Jozef Murgaš

Jozef Murgaš (1864–1929) was a Slovak Catholic priest, painter, and inventor active in the United States who held seventeen American patents in wireless telegraphy. His tone-modulation method for transmitting Morse code by two distinct pitches anticipated frequency-shift keying and demonstrated the first wireless telephony in Pennsylvania in 1905.

Jozef Murgaš was born on 17 February 1864 in Tajov in the Kingdom of Hungary, today central Slovakia. His father Ján Murgaš was a small farmer and miller, and his mother Zuzana brought up the family in a Slovak-speaking village under Hungarian rule.

He entered the seminary at Banská Bystrica, was ordained in 1888, and served as chaplain in Slovak parishes before his bishop sent him to study painting at the academies of Budapest and Munich from 1890 to 1893. Hungarian authorities suspected him of Slovak nationalism, and in 1896 he emigrated to the Slovak-American mining parish of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

From his rectory laboratory he filed his first wireless patents in 1904 and on 23 November 1905 transmitted the words "Wilkes-Barre, Scranton" between two Pennsylvania towns before reporters and engineers, including a representative of Guglielmo Marconi. His company collapsed when a 1906 storm destroyed the antennas. He returned to parish duties, painted altar pieces, and helped draft the 1918 Pittsburgh Agreement on Czechoslovak unity. He died at Wilkes-Barre on 11 May 1929.

His name Jozef derives from the Hebrew Yosef, meaning "he will add" or "may God add." Jozef is a Slovak, Polish, and Dutch masculine name corresponding to the English Joseph.