SIR BOSE,J.C. DIODE DETECTOR RECEIVED MARCONIS FIRST TRANSATLANTIC WIRELESS SIGNAL OF DECEMBER 1901 (THE ITALIAN-NAVY COHERER SCANDAL REVISITED)

The true origin of the ''mercury coherer with a telephone'' receiver t hat was used by G. Marconi to receive the first transatlantic wireless signal on December 12, 1901, has been investigated and determined. In controvertible evidence is presented to show that this novel wireless detection device was invented by Sir. J. C. Bose of Presidency College , Calcutta, India. His epoch-making work was communicated by Lord Rayl eigh, F.R.S., to the Royal Society, London, U.K., on March 6, 1899, an d read at the Royal Society Meeting of Great Britain on April 27, 1899 . Soon after, it was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society . Twenty-one months after that disclosure (in February 1901, as the re cords indicate), Lieutenant L. Solari of the Royal Italian Navy, a chi ldhood friend of G. Marconi's, experimented with this detector device and presented a trivially modified version to Marconi, who then applie d for a British patent on the device. Surrounded by a scandal, this de tection device, actually a semiconductor diode, is known to the outsid e world as the ''Italian Navy Coherer.'' This scandal, first brought t o light by Prof. A. Banti of Italy, has been critically analyzed and e xpertly presented in a time sequence of events by British historian V. J. Phillips but without discovering the tote origin of the novel dete ctor In this paper, the scandal is revisited and the mystery of the de vice's true origin is solved, thus correcting the century-old misinfor mation on an epoch-making chapter in the history of semiconductor devi ces.