BY FRANCESCO PARESCE

Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy on April 25, 1874 from the union of Annie Jameson and Giuseppe Marconi. Giuseppe belonged to the upper middle class of his town and was an eminently practical man intent on taking good care of the administration of his agricultural interests. Much has been said about this man in the past not all very favorable but it is quite clear today from all available reliable sources that he gave Guglielmo all the financial support and moral encouragement one could expect under the particular circumstances in which the family lived at the time. Giuseppe's practical, utilitarian, cost conscious, down to earth approach to life was certainly passed on from father to son. Relations between the two were always formal (Giuseppe was 51 years old when Guglielmo was born) as befitted the times but cordial even when Guglielmo was at his head-strong worst. In the most difficult times at the beginning of his career in England, Guglielmo never failed to inform his father of the tribulations and concerns he was going through and to ask for his advice and financial support.

Annie Jameson was altogether of another breed and how the two met is an interesting story in itself too long to describe here and how they survived such a peculiar union is a mystery but it is, in any case, again testimony to the patience and devotion of Giuseppe to his family that he supported all their peculiar habits with equanimity and restraint. And peculiar they were indeed because Annie, brought up in the country in Ireland, had very particular ideas regarding the civil and religious education of her son Guglielmo.

One of the enduring mysteries surrounding Marconi is his almost complete lack of any kind of formal schooling which would seem at odds at a superficial glance both with family tradition and the open-mindedness and worldliness shown in other occasions by both parents.
In my mind, this had certainly something to do with Annie's profound distaste for the Catholic Church ingrained in her by her Protestant Irish upbringing and probably confirmed by her association with the late 19th century society of Bologna, a very recent and somewhat reluctant convert from a Papal state to the secular constitutional monarchy of Savoia Italy.

In a letter to Giuseppe, for example, Annie asks him to make sure that his son will be able to "learn the good principles of my religion and that he not come into contact with the great superstition that is commonly taught to small children in Italy". In another letter she makes her husband swear that " he will not let his son be educated by the Priests". That in itself would have been quite difficult in Bologna where the good bourgeoisie almost invariably sent their sons if not their daughters to the best schools then available namely those run by Jesuit "Priests".

Guglielmo Marconi between his parents Annie and Giuseppe. His older brother Alfonso looks on behind him.

The considerable distance between their country home and the city center where these schools were located and Guglielmo's early health problems may have been other incidental causes of Marconi's unorthodox education but it is likely that they were used by Annie as expedients to cover the real reason behind her educational methods. Consequently, Guglielmo was essentially taught at home by Annie herself
and a series of tutors initially and in a variety of temporary schools in Florence and Leghorn where Annie took her son on extended visits later.

Especially unorthodox, at least for the conservative and rather rigid educational establishment of most European countries of the time, was Annie's insistence that her son be given free rein to seriously study only what he enjoyed most and gave scant, if any, attention to his performance in those subjects in which he had no interest which, unfortunately, were those that most schools set great store in including grammar, literature, history, arithmetic etc. She made, instead, a great effort to find for him the best possible tutors in his favorite subjects mainly in the sciences and music. Of particular significance was his apprenticeship with the Leghorn high school physics professor Vincenzo Rosa in whose laboratory Guglielmo picked up the first important notions and mastery of those experimental techniques that were to form such a crucial aspect of his later career.

An especially enduring myth of the many about Marconi concerns the seemingly miraculous and mysterious early appearance in his life of his interest and involvement in electrical phenomena and, in particular, in wireless communication. Recent research in this period of his life by Barbara Vallotti has convincingly shown that the actual development of his interest was gradual and systematic throughout his formative years between 15 and 20. He apparently carried out a rather impressive series of experiments in electrical engineering of increasing complexity both in Rosa's laboratory and in the attic of the Marconi country home in Bologna. These experiments culminated in the famous "gunshot" experiment of the winter of 1895 when he was just 21 wherein he was able to send electromagnetic signals a distance of 2 km over a hill blocking direct "optical" view of the receiver.

Several significant elements characterized these early efforts. One was that he was able to develop, without annoying interruptions due to the usual scholastic and social obligations of other boys his age like lessons, exams, parties, etc, a manual dexterity and general laboratory experience and practice that was to prove crucial in his later experiments. This certainly included a good dose of stubborn persistence in the face of adversity and, especially, a healthy resistance to frustration.

Another was his reliance for all kinds of electrical engineering information and equipment on a weekly semi-professional science magazine called L'Elettricita' akin to The Electrician of today. From this periodical, which probably represented almost his sole reading text in those years, he extracted most of the early technical notions and ideas that he needed to carry out his experiments. In particular, it gave Marconi the possibility of ordering the proper materials that were critical to the success of his enterprise. For example, the special materials needed for the filings in the heart of his "invention", the coherer detector, were all obtained this way.

It seems quite plausible, moreover, that he hit upon the very idea of wireless communication by reading this magazine since issue 44 of 1893 contains an article extolling the importance of electricity and claiming that "the slow vibrations of the ether would allow the marvelous concept of wireless telegraphy without underwater cables, without any of the expensive installations of our time". It is doubtful, but not impossible, that he was aware of Crookes' famous prescient article on the same subject that appeared in the Fortnightly Review in February 1892.

The first device developed by Marconi in Bologna in 1895 for wireless transmission. The antenna is a tin plate from an oil barrel. Another metal plate was laid on or buried in the ground. At the transmitting station, a spark gap (instrument on the table on the left) was connected between the two plates while at the receiving station the detector (a coherer, instrument on the table at the right) was connected between the plates.

Another important characteristic clearly present in his early outlook was the concept already well formed in his mind that he needed to properly protect his ideas from infringement by others by means of patents. Already in early 1893 at the age of 19 he was informing his cousin that he had "been very busy with my electrical experiments which I hope may succeed at last. I think of getting out my patents in August". Thus, he already felt keenly the necessity to proceed efficiently with the commercial exploitation of the "all kinds of inventions and discoveries" he was playing with since the age of fifteen. It also illustrates how much Marconi was influenced by his father's earthy, practical mentality from the very beginning, a mentality that would prove useful much later in his career when he was faced with the hard task of turning his invention into a successful commercial enterprise.

But what exactly did this invention he made while still not much more than a boy in Italy in the years 1894-1896 when he defined himself "an ardent amateur of electricity" actually boil down to technically? His truly "unique" discovery, in essence, regarded the fact that by elevating his transmitting and receiving antennas a fair distance above ground and grounding properly one end of the antenna he could transmit intelligible signals over the then astonishing distance of several kilometers even over such obstacles as walls and hills that should have been impossible to penetrate if the waves acted like those in the optical spectrum.

In retrospect it is clear that, by pure trial and error and considerable will power exercised over several years of painstaking experimentation and not in the "flash" so dear to later chroniclers, he discovered that electromagnetic waves of long wavelength would propagate in free space over considerable distances and interposed obstacles in contrast to the short ones used up to then in the laboratory.

We should emphasize here at this point that although his "invention" was always the subject of intense and sometimes acrimonious controversy and debate as to its exact character and priority there is no question whatsoever that absolutely nobody before him had been able to accomplish as much. Although the concept of the grounded vertical antenna was not new in itself (Franklin's kite and Popov's lightning conductor being well known precursors), it was Marconi's use of it as a device to transmit and receive signals that was completely new and revolutionary.

We now know, of course, that, at the roughly 1-10 meter long wavelengths he was probably using, he was taking good advantage of the ground or surface wave that, at these low frequencies, follows closely the contours of the earth. Higher frequency waves such as those generated by a small dipole antenna in the lab would be quasi-optical in their propagation characteristics and not penetrate much beyond the line of sight. For greater distance coverage, use of the ionospherically reflected sky wave would be more practical but VHF waves would not have been the best choice either since they do not refract well from a plasma..

Everything else about his wireless telegraphic system he developed in Bologna besides, perhaps, the exact form of his inspired antenna system was known and developed in one form or another by a whole suite of very able experimenters like Hertz, Lodge, Calzecchi-Onesti, Branly, Righi, and Popov (who used his grounded antenna for detecting atmospheric disturbances) of whose work he had quite detailed information through his assiduous reading of L'Elettricita' or directly through his personal association with Righi in Bologna.

What was essential is that he had brought each previously known component of his system to the best level of performance possible with the technology of the day, a system that was very precisely suited to his one and very simple and almost obsessive objective: sending and receiving intelligible signals over the greatest possible distances.

All the people mentioned above did much to advance basic knowledge in the science and technology of electromagnetic waves but none saw their practical potential for wireless communication. Marconi himself was to remark that, at that time: "My chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it in practice". As Aitken put it " the commercial potential of wireless telegraphy which was so obvious to Marconi was not self-evident to others".