Guglielmo Marconi - Pioneer of Radio Transmission | 3V
Guglielmo Marconi - Illustration from Punch, or The London Charivari (October 22, 1913)
December 12th, 1901: St. Johns, Newfoundland
“Signals are being received. Weather makes continuous tests very difficult. One balloon carried away yesterday.”
S.
Struck by the coastal winter gales of Newfoundland, a hexagonal Baden-Powell kite strained against its string and copper wires. Overseeing this windborne receiver, the bright-eyed Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, waited atop the appropriately named Signal Hill for a signal from over two thousand miles away.
The weather had not been kind to this experiment, either side of the Atlantic. Marconi and his assistants, the former Post Office engineer George Kemp, and Percy Paget, persisted against many setbacks. Antennas had been blown down, balloons carried away, and copper wires snapped by the wind.
Yet as the kite cavorted above them, with their equipment set up in an abandoned diphtheria hospital, they waited.
At 12:30 Marconi received the preestablished message from Poldhu, Cornwall; just a few clicks of morse code. DOT DOT DOT. The single letter, “S”.
April 15th, 1912: RMS Titanic, Mid-Atlantic:
“I’ve witnessed the most harrowing scenes of frantic people coming here to me, and to the offices of the Company to implore and beg us to find out if there might not be some hope for their relations […] Although only a few were saved everyone seems so very grateful to ‘wireless’. I can’t go about New York without being mobbed and cheered. Worse than Italy.”
S.O.S.
At seventeen minutes past midnight, in no doubt that the ship would sink, Jack Philips and his assistant, Harold Bride, sent out the following distress signal to all ships in the area:
“CQD CQD SOS Titanic Position 41.44 N 50.24 W. Require immediate assistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking.”
These men – contracted but not employed by the White Star Line – worked for the Nobel Prize winning pioneer of radio transmission, Guglielmo Marconi. They were in no doubt that if there were to be survivors in this freezing ice berg alley, assistance had to be forthcoming. More traditional distress signals had been sent, several flares lighting up the night sky, but they had been dismissed by the officers on the nearby S.S. Californian.
Aboard the Carpathia, another Marconi man, Harold Cottam, just as he was undressing for bed, heard one of the Titanic’s messages and relayed it to his captain. Rescue was on the way. Wireless transmission had come far in the first decade of the twentieth-century, and with this life-saving demonstration of its use Marconi found himself bombarded with thanks and praise.
When Carpathia arrived in New York with its seven hundred survivors, it was greeted by a deeply affected Marconi. He spoke with Bride, and was told how Philips went down with the ship, transmitting Marconi-grams until the very end.
Jack Philips joined over one thousand five-hundred drowned that mid-April morning.
After the sinking of the Titanic, international laws were brought into place requiring twenty-four hour wireless operation aboard passenger liners - all on the same wavelength - and for operators to practice intermittent radio silence to ensure that distress signals can be heard.
Wireless was recognised as being indispensable, and Marconi was hailed as the hero of the hour.
July 20th, 1937: Rome, Italy:
“Have I done the world good, or have I added a menace?”
Silence.
Guglielmo Marconi, proud and upstanding member of the Grand Council of Fascism, was taken by a ninth and fatal heart attack.
His final years had been spent establishing Vatican Radio, as a confidant of Mussolini, in clandestine experiments with ‘death rays’, and fearing a coming conflict between Italy, the land of his birth, and England, the land where he forged his achievements.
In Italy, while his successes were celebrated with patriotic pride, there was always the suspicion of the man having been amongst the Anglo-Saxon’s too long. In England, while his genius was clearly recognised and supported, he was still a foreigner.
Outsider always but never ignored, Marconi had by his inventiveness and entrepreneurial effort accelerated the modern notion of the interconnected, networked world. Yet a device that could send out a cry for help could also be used in calling for harm. He mulled on this aspect of his legacy; but no matter, it was too late.
Turning more and more to faith, a miniature crucifix around his neck, it is said that sometime between his fifth and sixth heart attack Marconi became transfixed by a strange theory. After a lifetime devoted to the transmission of sound and messages, he became convinced that once a sound was created it reverberated forever, becoming fainter but never truly disappearing. Following this theory, he dreamt that if he could only make a microphone sensitive enough, he could hear anything, everything, forever. The microphone could bring it back. With this device, in these final hopeless months, he dreamt of retrieving Christ’s Sermon on the Mount to guide the madness of the day.
On his deathbed, gazing at his lifted forearm, he asked his physician, Cesare Frugoni, why it was that he was still alive even though his heart had stopped beating. Frugoni comforted him by explaining that it is only a matter of his arm being in a raised position that he couldn’t perceive a pulse. Marconi gave a wry smile, “No my dear doctor, this would be correct for the veins but not for an artery. But I don’t care, I don’t care at all.”
Full Illustration from Punch, or The London Charivari (October 22, 1913)
References
· Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
· Marconi, My Beloved by Maria Cristina Marconi (Boston: Dante University of America Press, 2001)
· Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music by Greg Milner (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)
· ‘Titanic, Marconi and the Wireless Telegraphy’, The Science Museum, 24 October 2018 [https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/titanic-marconi-and-wireless-telegraph]
· ‘Guglielmo Marconi: Radio Star’ by Roger Bridgman, Physics World, 30 November 2001 [https://physicsworld.com/a/guglielmo-marconi-radio-star/]
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