My parents despaired of me. They saw my future as a church minister or a
teacher, but when I closed my eyes and dreamed, I saw an invention that could
send voices around the world without using wires or cables. "There's no
future in that," my mother told me, and she was both right and wrong.
In my lifetime, I developed over a hundred patentable inventions including
the electric gyroscope, the heterodyne, and a depth finder. I
built the first power generating station at Niagara Falls and I invented radio,
sending the first wireless voice message in the world on Dec. 23, 1900. Come to
my laboratory if you want to see some of my inventions for yourself.
But despite all my hard work, I lived most of my life near poverty. I fought
years of court battles before seeing even a penny from my greatest inventions.
And worst of all, I was ridiculed by journalists, businessmen, and even other
scientists, for believing that voice could ever be transmitted without using
wires. But by the time of my death, not only was I wealthy from my patents, all
of those people who had laughed at my ideas were twisting the dials on their
newly bought radios to hear the latest weather and news
