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 merely 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. "Today, our world of smartphones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, satellite TV and radio, Global Positioning Systems and wireless computer networking was largely imagined by and based on Marconi’s electrical experiments," says the Pioneer Institute, in independent think tank.