Meet the father of all hackers: Nevil Maskelyne.
In 1903, this gentleman gained notoriety by hacking into Guglielmo Marconi’s purportedly long-distance secure wireless telegraph, causing it to tap out unflattering messages about Marconi minutes before it was to be demonstrated at the Royal Institution. Maskelyne was a disgruntled competitor, his business suffocated by Marconi’s overly broad patents, but he justified his actions claiming that it was in the public interest to expose the flaws of Marconi’s system.
If his name sounds familiar, by the way, it’s perhaps because of his famous namesake, Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal who a century and a half earlier was the cause of so much frustration to John Harrison, creator of the marine chronometer.