On this day in 1929, Jozef Murgaš died. He was a Slovak inventor, architect, botanist, painter, patriot, and Roman Catholic priest. Murgaš was nicknamed the Radio Priest.
In 1905, Murgaš achieved radio transmission between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania, or a distance of 20 miles (30 km).
The tone system is the use of two signals of different frequencies, i.e. MurgaÅ¡ substituted the “dot” of the Morse code with a higher tone and the “dash” with a lower tone (this is the 1904 patent “The way of transmitted messages by wireless telegraphy”).
Thomas Edison paid remarkable attention to MurgaÅ¡’s experiments and he is said to have informed G. Marconi of MurgaÅ¡’s success. MurgaÅ¡’s lab in Wilkes-Barre was visited by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.