer which recorded the received Morse code dots and dashes onto a roll of paper tape.

In the summer of 1895, Marconi moved his experiments outdoors on his father's estate in Bologna.
 He tried different arrangements and shapes of antenna but even with improvements he was able to transmit signals only up to one half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves.
At the age of 20, Marconi began to conduct experiments in radio waves, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home at the Villa Griffone in Pontecchio (now an administrative subdivision of Sasso Marconi), Italy with the help of his butler Mignani. Marconi built on Hertz's original experiments and, at the suggestion of Righi, began using a coherer, an early detector based on the 1890 findings of French physicist Édouard Branly and used in Lodge's experiments, that changed resistance when exposed to radio waves. In the summer of 1894, he built a storm alarm made up of a battery, a coherer, and an electric bell, which went off when it picked up the radio waves generated by lightning.
Late one night, in December 1894, Marconi demonstrated a radio transmitter and receiver to his mother, a set-up that made a bell ring on the other side of the room by pushing a telegraphic button on a bench. Supported by his father, Marconi continued to read through the literature and picked up on the ideas of physicists who were experimenting with radio waves. He developed devices, such as portable transmitters and receiver systems, that could work over long distances, turning what was essentially a laboratory experiment into a useful communication system. Marconi came up with a functional system with many components:
A relatively simple oscillator or spark-producing radio transmitter;
A wire or metal sheet capacity area suspended at a height above the ground;
A coherer receiver, which was a modification of Édouard Branly's original device with refinements to increase sensitivity and reliability;
A telegraph key to operate the transmitter to send short and long pulses, corresponding to the dots-and-dashes of Morse code; and
A telegraph register activated by the coherer which recorded the received Morse code dots and dashes onto a roll of paper tape.
In the summer of 1895, Marconi moved his experiments outdoors on his father's estate in Bologna.  He tried different arrangements and shapes of antenna but even with improvements he was able to transmit signals only up to one half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves.
Guglielmo Marconi