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Guglielmo Marconi developed wireless telegraphy by coordinating the transmitter, propagation and receiver as one experimental system. His lecture describes a coherer containing nickel and silver filings, connected to a tuned circuit and a relay. The relay operates a recorder and a tapper that resets the detector, allowing successive signals to be registered. Long and short wave trains encode telegraphic signs. Improving detector reliability and resonance of electrical circuits therefore mattered alongside producing radiation at the transmitter.^[ref]

A physicist.^[ref]

Wireless telegraphy links the dynamics of a transmitter, propagation and the response of a receiver. A successful detector reading depends on that complete chain, rather than on the transmitter alone.

Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun shared the award equally for developing wireless telegraphy.^[ref] Braun's receiver coupling experiment connects that history to resonance and the selectivity of a receiver.

Guglielmo Marconi's 1909 lecture describes antennas with earth connections and separate coupled receiving circuits. His 1900 system coupled a closed capacitor–inductor–spark gap loop to a transmitting antenna. Coil spacing adjusted coupling; inductance and capacitance adjusted tuning. All four circuits were tuned together. By 1909 his company's stations mainly used magnetic receivers, rather than coherers.^[ref]

Those are a participant's retrospective descriptions, not a complete account of priority. An earth connection is part of this antenna arrangement; it is not a universal requirement for radio communication. Nor does tuning an isolated LC circuit ensure that its frequency remains unchanged when strongly coupled to another circuit. The coupled resonant circuit model quantifies that distinction.

By Guglielmo Marconi. Nobel lecture delivered 11 December 1909; cited p. 197, Figure 1. Later HTML editorial additions are separate.

Wireless telegraphy conveys discrete symbols without a connecting message wire. Here the mechanism is radio communication: keyed excitation produces radio waves, a receiving antenna drives a selective electrical circuit, and a detector produces a readable event. This makes a beautiful bridge between resonance and information: accumulating many appropriately timed small electrical disturbances can distinguish one transmission from another. Selectivity is finite, however; resonance alone cannot guarantee immunity to strong unwanted signals or noise.

The 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun for contributions to wireless telegraphy.^[ref] Their apparatus should be understood as a developing collection of systems. An early coherer receiver, a later tuned receiver and a modern envelope detector are different instruments.