Guglielmo Marconi
(1874-1937)
G'day folks,
Welcome to some background on another inventor with great passion.
Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi
(1874-1937) developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful
long-distance wireless telegraph and in 1901 broadcast the first transatlantic
radio signal. His company’s Marconi radios ended the isolation of ocean travel
and saved hundreds of lives, including all of the surviving passengers from the
sinking Titanic. In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his radio
work.
Guglielmo Marconi’s Early Years
Guglielmo Marconi was born
in 1874 in Bologna, Italy. His father was a wealthy landowner and his mother
was a member of Ireland’s Jameson family of distillers. Marconi was educated by
tutors and at the Livorno Technical Institute and the University of Bologna.
In 1894 Marconi
became fascinated with the discovery by German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz
of “invisible waves” generated by electromagnetic interactions. Marconi built his
own wave-generating equipment at his family’s estate and was soon sending
signals to locations a mile away. After failing to interest the Italian
government in his work, Marconi decided to try his luck in London.
Guglielmo Marconi in England
The 22-year-old Marconi and
his mother arrived in England in 1896 and quickly found interested backers,
including the British Post Office. Within a year Marconi was broadcasting up to
12 miles and had applied for his first patents. A year later, he set up a
wireless station on the Isle of Wight that allowed Queen
Victoria to send messages to her son Prince Edward aboard the royal
yacht.
By 1899 Marconi’s signals
had crossed the English Channel. The same year, Marconi traveled to the United
States, where he gained publicity offering wireless coverage of the America’s
Cup yacht race from off the coast of New
Jersey.
Guglielmo Marconi and the Transatlantic “S”
Marconi began to work on
improving his wireless for a transatlantic broadcast. Many physicists argued
that radio waves traveled in straight lines, making it impossible for signals
to be broadcast beyond the horizon, but Marconi believed they would follow the
planet’s curvature. (In fact, the waves do travel in straight lines but bounce
off the ionosphere, approximating a curve.) After failed attempts to receive a
signal from England on Cape Cod, Massachusetts,
Marconi decided to try a shorter distance, from Cornwall to Newfoundland.
The radio signal broadcast from Poldhu, Cornwall, was
as powerful as Marconi’s team could make it—at full power, the equipment sent
out sparks a foot long. Some 2,100 miles away, atop Signal Hill in St. John’s,
Marconi attached an antenna first to a balloon, which blew away, and then to a
kite on a 500-foot tether. On December 12, 1901, he picked up a faint three-dot
sequence—the Morse Code letter “s.”
Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Prize and Titanic
In 1909 Marconi shared the
Nobel Prize in Physics with the German physicist Karl F. Braun, the inventor of
the cathode ray tube. Marconi’s accolades were not without controversy: many
other men had claims (some dubious, some not) to the “Father of Radio” title.
As early as 1895, the Russian physicist Alexander Popov was broadcasting
between buildings, while in India Jagdish Chandra Bose was using radio waves to
ring bells and trigger explosions. In 1901 the Serbian-American electrical
pioneer Nikola
Tesla said he had developed a wireless telegraph in 1893; in 1943
the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated four Marconi radio patents, citing Tesla’s
prior work.
As shipping
companies realized the radio telegraph’s usefulness for passenger
communication, navigation reports and distress signals, Marconi Company
radios—operated by trained cadres of “Marconi Men”—became standard equipment.
When RMS Titanic
struck an iceberg on April 14, 1913, its Marconi operator was able to summon
RMS Carpathia to the scene to pick up 700 survivors.
Guglielmo Marconi’s Later Years and Legacy
For the next two decades,
Marconi continued refining his inventions, experimenting with shortwave
broadcasts and testing transmission distances aboard his 700-ton yacht,
Elettra. He returned to Italy, became a supporter of Benito
Mussolini and annulled his first marriage—to an Irish artist with
whom he had four children—to wed an Italian noblewoman. In 1935 he toured
Brazil and Europe defending Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. He died two
years later of a heart attack in Rome. In his honor, radio stations in America,
England and Italy broadcast several minutes of silence.
Clancy's comment: Mm ... Not so sure about his quote above regarding war. Modern inventions and technology seem to have heightened war efforts wherever they are in the world. And, the end result is bloody gruesome.
I'm ...
