Marconi exhibition in Chelmsford showcases early broadcasting history

The first commercially available wireless receiver

An exhibition celebrating the inventor of radio and the world's first purpose-built radio factory opens next month.

Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) will showcase items from Guglielmo Marconi's factory, which opened in 1912 in Chelmsford, Essex.

This year marks 100 years since the world's first regular broadcasts for entertainment began from the Marconi laboratories at nearby Writtle.

The Chelmsford factory closed in 2008 and the site is now a housing estate.

Marconi's factory in Chelmsford, the city that bills itself as the "birthplace of radio"

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian wireless pioneer who helped bring radio to the world.

He came to Chelmsford in 1898, at first developing machines to send messages via Morse code for ship and transatlantic communication.

After World War One, Marconi's engineers started looking at broadcasting voices and entertainment.

Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi brought the wireless apparatus with him when he came to England at the end of the 19th Century

The exhibition will include the world's first radio signal detector, early receivers and transmitters used during the 1914-18 conflict.

The display will also showcase the first ever microprocessor, a mobile car phone from 1984, as well as a TV camera used at the Queen's Coronation in 1953.

Prof Laurie Butler, the university's pro vice chancellor, said: "Chelmsford is known throughout the world as the birthplace of radio, and at ARU we are proud to be hosting this fascinating exhibition that will give an insight into how radio and communications have developed over the last 100 years."

A camera used by the BBC at the Queen's Coronation with former Marconi engineer, Paul Marshall