BY FRANCESCO PARESCE

It is almost exactly 100 years since my grandfather's masterful technological and public relations coup of sending and receiving the first wireless message across the Atlantic ocean at the age of 27. At this point in his career, he was the majority stockholder and director of research of a reasonably well established and financially sound company called the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. with an industrial-size plant in Chelmsford, England, the owner of two fundamental English patents on a wireless communication system, the holder of a practical monopoly on wireless communication in the British Empire and the focus of an incredible amount of international attention and acclaim.

All of this from a young foreigner with no formal training, with scant if any understanding of the physics involved and using what looked to most serious scientists as home-made and rudimentary techniques borrowed, for the most part, from other workers in the field. No wonder then that, in 1897 when the details of Marconi's apparatus became better appreciated, the eminent English physicist G. FitzGerald labeled him derisively "an Italian adventurer". Great experimental physicists like Hertz, Righi and Lodge had, after all, set out the basic concepts involved in the generation, transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves in the laboratory well before Marconi. The task of "harnessing these oscillations" for practical purposes, as Marconi put it, seemed rather trivial to these representatives of the scientific establishment if they thought about it at all. Over-the-optical- horizon communications with these waves seemed to them in any case far-fetched if not impossible.

So, how did this astonishing almost meteoritic success come to pass? What were the crucial elements in the development of his "invention" in just a few short years and the background from which they sprang? What drove Marconi to take on the world for what seemed to most an impossible dream? Was he one of those one-of-a-kind geniuses or fanatics that just happened to walk on to the stage at the right time and place with an unshakable but quixotic vision? Was he born with super-natural powers as the "wizard of the waves" or the "magician of the ether" as he is best known in his native Italy? Or was he a rather special but otherwise ordinary mortal striving against long odds in showing the way to a sympathetic but mostly uncomprehending public? More importantly, are there lessons to be learned from his example that could be useful for future 21st century technological enterprises of the same caliber?

In the following paragraphs, I will try to answer briefly some of these questions on the basis of the most recent research on the genesis of his invention and on the development of long distance wireless communication systems in his lifetime. I hope to show by this work that Marconi's personal history, although obviously peculiar in some respects, followed a rather predictable path wherein his successes and failures can be rather naturally attributable to specific causes inherent in his training and in the basic process of bringing an invention to successful commercial exploitation. Of particular interest is the very difficult role Marconi had to play in the "transition region" between science, technology and the commercial market place.

There are many good books, articles and monographs on Marconi and his times to which the interested reader may refer for more details and broader coverage than I can afford in this brief contribution. The outstanding technical, personal and sociological overview of Marconi's place in the history of wireless communications entitled "Spark and Syntony" by Hugh G.J. Aitken merits the place of honor in my estimation. Barbara Vallotti's thesis entitled "La formazione di Guglielmo Marconi" at the University of Bologna is the most recent worthy and important addition to the subject of Marconi's early training.

The European Patent Office's recent re-examination of the basis of Marconi's English patents (EPO Gazette # 12, 30 June 1997) presents an extraordinarily interesting modern view of this rather esoteric and still controversial subject. Finally, my mother's (Marconi's first daughter) biography contains the best view of Marconi as a man from the one person who was closest to him for the longest period of time. I will concentrate here on what I personally consider to be the most salient and compelling issues illuminating his life and times from a modern scientific perspective.

Invited paper given at the special session on Marconi Sentential at the IEEE GLOBECOM 2001 meeting November 28, 2001 San Antonio, Texas.