Guglielmo Marconi

Italian physicist

• Born: April 25, 1874
• Birthplace: Bologna, Italy
• Died: July 20, 1937
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Marconi, who shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, was recognized for his pioneering work in physics that led to the invention of devices for sending signals wirelessly, thereby revolutionizing telegraphic and radio transmission over long distances.

Early Life

By age six, Guglielmo Marconi (gew-YEHL-moh mahr-KOH-nee) had spent half of his life in Italy and half in England. His father, Giuseppe Marconi, was a comfortably fixed landowner in northern Italy, who, when his first wife died, married Guglielmo’s mother, Annie Jameson, a British subject and the daughter of a well-to-do family in the liquor-distilling business that had left Ireland to settle in England. In 1864, defying parental admonitions, Annie married Giuseppe. She was twenty-one, her husband thirty-eight.

When Guglielmo was three, his mother took him and his nine-year-old brother, Alfonso, to England for a three-year visit. On their return, their father employed a teacher who came to their home, Villa Grifone, to help them catch up on their Italian. Their mother taught them English and the Bible. When Guglielmo finally went to school in Florence, the experience was miserable for him. His Italian was bad, and he was rebellious. He stayed in constant trouble. The only positive benefit he derived from attending that school was that there he met Luigi Solari, his lifelong, highly influential friend.

At thirteen, in Leghorn (Livorno), to which his mother often took him and his brother to escape northern Italy’s winter, Marconi attended the Technical Institute. In the same year, 1888, Heinrich Hertz discovered that electricity could be transmitted through space from one point to another and that when an electric spark leaped the gap between two metal spheres, periodic oscillations, now called Hertzian waves, occurred. Marconi believed that these oscillating waves could carry signals.

Marconi’s autocratic father was intolerant of what he considered his son’s idle, directionless dallying. He envisioned a naval career for his son, whom he gave little encouragement to follow his natural bent toward chemistry and physics, subjects that intrigued the boy.

When Marconi failed his entrance examinations for the University of Bologna, his mother interceded with the Marconis’ neighbor, Professor Augusto Righi, who finally permitted Marconi to use laboratory facilities and equipment at the university on an unofficial basis. Marconi, excited at the possibility of wireless telegraphy, shared this excitement with Righi. The professor discouraged him, cautioning the twenty-year-old Marconi that he did not have the scientific background to succeed at work that for years had baffled experimental physicists, including Righi.

Marconi, however, was undaunted. Overcoming paternal disapproval, he set up his experiments in the attics of Villa Grifone and labored tirelessly to prove his theory of the wireless transmission of signals. Although he knew that others much better trained than he were working on the same problem, he was determined to succeed. Perhaps his innocence of theory and his emphasis on the practical outcomes of his experiments made his successes possible. Marconi proceeded in relative ignorance to try things that more seasoned scientists knew theoretically could not work; sometimes, remarkably, these things succeeded.

Life’s Work

Marconi began his life’s work in earnest when he was barely more than twenty and began to sequester himself for long hours in his attic workshop. He irritated his father by asking him for money to buy apparatuses. His neighbor Righi lent him some of the equipment he needed, and Marconi, ever talented at working with his hands, constructed many of his own apparatuses.

Using a Hertz oscillator and a Branly coherer (named for Édouard-Eugène Branly) that could detect the oscillations that the Hertzian apparatus impelled, sometimes working theoretically but more often working intuitively and succeeding by patient trial and error, Marconi finally, early in 1895, achieved his end in one simple application: With the minimal equipment he had available, he made a bell ring by capturing the Hertzian oscillations and converting them into energy, which he sent across the expanse of his attic workshop.

By a fortuitous stroke, Marconi one day placed one of his terminals on a rise in the ground and discovered that the signal increased. He then experimented with burying a transmitter deep in the ground, first horizontally, then vertically, and elevating the receiver. By the middle of 1895, Marconi had gone farther and farther afield, finally sending a signal one and a half miles. He sent signals from one side of a hill to the other, making him think that perhaps Hertzian waves penetrated solids and exited the other side; he later learned that they circumvent them. By this time, even Marconi’s skeptical father was beginning to acknowledge that his son’s work was important.

It was time for Marconi to market his idea. He first turned to the Italian government for help but was rebuffed. He took his equipment to England, where his cousin, Henry Jameson Davis, set to work helping Marconi get his patent application for radiotelegraphy into acceptable form. Despite a delay occasioned by custom officers’ smashing some of his transmitting equipment when he tried to import it, Marconi quickly made replacements, improving his terminals and vacuum tubes to the extent that by September, 1896, he was able to transmit a signal a distance of two miles.

In 1897, just as he was perfecting his invention and finding financial backing for it, Marconi was called on to meet the three-year military obligation imposed on all Italian males when they reached their majority. Marconi considered renouncing his Italian citizenship and declaring himself a British subject, which he could have done. Instead, through the intervention of Italy’s minister of marine, Benedetto Brin, Marconi became a naval cadet stationed in London as an attaché in the Italian embassy. Because his appointment involved no duties, he donated the pay he received from the government to an orphanage.

Henry Jameson Davis helped Marconi form the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company in July, 1897, to finance continued experiments. Before that, Marconi had gained considerable attention by sending a signal across Bristol Channel, a distance of nine miles. Marconi, realizing that he could increase his range by increasing the number of antennae he used and by increasing their length, constructed a string of antennae 150 feet high across the English Channel, fixing them to lighthouses and naval vessels, enabling him to send a signal the twenty-eight miles to France.

The next step was clearly a dramatic one: Marconi, who by 1900 had sent signals almost two hundred miles, was determined to send a signal across the Atlantic. Preparatory to this transmission, a huge, high receiver was erected on Cape Cod off the Massachusetts mainland and a transmitter the most powerful Marconi had yet built was placed on England’s Cornwall coast. When a windstorm destroyed the receiver, Marconi sailed to St. John’s, Newfoundland. There he launched a receiver on a kite, taking a page from his boyhood reading in the works of Benjamin Franklin.

By the end of 1901, with Solari at the transmitter and Marconi more than two thousand miles away flying the receiver in the air, the wireless transatlantic transmission was made. On December 12 Solari tapped in the three telegraphic dots of “S” in Morse code, and Marconi received it. The next year, Marconi sent the first wireless signal back to England.

Only twenty-eight years old, Marconi, a handsome Italian of olive complexion and chiseled Roman features, saw his name become a household word. The inventor, lacking the usual academic credentials of physicists, was well on the way to receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics that he would share in 1909.

Marconi’s patent 7,777, granted in 1900, gave its holder great control over the communications industry of his day. He spent much of his remaining years expanding Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company and perfecting his basic invention. He continued to patent his inventions of such implements as the directional aerial and improved transmission devices.

In 1905, Marconi married Beatrice O’Brien, who, like his mother, was Irish. They had three children, but Marconi’s relationship with his family, both wife and children, deteriorated because of his lifestyle, which included considerable womanizing. The marriage was annulled in 1924. In 1927, Marconi married the Countess Maria Bezzi-Scali, by whom he had one daughter.

Marconi served Italy in several military capacities during World War I, finally serving as a commander in the Italian navy, ironically fulfilling his father’s early preference. He was in charge of telegraphy for all of Italy’s armed forces and rose to a position of sufficient prominence that he was Italy’s plenipotentiary delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, where he was signatory to the peace treaties Italy entered into with Austria and Bulgaria.

By 1921, Marconi had redesigned his yacht, Elettra, into a combined home and laboratory, conducting most of his corporate business from that base. His experimentation continued, focusing now on shortwaves. His corporation assumed immense international proportions, the United States branch becoming the influential Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

His activities hampered by a heart condition that resulted in several severe attacks, Marconi worked as steadily as his health permitted. On July 19, 1937, having reconciled somewhat with the three children from his first marriage and two days after having an audience with the pope, Marconi saw his wife and young daughter off for a seaside resort, promising to join them there the next day. He went home to prepare for an evening appointment with his friend, Benito Mussolini, for whom he had made broadcasts supporting Italy’s rising fascism. He was never to keep that appointment. Shortly before he was to leave for it, he was stricken with a heart attack that proved fatal in the early hours of July 20.

Significance

Guglielmo Marconi was the sort of original genius whose name is inextricably attached to wireless communication, particularly to the radio. He, along with Thomas Alva Edison, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell, helped to bring about the modern age in communication. Edison perfected the power sources required for the inventions of the others, each of whom helped to shrink the world by making it possible for people to communicate with speed across great distances.

The political implications of Marconi’s invention are particularly significant, because his invention brought the whole world into one’s own living room or bedroom. People in the remotest venues could now be as well informed about world events as those who lived in thriving metropolises. Politicians throughout the world quickly took advantage of the new medium that Marconi developed to disseminate their ideas to hundreds of times more people than they would have been able to reach through making whistle stops throughout their constituencies. Although Marconi lived for many years after his initial invention of the wireless, it is with this invention that his name is generally connected.

Bibliography

Donaldson, Frances. The Marconi Scandal. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962. The book provides details about the fall of Godfrey Isaacs, managing director of Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company, who was charged with corruption in his aggressive handling of the company’s affairs, particularly of the so-called imperial wireless scheme, which was generally known as the “Marconi scandal.” Donaldson’s report of this convoluted proceeding is filled with all the intrigue of a mystery novel.

Jacot, B. L., and D. M. B. Collier. Marconi Master of Space: An Authorized Biography of the Marchesa Marconi. London: Hutchinson, 1935. Although much additional information about Marconi became available to biographers after his death in 1937, Jacot and Collier uncovered valuable information about the inventor, particularly about his early experiments at Villa Grifone and later in England. Less enlightening about his later personal life than some of the later books are.

Jolly, W. P. Marconi. New York: Stein & Day, 1972. Jolly’s biography is one of the most comprehensive to date. It is well written, objective in its presentation of a man whose life was filled with contradictions, and well illustrated with carefully chosen pictures of its subject. The index is not always as thorough as it might be, but it is generally serviceable.

Larson, Erik. Thunderstruck. New York: Crown, 2006. Larson, author of the highly acclaimed book The Devil in the White City(2003), recounts Marconi’s invention of radio transmission alongside the story of Hawley Crippen, an English murderer.

Marconi, Degna. My Father, Marconi. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. In this book, Marconi’s daughter by Beatrice O’Brien, alienated from her father until shortly before his death, when they had a most satisfying reconciliation, tries more than two decades after his death to sort out her feelings about him. The book is more valuable for the personal information it provides than for detailed work about Marconi’s scientific contributions, although these are treated. Marconi’s life is the stuff of which novels are made, and this book provides a base for any writer inclined in that direction.

Schueler, D. G. “Inventor Marconi: Brilliant, Dapper, Tough to Live With.” Smithsonian 12 (March, 1982): 126. Discusses Marconi in terms of his intellectual independence and insights, pointing out the more flamboyant side of his personality that led to his divorce, his womanizing, and his frequent breaks with his children.

Weightman, Gavin. Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: How an Amateur Inventor Defied Scientists and Began the Radio Revolution. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Biography recounting Marconi’s life and career within the context of his urgency to invent a form of radio transmission before his many rivals.