Irish-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi ushered in a new era of
global communications, sending the first radio transmission
across the Atlantic Ocean on this day in history, Dec. 12, 1901.

The message was the letter "s" in Morse code (dot-dot-dot). But
it proved after years of advances by Marconi that radio could
make the world a smaller place.

The wireless signal traveled 2,000 miles from a transmitting
station in Poldhu, Cornwall, in the far southwestern corner of
England, to a receiving station in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi
(25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937)

The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison,
Alexander Graham Bell‘s Volta Laboratory made several
improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone,
including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a
cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove
around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the
transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral
groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining
the term gramophone for disc record players.

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931)

 


Garrett Augustus Morgan Sr.
(March 4, 1877 – July 27, 1963)

On November 20, 1923, the U.S. Patent Office grants Patent No.
1,475,074 to 46-year-old inventor and newspaperman Garrett
Morgan for his three-position traffic signal. Though Morgan’s
was not the first traffic signal (that one had been installed in
London in 1868), it was an important innovation nonetheless:

By having a third position besides just “Stop” and “Go,”
it regulated crossing vehicles more safely than earlier
signals had.

Morgan also invented a "safety hood smoke protection device"

On November 15, 1867, the first stock ticker was unveiled in New 
York City. The advent of the ticker ultimately revolutionized the
stock market by making up-to-the-minute prices available to
investors around the country.

Prior to this development, information from the New York Stock Exchange, which has been around since 1792, traveled by mail
or messenger.

The ticker was the brainchild of Edward Calahan (1838-1912) who configured a telegraph machine to print stock quotes on streams
of paper tape (the same paper tape later used in ticker-tape
parades).

The patent office awards U.S. Patent No. 743,801 to a
Birmingham, Alabama woman named Mary Anderson
for her “window cleaning device for electric cars and
other vehicles to remove snow, ice or sleet from the
window.”

Though mechanical windshield wipers were standard
equipment in passenger cars by around 1913, Anderson
never profited from the invention.