Guglielmo Marconi began successfully transmitting wireless telegraph signals as early as 1890 between tin plates mounted on posts in his father’s garden in Italy when he was only sixteen years old. Building on short-range successes, he gradually increased the distance between transmitters and receivers, reaching one mile in 1895, twenty miles from ship to shore in 1899, and then spanning the English Channel. In December 1901 at his Newfoundland station, he received the first transatlantic signal, the letter “S” tapped out at his English station. On January 18, 1903, he transmitted a 48 word message from here to England and promptly received a reply, creating the first two-way transoceanic communication and the first wireless telegram between America and Europe. Marconi, an Italian electrical engineer and inventor whose work led him to England and America, had studied the scientific accomplishments of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison in his youth.