The closest thing to any information I can find here is related to Arthur C. Clarke’s book (and the movie based on it), Contact. A speech from Adolf Hitler at the beginning of the 1938 Olympics is beamed back to Earth, and is claimed to be our first significant transmission. This smells like fiction, though, because I can’t seem to find anything online that will confirm that (or tell me what the real first transmission was). This is for a writing project that requires authenticity, so I need an answer that I can confirm. Help me out if you know.
Marconi was responsible for the first transatlantic radio signals, and was known for sending signals across space– as in, across thin air, as opposed to across lines– but I can’t find any evidence that he ever intentionally sent a signal into space. His transatlantic would have gone into space (unintentionally, since he thought the signal would follow the curvature of the Earth), but it reflected off the ionosphere. So I can’t really go with Marconi. I need the first person to send a signal into space intentionally, and therefore with enough focus that it might have actually been received somewhere.
