Guglielmo Marconi

• 1. Introduction

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  Guglielmo Marconi was twenty years old on a December night in 1894 when he rang a bell across a room in his family's Italian villa. He pushed a telegraph button on a bench. No wire connected the two ends of the room. His mother was the only witness.

  Born on the 25th of April 1874, Marconi died in Rome on the 20th of July 1937, at 63 years old. In between those dates, he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ferdinand Braun for advancing wireless telegraphy. He founded a wireless company in Britain in 1897, and King Victor Emmanuel III made him a marquess in 1929. He is remembered today, more than almost anyone else, as the man who invented radio.

  That title covers a messier story than the honors suggest. Marconi had no formal schooling and learned from private tutors before he ever built a working transmitter. Physicists of his era believed radio waves could not travel beyond the horizon. How did a young man with no university degree convince himself otherwise, and push signals farther than trained scientists thought possible? When his signals eventually crossed an entire ocean, why did other scientists doubt he had really heard anything at all? Decades later, a U.S. court and a group of historians each looked again at what he had actually invented. How much of the credit held up?

• 2. An Unlikely Education

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  Giuseppe Marconi, Guglielmo's father, owned land around Capugnano, near Porretta Terme in the Bolognese Apennines. He kept a home in the countryside of Pontecchio. Giuseppe was already a widower with a son, Luigi, when he married Annie Jameson on the 16th of April 1864, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Annie was the granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of the Jameson Irish Whiskey company. Guglielmo's older brother, Alfonso, was born the following year. Between the ages of two and six, Guglielmo lived with his mother and Alfonso in Bedford, England. On the 4th of May 1877, when he was three, his father decided to obtain British citizenship. Both of Guglielmo's parents held British citizenship, meaning he could have claimed it himself at any time. His mother's Irish background later helps explain why so much of his career unfolded in Britain and Ireland.

  In Livorno, a high school physics teacher named Vincenzo Rosa taught Marconi, then seventeen, the basics of electricity and new theories of physical science. Rosa was one of a series of private tutors Marconi's parents hired at home, since the family gave him no formal schooling. They added extra tutors each winter, when the family left Bologna for the warmer climate of Tuscany or Florence.

  At eighteen, back in Bologna, Marconi met Augusto Righi, a physics professor at the University of Bologna who had studied Heinrich Hertz's work. Righi let him attend lectures and use the university's laboratory and library, doors a self-taught teenager could not otherwise have opened.

  In 1894, an article Righi wrote about the recently deceased Heinrich Hertz caught Marconi's attention. It revived his interest in a line of research almost no other inventor seemed to be pursuing: sending telegraph messages using radio waves instead of wires.

• 3. The Silkworm Room

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  At twenty, Marconi began building his own equipment to experiment with radio waves. He worked in the attic of Villa Griffone, his family's home in Pontecchio, now part of the municipality of Sasso Marconi. His butler, Mignani, helped him there, in a converted space they later called the Stanza dei Bachi, or silkworm room, named for its earlier use raising silkworms. At Righi's suggestion, Marconi adopted a coherer, a radio-wave detector based on 1890 research by the French physicist Édouard Branly and already used in Oliver Lodge's experiments. In the summer of 1894, he wired a battery, a coherer, and an electric bell into a storm alarm. It rang whenever it picked up radio waves generated by lightning.

  Marconi later described his 1895 apparatus in his Nobel lecture. It combined a spark-producing transmitter, a wire or metal sheet raised above the ground to hold capacity, and a refined coherer receiver. A telegraph key sent Morse code pulses, and a paper-tape register recorded whatever the coherer picked up.

  In the summer of 1895, Marconi moved his experiments outdoors, onto his father's estate, trying different antenna shapes and arrangements. Even with improvements, he could only transmit signals up to 800 metres, or half a mile. That matched the maximum range Oliver Lodge had predicted for radio waves back in 1894.

  The breakthrough came later that same summer. Marconi found that raising his antenna's height, and grounding both the transmitter and receiver, a trick borrowed from wired telegraphy, dramatically extended his range. With those changes, his system could send signals two miles, and over hills. In one trial at Villa Griffone, he transmitted a signal beyond the Celestini hill, about two kilometres away, using a vertical antenna wired to a buried metal plate. That monopole antenna produced a lower frequency than the dipole antennas Hertz had used, and it radiated vertically polarized waves that travelled much farther. Marconi concluded that, with more funding and research, the system could prove valuable both commercially and militarily. That 1895 apparatus turned out to be the first radio transmission system that was both fully engineered and commercially viable.

  Marconi wrote to the Italian Ministry of Post and Telegraphs, then run by Maggiorino Ferraris, describing his wireless machine and requesting funding. He never received a reply. An often-repeated but unverified story claims that the responsible minister, misidentified at various points as Emilio Sineo and then Pietro Lacava, scrawled 'to the Longara' on Marconi's application, a reference to the insane asylum on Rome's Via della Lungara. The letter itself has never been found.

  Denied support in Italy, Marconi would soon carry his fragile apparatus across the English Channel, to test whether a foreign government valued it more than his own had.

• 4. Wires Across Water

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  In 1896, a family friend named Carlo Gardini, the Honorary Consul at the United States Consulate in Bologna, urged Marconi to leave Italy for Great Britain. Gardini wrote to Annibale Ferrero, Italy's ambassador in London, describing Marconi's discoveries. Ferrero advised keeping the results secret until a patent was secured. He also encouraged Marconi to come to Britain, believing funding would be easier to find there. Finding little interest in Italy, Marconi travelled to London in early 1896, at twenty-one, accompanied by his mother. Fluent in English as well as Italian, he had little trouble settling in. At Dover, a customs officer opened Marconi's case, found an assortment of apparatus, and alerted the Admiralty in London. Amid British fears about Italian anarchists, and suspicion that Marconi might be smuggling a bomb, his equipment was destroyed on the spot.

  In Britain, Marconi won the support of William Preece, Chief Electrical Engineer of the General Post Office. He applied for a patent on the 2nd of June 1896. British Patent No. 12039, 'Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor,' became the first patent ever granted for a radio-based communication system.

  Marconi gave a series of public demonstrations across Britain in 1896 and 1897, in London, on Salisbury Plain, and over the Bristol Channel. By March 1897 he was sending Morse code roughly 3 miles across Salisbury Plain. On the 13th of May 1897, he sent the first wireless message ever transmitted over open sea, a brief text reading 'Are you ready'. It travelled three miles, from Flat Holm Island to Lavernock Point near Cardiff. Engineers soon moved the transmitter to Brean Down Fort on the Somerset coast, stretching the range to 10 miles.

  Preece introduced Marconi's work to the wider public in two London lectures. The first, 'Telegraphy without Wires,' was given at Toynbee Hall on the 11th of December 1896. The second, 'Signalling through Space without Wires,' was delivered to the Royal Institution on the 4th of June 1897.

  More demonstrations followed. In July 1897, Marconi ran tests at La Spezia in Italy for the Italian government. On the 6th of July 1898, George Kemp and Edward Edwin Glanville ran a Lloyd's trial between Ballycastle and Rathlin Island in County Antrim. That same month, Marconi's system was also used to report the Kingstown Regatta off the Irish coast. It was one of the earliest uses of wireless telegraphy to cover a live sporting event. On the 27th of March 1899, a transmission crossed the English Channel itself, from Wimereux in France to South Foreland Lighthouse in England.

  Marconi then set up an experimental station at the Haven Hotel in Sandbanks, Poole Harbour, where he raised a mast 100 feet high. There he became friends with Charles and Florence van Raalte, owners of nearby Brownsea Island. He later moored his steam yacht, the Elettra, off the island or at the hotel. He bought the Elettra after the First World War and converted it into a floating laboratory. Among her crew was Adelmo Landini, his personal radio operator and an inventor in his own right.

  In December 1898, Britain's lightship service authorised wireless contact between South Foreland lighthouse and the East Goodwin lightship, twelve miles away. On the 17th of March 1899, the East Goodwin sent the first wireless distress signal in history, on behalf of the grounded merchant vessel Elbe. The South Foreland operator received it and summoned help from the Ramsgate lifeboat.

  In 1899, The New York Herald invited Marconi to the United States to cover that year's America's Cup races off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. His first demonstration there transmitted from aboard the SS Ponce. Heading home on the 8th of November 1899, aboard an American Line ship, Marconi's wireless carried news of the recently begun Second Boer War to the passengers, at the request of the line's officials. A week later, on the 15th of November, the SS Saint Paul became the first ocean liner to announce her own return to Britain by wireless. Marconi's station at the Needles on the Isle of Wight reached her 66 nautical miles from the English coast. A shipboard newspaper, the first Transatlantic Times, carried the news before she even docked.

  By the turn of the century, Marconi had proven wireless telegraphy could reach ships far out at sea. The far harder question was whether it could cross an entire ocean.

• 5. From Telegraph To Broadcast

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  In 1901, Marconi built a transmitting station at Rosslare Strand in County Wexford, to link Poldhu in Cornwall with Clifden in County Galway, Ireland. It was part of his plan to signal across the Atlantic and challenge the existing transatlantic telegraph cables. On the 12th of December 1901, using a 500-foot kite-supported antenna at Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland, he announced that he had received the Morse code letter S. It had supposedly been sent from the company's new high-power station at Poldhu, roughly 2,200 miles away.

  No one could verify the exact wavelength Marconi used, later estimated at roughly 350 metres, a frequency near 850 kHz. Sceptics seized on that gap almost immediately. The entire transatlantic path lay in daylight during the test, the worst possible timing, since medium-wave signals cannot travel far during the day because the ionosphere absorbs them. Marconi knew in advance to listen for three repeated clicks representing the letter S, so it was not a blind test. The clicks themselves were reported only faintly and sporadically, indistinguishable from atmospheric static, and no independent observer ever confirmed the reception.

  Facing that scepticism, Marconi organised a more rigorous trial in February 1902, sailing west aboard the SS Philadelphia while recording signals sent daily from Poldhu. He achieved coherer-tape reception up to 1,550 miles and audio reception up to 2,100 miles, both at night. During daylight hours on that same voyage, reception dropped to only about 700 miles, less than half the distance claimed at Newfoundland, where the earlier test had also run in daytime. The results proved radio waves travel much farther after dark, without fully confirming what he said he had heard in Newfoundland.

  In December 1902, transmissions between the Marconi station at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and Poldhu became the first officially confirmed transatlantic wireless messages sent from North America to Europe. From a station near South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Marconi sent a greeting from U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to Britain's King Edward VII on the 18th of January 1903. A regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service between Clifden and Glace Bay finally began on the 17th of October 1907, though the company struggled for years afterward to keep the link reliable, competing against rival inventors building their own high-powered stations.

  In 1915, the Marconi companies finally began serious work with continuous-wave transmission, after the introduction of the oscillating vacuum tube, or valve. Until then they had kept a reputation for technical caution, relying on inefficient spark transmitters suited only to telegraph signalling, well after continuous wave, more efficient and able to carry audio, had become the technology's future.

  At the New Street Works factory in Chelmsford, the Marconi Company staged one of Britain's first public entertainment radio broadcasts on the 15th of June 1920, featuring a performance by Dame Nellie Melba. By 1922, the company was running broadcasting stations at 2MT Writtle near Chelmsford and at 2LO inside Marconi House in London, both of which helped pave the way for the British Broadcasting Company. In 1924, the Marconi-linked firm Radiofono helped found the Unione Radiofonica Italiana, Italy's first radio broadcasting concessionaire and a forerunner of RAI.

  None of this broadcasting success touched the part of Marconi's business that would soon matter most: the wireless sets quietly carried aboard ocean liners.

• 6. A Debt At Sea

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  Before the Titanic disaster, a collision in 1909 between the RMS Republic and the SS Florida off Nantucket had already shown what maritime wireless could do. Republic's Marconi equipment let her operator, Jack Binns, send repeated CQD distress calls. Those calls brought rescue ships to the scene and helped save more than 1,500 people.

  Public awareness of wireless grew further after RMS Titanic sank on the 15th of April 1912, and again after RMS Lusitania went down on the 7th of May 1915. Titanic's radio operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, worked not for the White Star Line but for the Marconi International Marine Communication Company. Survivors were picked up by the Cunard liner RMS Carpathia, 93 kilometres, or 58 miles, from where Titanic sank. When Carpathia docked in New York, Marconi went aboard with a reporter from The New York Times to speak with Bride, the surviving operator.

  On the 18th of June 1912, Marconi testified before the British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry into the Titanic sinking, explaining how marine wireless worked and how it should function in emergencies. Britain's Postmaster-General, Herbert Samuel, later summed up the disaster's lesson: 'Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr Marconi... and his marvellous invention.'

  Marconi himself had been offered free passage on Titanic before she sailed, but had already crossed on Lusitania three days earlier. His daughter Degna later explained that he had paperwork to finish, and preferred that ship's public stenographer.

  The same wireless system that had just saved so many lives was, at that very moment, tangled in a quieter argument over who had actually built it.

• 7. Contested Credit

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  At the center of the 'Italian Navy coherer' controversy is the receiving component Marconi used during his the 12th of December 1901 transatlantic test at Signal Hill: a self-restoring mercury coherer wired to a telephone receiver, not his wireless system as a whole. A Science Museum Group record describes the surviving device as a carbon-mercury-iron semiconductor diode detector, of a type invented by the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose in 1899 and modified between 1899 and 1901. The same record identifies it as the exact detector Marconi used to receive that December 1901 signal. Bose had already described a related iron-mercury-iron coherer with a telephone detector, in a paper he submitted to the Royal Society in 1899.

  According to later historical accounts, Marconi obtained his detector in 1901 from Lieutenant Luigi Solari of the Royal Italian Navy, who had adapted a mercury-contact detector using carbon or iron electrodes sealed inside a glass tube. Through 1902 and 1903, Italian and British technical periodicals disputed who deserved credit, with claims raised on behalf of Paolo Castelli, Solari, and Tommaso Tommasina. Silvanus P. Thompson separately challenged Marconi's own priority, while Marconi and Solari defended their position. Historians have kept arguing about it since. V. J. Phillips called it the 'Italian Navy coherer affair,' while Probir K. Bondyopadhyay has argued the detector Marconi used in 1901 actually derived from Bose's earlier work on self-recovering coherers and semiconductor detection.

  A separate reckoning came decades later, on the 21st of June 1943, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America v. United States, a Court of Claims case over the government's wartime use of wireless patents. The case weighed four patents: two belonging to Marconi, including U.S. Patent No. 763,772 and its reissue No. 11,913, one to Oliver Lodge, and one to John Ambrose Fleming. The Court upheld the invalidation of Marconi's broad patent claims as 'invalid because anticipated.' It found that the inventor John Stone Stone had already covered the same ground, and that Marconi had shown no real advance over Stone merely by making antenna-circuit tuning adjustable, or by borrowing Lodge's variable inductance. The justices also weighed earlier work by Nikola Tesla, Lodge, and Stone, though they said their reading of Stone's own patent made a ruling on all three unnecessary.

  The Court drew a line between Marconi's early practical achievements and the narrower patent claims before it. It noted that his reputation as the first person to achieve working radio transmission rested on his original patent, a separate document from the one it had just invalidated. That distinction meant the ruling never settled the broader question of who, in general, had invented radio.

  None of this legal wrangling in Washington much troubled Marconi's standing back home, where, years earlier, the Italian state had already begun rewarding him with titles and offices of its own.

• 8. Faith, Fascism, And Family

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  In 1914, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Marconi to the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy, in recognition of his service to the nation, and Britain separately made him an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. When Italy joined the Allies in the First World War, Marconi took on military and naval technical roles connected to wireless communication. Italian Senate records show he became a lieutenant in the military engineers in 1915, later held the naval ranks of captain and commander, and was promoted to rear admiral in the reserve in 1936.

  In 1923, Marconi joined the National Fascist Party. Under the regime he rose through several public roles: president of Italy's National Research Council from 1927, and, starting on the 19th of September 1930, president of the Royal Academy of Italy, a post he held for the rest of his life and which also placed him on the Fascist Grand Council. In one speech, Marconi declared, 'I reclaim the honour of being the first fascist in the field of radiotelegraphy, the first who acknowledged the utility of joining the electric rays in a bundle, as Mussolini was the first in the political field who acknowledged the necessity of merging all the healthy energies of the country into a bundle, for the greater greatness of Italy.' During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, press reports of the time said he was expected to help Italian forces with their communications work.

  Research by the historian Annalisa Capristo found that Jewish candidates were systematically excluded from the Royal Academy of Italy during Marconi's presidency, before Italy's 1938 racial laws were even passed. Reporting on Capristo's findings, The Guardian said Marconi marked Jewish candidates' files with the letter 'E,' and that no Jewish candidate was ever admitted to the academy during his tenure.

  Guglielmo met Beatrice O'Brien, daughter of Edward O'Brien, 14th Baron Inchiquin, in 1904, through his friends Charles and Florence van Raalte of Brownsea Island. He married her on the 16th of March 1905, honeymooning on Brownsea Island. They had three daughters, Lucia, who died in 1906, the year of her birth, Degna, and Gioia, and a son, Giulio, who later became the 2nd Marquess. In 1913 the family moved to Rome, where Beatrice served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elena. At Marconi's request, the marriage was annulled on the 27th of April 1927.

  Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali, born on the 2nd of April 1900, was the only daughter of Count Francesco Bezzi-Scali. Marconi's wish to marry her required him to be formally confirmed in the Catholic faith he had been baptised into but raised away from, as a practising Anglican. The couple married in a civil ceremony on the 12th of June 1927, followed by a religious service three days later; Marconi was 53 and Maria was 27. They had one daughter, Maria Elettra Elena Anna, born in 1930. Marconi left his entire fortune to this second family, and nothing to the children of his first marriage.

  In 1931, Pope Pius XI commissioned Marconi to build Vatican Radio's short-wave station, and the first papal broadcast aired on the 12th of February that year. Marconi introduced it himself, telling listeners: 'With the help of God, who places so many mysterious forces of nature at man's disposal, I have been able to prepare this instrument which will give to the faithful of the entire world the joy of listening to the voice of the Holy Father.'

  Marconi had lived with heart disease for years. A later medical review found he had suffered a heart attack roughly a decade earlier, followed by angina, and that his final illness combined acute coronary failure with an irregular heartbeat.

  A state funeral followed his death, and shops on the street where he had lived closed under signs reading 'Closed for national mourning.' At 6 pm the next day, radio transmitters around the world fell silent for two minutes in his honour, and Britain's Post Office asked every broadcasting ship to do the same.

  At his own request, Marconi's funeral was held in Bologna's San Petronio Basilica, and his coffin was placed first in the city's Certosa cemetery. In 1941, his body was moved to the Mausoleum of Guglielmo Marconi, designed by the architect Marcello Piacentini, at Villa Griffone in Pontecchio, the same estate where he had run his first experiments. In 1938, the municipality of Sasso Bolognese and the village of Pontecchio were renamed Sasso Marconi and Pontecchio Marconi in his honour.

  The Italian state later acquired Villa Griffone itself, declaring it a national monument in 1939. The Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi took ownership in 1941, the same year the mausoleum was completed, and the Marconi Museum opened inside the villa in 1999.

  His steam yacht, the Elettra, met a rougher end. The German Kriegsmarine seized and refitted it as a warship in 1943, and Britain's Royal Air Force sank it on the 22nd of January the following year. When the Italian government later tried to raise and rebuild the wreck, the plan was abandoned, and what remained of the Elettra was cut into pieces and scattered among Italian museums.