The 1890s and early 1900s were a remarkable decade for inventions
that changed the world, including Rontgen's X-Rays and Tesla's
experiments with electricity. Another was the wireless - the 'new
telegraphy' invented by Guglielmo Marconi, who turned a boyhood
fascination with electricity into an entirely new form of
communication. Thomas Edison said of Marconi, 'He delivers more
than he promises.' Marconi was an amateur, an eccentric iconoclast,
and he had little idea how his electronic signals actually worked,
but work they did, even worrying genteel society who thought that
ladies' modesty and privacy would be offended by these invisible
rays that went through walls! Marconi made his discovery in Italy,
but took it to London where his invention stood a greater chance of
being taken up. Until then telegraphic cables were the only way of
sending messages, apart from semaphore and carrier pigeon. His
noisy spark transmitter sent a wireless signal which could be
picked up by anyone who had a receiver. Importantly, wireless
allowed communication from ship to shore, and ship to ship. The
messages were received as Morse code printout and deciphered into
longhand - even Queen Victoria had a wireless link with her son.
Marconi quickly became famous but he had to prove he could compete
with the cable telegraph and send messages over hundreds of miles.
The book gives a fascinating description of the age: Marconi's
'invisible forces' encouraged spiritualism and belief in
communications from the dead; Dr Crippen was caught by the use of
Marconi's invention as the murderer sailed to the US with his
lover; and the rescue of some of the Titanic passengers was a
sensational success for Marconi's wireless. In his personal life,
however, Marconi was unable to relax because of the threat of his
competitors, and his marriage eventually collapsed under the
strain. Eventually the spark transmitters were replaced by
high-speed alternators which could transmit speech, but Marconi had
blazed the trail of communications technology. Detailed, factual
and readable, this is a fascinating study of Marconi's life and
career. (Kirkus UK)
The intriguing story of how wireless was invented by Guglielmo
Marconi - and how it amused Queen Victoria, saved the lives of the
Titanic survivors, tracked down criminals and began the radio
revolution. Wireless was the most fabulous invention of the 19th
century: the public thought it was magic, the popular newspapers
regarded it as miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day
(in Europe and America) could not understand how it worked. In
1897, when the first wireless station was established by Marconi in
a few rooms of the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, nobody
knew how far these invisible waves could travel through the
'ether', carrying Morse Coded messages decipherable at a receiving
station. (The definitive answer was not discovered till the 1920s,
by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry filling the
airwaves with a cacaphony of sounds - most of it American.) Marconi
himself was the son of an Italian father and an Irish mother (from
the Jameson whiskey family); he grew up in Italy and was fluent in
Italian and English, but it was in England that his invention first
caught on. Marconi was in his early twenties at the time (he died
in 1937). With the 'new telegraphy' came the real prospect of
replacing the network of telegraphic cables that criss-crossed land
and sea at colossal expense. Initially it was the great ships that
benefited from the new invention - including the Titanic, whose
survivors owed their lives to the wireless.
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