Guglielmo Marconi, the man who connected the world

Accustomed to connecting with the most remote places in the world with a click, we often forget that the global interconnection in which we live is a recent phenomenon. And it is largely due to the genius and resourcefulness of an Italian: Guglielmo Marconi. Just over a century ago, thanks to a combination of skill, tenacity, foresight and timing, Marconi experimented, popularized - and above all patented - a radio system that profoundly and irrevocably changed the way the world communicates. The Bolognese inventor had a long journey through discoveries, intuitions, patents and races against time to precede other scholars and scientists. A ride that Marco Raboy, professor emeritus of Communication and New Media at McGill University in Montreal, reconstructs in a compelling way in the powerful biography “Marconi. The man who connected the world” (Hoepli editore, 2024, Euro 29.90, pp. 640. Also Ebook).

Based on unpublished archival materials, Raboy's book is the first to meticulously explore and connect the many significant moments of Marconi's biography: from his beginnings in Italy, to his revolutionary experiments in transatlantic communication, to his role in world affairs. Until his death in 1937, Marconi was at the center of all the major innovations in the field of electronic communications, courted by powerful scientific, political and financial interests, and followed by the media, who treated him like a real star. The inventor was decorated by the Tsar of Russia, appointed an Italian senator and knighted by King George V of England, awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, all before the age of 40. In the last ten years of his life he eventually became a leading figure in Mussolini-dominated Italy.

An extraordinary life, at very high speed and extremely modern. A life that Raboy restores by bringing out the Marconi man, as well as recounting the era in which he lived, an era marked by the great hopes of the Belle Époque, the tragedy of the First World War and the great post-war unrest, which paved the way to dictatorships in Italy and Germany. In this whirlwind of events Marconi was the one who was able to see further than others. To understand this, just retrace the birth of what we now call wireless, wireless communication. Before Marconi, in fact, one could only communicate with the telegraph, one of the great inventions of the nineteenth century. It was an extraordinary medium for its time but with some limitations. Long-distance transmissions were very slow and there were few lines available because the infrastructure (poles, thousands of kilometers of wires) was expensive. Scientists therefore embarked on a great challenge to create a wireless telegraph. The competition between the most brilliant minds of the time was won by Guglielmo Marconi, at the time an amateur and self-taught physicist who carried out his first experiments in the attic of his home in Bologna, the city where he was born on 25 April 1874. Attending at the university of his city at the lessons of Professor Augusto Righi (1850-1920), the highest Italian authority on waves, Marconi became convinced of the possibility of using them to establish remote communications without wire connections. He spent the winter of 1894-1895 making tests and experiments; finally, in the spring of 1895, he managed to receive intelligible telegraph signals up to 2,400 meters away.

The Bolognese scientist, after having in vain offered the result of his research exclusively to the Italian government, on the advice of his mother went to England, where he attracted the interest of the postmaster general. He obtained the first patent, the decisive one, for the wireless telegraphy system on 2 June 1896 in London and two years later he founded one of the first startups in the capital, Marconi's Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company. Radiotelegraphy, or more simply radio, was born.

The progress of the new telegraph was very rapid. In 1898 Marconi managed to solve the problem of interference between multiple broadcasting stations, and then extended the range of communications to a few hundred kilometers: on 6 December 1901 the first intercontinental connection was created from Poldhu in Cornwall to Cap Cod in America. Six years later, in October 1907, the Marconi Corporation inaugurated the first public radiotelegraphy service across the Atlantic with the birth of a new professional figure, that of the "marconist", also known as radiotelegraphist, the operator responsible for radio communications on ships or aircraft, named in honor of Marconi. The usefulness of the service was tested on January 23, 1909, when the SOS launched by the American ocean liner Republic allowed the rescue of more than 1,700 people; even the 705 survivors of the Titanic in 1912 owed their lives to radio rescue. For all these merits, in November 1909, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. The system developed by Marconi was initially not capable of transmitting the human voice or prolonged sounds but only the Morse Code signals already in use in the telegraph. On 30 May 1924 Marconi also achieved the first intercontinental human voice transmission between Poldhu and Sydney, Australia. The great inventor died on July 20, 1937, while working on the technique of microwave radio communications, developed in the years of the Second World War to carry out detections and radiolocalisations with radar and similar systems.

In short, saying that Marconi invented the radio is simply an understatement. Above all, he was the inventor of wireless, the prophet of the digital age. From cell phones to smartphones, from tablets to satellite TV, from GPS to the microwaves captured by the Big Bang, there is no object in our multifaceted technological world that does not date back to its invention. He was therefore more than any other scientist of the 20th century a forerunner of the modern Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.