In June of 1903, the English physicist John Ambrose Fleming, who, among other things, invented the vacuum tube,

presided over an event at the Royal Institution's Lecture Theater in London.

The event was an unveiling of sorts.

He was demonstrating to those in attendance, a collection of some of the era's most important thinkers and connected social

entities, a radio transmitter that he had designed at the behest of the Italian inventor Guglielmo

Marconi, who is credited with, among other inventions, the development of the radio.

Marconi was keen to make wireless communication across the Atlantic a reality, something that

up until that point was only attainable via expensive and flawed undersea telegraph cables,

and he aimed to do this wirelessly via radio transmission.

Fleming was an expert in relevant engineering techniques, and thus was hired to build

the world's first large radio transmitter, a spark gap model, powered by a combustion engine,

which successfully transmitted the first transatlantic radio message in December of 1901.

The transmitter worked similarly, in some ways, to the more familiar at the time telegraph.

Operators would translate their message into the dots and dashes of Morse code,

and those would be sent via pulse, in the case of the telegraph, across long

cables, and in the case of the radio, using radio waves.

This demonstration was meant to show the English scientific elite, this new wonder,

wireless telegraphy, essentially, which Marconi and Fleming both claimed could be used to send private messages across vast distances.

In an interview for a London newspaper that same year, Marconi is quoted as having said, quote,

I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages, end quote.

Which is technically true in that no other non-similarly tuned instrument would be able to pick up such a signal.

What many of us know today, of course, is that tapping into a radio signal is as simple

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