Guglielmo Marconi with his mother and elder brother around 1880.
College/University
Career
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1910
The Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi portrayed with his daughter Degna, born in 1908.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1912
United Kingdom
Guglielmo Marconi's portrait photo from the book The Year 1912 illustrated published in London in 1913.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1915
Guglielmo Marconi, Italian wireless inventor arrives on the S. S. Lusitania.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1915
Guglielmo Marconi with his family: his wife Beatrice, his daughters Degna and Gioia, and his son Giulio.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1919
United Kingdom
Guglielmo Marconi wearing court dress outside the House of Commons (probably following enquiry) photographed by John Benjamin Stone.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1922
United States
Marconi and Langmuir in General Electrics Research Lab.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1925
United Kingdom
Guglielmo Marconi inventor of the wireless in the garden of Elizabeth Paynter. 13th April 1925.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1927
Rome, Italy
The day of the wedding, Guglielmo Marconi, Italian physicist, next to his second wife Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali. Rome, 15th June 1927.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1930
Capitoline Hill, Rome, Italy
The academicians of Italy Guglielmo Marconi, Enrico Fermi, Pietro Mascagni, Francesco Giordano, Lorenzo Perosi and Italo Balbo for the inauguration of the Academy in Campidoglio. Photo by Luigi Leoni.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1930
Capitoline Hill, Rome, Italy
The head of the Fascist government Benito Mussolini with the Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi in uniform and cocked hat of the members of the Accademia d'Italia. In September 1930 Marconi was named the president of the Reale Accademia d'Italia.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1931
Vatican
Pope Pius XI inaugurating Vatican Radio in the presence of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli and Guglielmo Marconi.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1933
Mary Pickford entertains Senator Marconi. Left to right: Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin, Mrs. Guglielmo Marconi, Senator Guglielmo Marconi, and Mary Pickford.
Gallery of Guglielmo Marconi
1937
Rome, Italy
Guglielmo Marconi with wife holding their daughter Elettra Elana on her 8th birthday. Marconi died of heart paralysis on the same day.
Achievements
Membership
Royal Academy of Italy
Guglielmo Marconi was the President of the Royal Academy of Italy.
The academicians of Italy Guglielmo Marconi, Enrico Fermi, Pietro Mascagni, Francesco Giordano, Lorenzo Perosi and Italo Balbo for the inauguration of the Academy in Campidoglio. Photo by Luigi Leoni.
The head of the Fascist government Benito Mussolini with the Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi in uniform and cocked hat of the members of the Accademia d'Italia. In September 1930 Marconi was named the president of the Reale Accademia d'Italia.
Mary Pickford entertains Senator Marconi. Left to right: Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin, Mrs. Guglielmo Marconi, Senator Guglielmo Marconi, and Mary Pickford.
Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian physicist, inventor, and pioneer in wireless telephony. In 1909 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics, which he shared with German physicist Ferdinand Braun. He later worked on the development of shortwave wireless communication, which constitutes the basis of nearly all modern long-distance radio.
Background
Ethnicity:
Marconi’s father was Italian and his mother of Irish-Scot and English descent.
Guglielmo Marconi was born on April 25, 1874, in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. He was the second son of an Italian landowner, Giuseppe Marconi, and Anne Jameson, daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in County Wexford, Ireland, and granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons. As a youngster, Marconi spent the winter months in England or Florence, Italy, with his mother, brother, and English relatives.
Education
Schooling for the Marconi brothers was divided between their mother, who taught them English and religion, and a tutor, who provided instruction in Italian and other subjects. Perhaps through teaching her sons, Anne Marconi became aware of her son's intellectual abilities and his determination to solve problems on his own. She supported Marconi's efforts throughout her life. He began exploring the properties of electricity at a young age by reading scientific publications and duplicating and modifying experiments. This exploration continued throughout his life resulting in the foundational work he did in the field of wireless technology and telecommunications.
Marconi attended Liceo Classico Niccolini in Livorno. He was not noted for his scholarship. He audited courses at the University of Bologna, because he could not gain admittance to the university for credit, and studied under Augusto Righi, a scientist who had worked with electromagnetic waves. Since Righi was also a neighbor, Marconi would often visit him with questions and ideas. Righi rarely encouraged Marconi's ideas about a practical system of transmitting information using these electromagnetic waves. Still, Marconi showed a dogged persistence in trying out method after method in his experiments.
After studying in Bologna, in 1894 Marconi for a short time became a physics student at the technical school in Livorno, where he studied the work of Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge.
In 1895, after following the experiments of Heinrich Hertz, Marconi (at twenty years of age) began to conduct experiments in radio waves, building much of his own equipment in the attic of his home at the Villa Griffone in Pontecchio (now an administrative subdivision of Sasso Marconi), Italy with the help of his butler Mignani. He was able to do this purely by striking a telegraph key that created electromagnetic waves. Marconi began producing this effect at longer and longer distances, eventually moving outside and sending the signals over a distance of several hundred yards. Initially, distances were overcome simply by using more powerful electrical charges, a condition that would never allow practical wireless communication to travel very far. Marconi eventually found that if he placed part of the transmitter on the ground, resistance was cut dramatically and the signal would travel much farther. Thus, Marconi invented the grounded antenna and began sending telegraph signals over distances of up to two miles (regardless of hills or other obstacles).
After the Italian Ministry of Post and Telegraph rejected his initial presentation of the invention, Marconi took it to England. After applying for a patent to protect his idea, he began working to gain British support. Since his mother was Irish, he had several family connections in England and was able to arrange a presentation of the invention to William Preece of the British postal system in 1896. Preece became an avid supporter and provided postal system personnel to help Marconi continue to develop his system. By 1899, Marconi had established a wireless link across thirty-two miles of the English Channel.
The wireless system as it then existed allowed for only one person at a time to transmit in a given geographical area. If multiple transmissions were sent simultaneously, they were incomprehensible or canceled each other out. Marconi looked for a way to tune the signal to specific wavelengths. By 1900, he had succeeded in developing a system of tuned multiplex telegraphy, which allowed multiple messages to be sent from the same transmitter simultaneously with each message being received accurately by different receivers in different locations.
Another obstacle to be overcome by Marconi was a belief by many scientists that electromagnetic waves would not be able to follow the curve of the earth and could, therefore, never transmit signals across the vastness of an ocean. In 1899, Marconi had transmitted signals from ship to shore over a span of sixty-six nautical miles, far more than enough to ensure that the waves were somehow bending around or traveling through the ocean to reach the shoreline. Marconi was convinced that the wireless could span the ocean, and he set out to prove it. He had a powerful transmitting station built in Poldhu, on the coast of England, and set sail for St. John's, Newfoundland. Once there, Marconi attached a receiving wire to a kite and flew the kite at a height of four hundred feet. To anyone who expressed interest in what he was doing, Marconi pretended that he was working on contacting passing ships on their transatlantic voyages. On December 12, 1901, he received the letter "S" several times and had an assistant verify the reception. He then announced to the world that he had received a message from England, which was more than twenty-one hundred miles away across the Atlantic.
Still, many people doubted Marconi's claim because of the bias of his only witness and the simplicity of the message. Therefore, Marconi outfitted the ship Philadelphia with sophisticated wireless equipment, a telegraph recorder that would mark the signals on paper tape, and a public listening-room so passengers and crew could serve as witnesses to the receptions. The experiment, which took place during a 1902 voyage where the ship sailed from Cherbourg to New York, was a success. Marconi recorded receiving signals from over a distance of more than two thousand miles. As a by-product of his experiment, Marconi also found that the signals traveled best at night, but this was a phenomenon that he was at a loss to explain.
In 1907, Marconi finally perfected the system of transatlantic wireless and began commercial service between Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and Clifden, Ireland. His work on wireless brought him the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909.
The early 1910s were full of lawsuits in which Marconi was forced to defend his patent rights. He emerged victorious, however, and the results were financially profitable for his British, American, and international companies. In 1916, during World War I, America wanted to avoid foreign control in wireless properties that were being used by the military. As a result, the American Marconi Company was forced by the United States government to merge with General Electric. Thus, Marconi lost the influence he had established in wireless communication in America. In his home base of Britain, however, Marconi and his companies were influential in the startup of public radio broadcasting and helped to establish the British Broadcasting Company, which later became the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Marconi continued to experiment on improving radio broadcasting. He eventually was able to send messages in specific directions and around the globe. He also performed experiments with radar and with microwave, proving that microwaves could also travel beyond the horizon of the earth. In 1924, he set up a system of wireless stations that linked England to the British colonies around the world. He also set up a radio service for the Vatican in Rome in 1931 and created the first microwave link so that the Pope's messages could instantly be sent several miles away to the short-wave transmitter that could then broadcast the message live to the world.
Failing health restricted Marconi's activity for much of the last ten years of his life. He died of heart failure in 1937.
(This is a posthumous book of letters of Guglielmo Marconi.)
1941
Religion
Guglielmo Marconi was baptized Catholic but had been brought up as a member of the Anglican Church. He became a confirmed Catholic in order to marry Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali.
Politics
Marconi joined the Italian Fascist party in 1923. In 1930, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini appointed him President of the Royal Academy of Italy, which made Marconi a member of the Fascist Grand Council. Later in life, Marconi was an active Fascist and an apologist for their ideology and actions such as the attack by Italian forces in Ethiopia.
Views
Marconi's approach to patents and business was very conservative. When applying for patents or support for his work, he would explain the function of his invention or outline the improvements over previous methods but did not include full disclosure of the design until a patent was granted. He followed the same procedures when demonstrating his equipment. This method protected his work from others and allowed him more fully to realize the monetary value of his systems.
Quotations:
"Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time."
"The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous."
"I am proud to be a Christian. I believe not only as a Christian, but as a scientist as well. A wireless device can deliver a message through the wilderness. In prayer the human spirit can send invisible waves to eternity, waves that achieve their goal in front of God."
"Long experience has taught me not always to believe in the limitations indicated by purely theoretical considerations. These, as we well know, are based on insufficient knowledge of all the relevant factors."
Membership
Royal Academy of Italy
,
Italy
Grand Council of Fascism
,
Italy
Senate of the Kingdom of Italy
,
Italy
Personality
Guglielmo Marconi had a rather eccentric personality. He so adored the research ship that he named a daughter after her - Elettra. Never receiving formal scientific and engineering education it was his interest in physics that inspired him for his discoveries and inventions.
Quotes from others about the person
"Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi ... and his marvellous invention." Herbert Samuel, Britain's Postmaster General in 1910s
Interests
sailing
Philosophers & Thinkers
Benjamin Franklin
Politicians
Benito Mussolini
Connections
Guglielmo Marconi married Beatrice O’Brien in 1905. They had three daughters, Degna, Gioia, and Lucia, and a son, Giulio, 2nd Marchese Marconi. But the marriage broke down and they divorced in 1924. He remarried Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali in 1927, they had one daughter, Elettra Elena Anna. For unexplained reasons, Marconi left his entire fortune to his second wife and their only child, and nothing to the children of his first marriage.
Making Contact! Marconi Goes Wireless
Monica Kulling's playful, informative text, combined with the compelling illustrations of artist Richard Rudnicki, bring an amazing inventor and his times to life.