Full Text of "My Father Marconi"

Full text of "My Father Marconi" MY FATHER, MARCONI This richly detailed biography of a fas cinating man Guglielmo Marconi, the "father of wireless" is written with lively affection and understanding by his eldest daughter. Beginning with Marconi s boyhood in northern Italy nearly a century ago, the author vividly re-creates the early life of the scientist who was to change the whole history of communication. Com pletely captured by contemporary dis coveries in electricity, Marconi was dedi cated to the private little world of his attic laboratory, where he spent exhaust ing months testing his first plans for a wireless telegraph. Supported by Ms de voted Irish mother, and opposed by his Italian father, who felt Marconi s experi ments were only childish tinkering, the young man finally assembled the first wireless telegraph and transmitted radio signals several hundred meters* He was then twenty years old. For most men this would have been the climax of an outstanding scientific career. For Marconi this was only the beginning. Stormy and dramatic years followed, for the Italian government re jected his patent, and he reluctantly traveled to England, where his ideas found enthusiastic acceptance. With im mediacy and authority, the author shares these times of trial, climaxed by the ex citement of high triumph when, in 1901, he Hashed the first transatlantic signal from Newfoundland to Cornwall prov ing by this one brilliant experiment that world-wide communication was possible. (continued on back flap) JACKET DESIGN BY RUPERT FINEOOtD 92 {.132 to iMarconi ay father 9 Marconi 62-09748 92 ,G21; : i uarcon:l 5"/50 Uy fat her ^ .Viarconi 62-0974C MAY feu- MY FATHER, MARCONI DEGNA MARCONI MY FATHER, MARCONI Mc-Graw Hill Book Company, Inc. NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON MY FATHER, MARCONI Copyright 1962 by McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-11199 First Edition 40280 Editing and revisions by Suzanne Cleaves and Lael Wertenbaker FOR MY SON FRANCESCO, GRANDSON OF GUGLIELMO MARCONI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS jLYJLany people have helped me during the years when I was collecting material for this book ami to all of them I wish to ex press rny gratitude. My father s old colleagues shared their recollections of him, and Mr. Ronald Ferguson, until the end of 1961 Managing Di rector of The Marconi International Marine Communication Company Ltd. in England and in 1914 wireless operator aboard the Empress of Ireland when she sank, offered me the resources at his disposition. Marconi s Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd. kindly gave me access to many of my father s personal papers and has graciously given permission to reproduce many of the photographs in this book. At the General Post Office in London I was given copies of some of the early letters and agreements between my father and Sir William Preece and the vivid descrip tion of Father s first day there by P. R. Mullis. Of the books available I have consulted Orrin E. Dunlap, Jr. s, Marconi, the Man and His Wireless, Walter Lord s A Night to Remember, BL E. Hancock s Wireless at Sea, Luigi Solari s Mar coni, R. N. Vyvyan s Wireless over Thirty Years, and the Hon. Donough O Brien s History of the O Briens. The RCA David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, supplied a ix print of the first Marconi patent ; technical societies in England, Italy, America and France, journals in which my father s papers were reprinted ; and Clinch Calkins aided me in preliminary re search. On my personal pilgrimages to South Wellfleet, London and back to Pontecchio, in Bologna, Rome and New York, people who knew Guglielmo Marconi were happy to talk of him again. Above all my mother opened her heart to me, re-creating years before I was born and recapturing the sound of Father s voice when he was young so that this should be a true portrait. Degna Marconi PART I CHAPTER ONE I was born in 1908, thirteen years after my father, Guglielmo Marconi, made the historic discovery that was to revolutionize the world of communication. By the time I was old enough to begin storing up memories, he was deeply involved in expand ing the invention he had made on the top floor of the old house near Bologna and in supervising the immense business it entailed. He was often absent, either in body or in mind, for his dedication to his work was absolute. Moreover, I was only sixteen when my father and mother separated, and the easy, accustomed family ties were dissolved. Yet this dedicated and private man, who had developed a pro tective fagade against intrusion by the time he was twenty, loved us children anxiously, openly, and devotedly. We accepted him, as the young do, first as a person. But we could not help realizing that he was a famous man. For us the question asked was never, "What does your father do?" It was, "Your name is Marconi? Are you any relation ... ?" So for me over the years there have always been two Marconis : the scientist and my father. The first was absorbed in things I could not comprehend. The second, an intricate and fascinating human being I have come to see clearly only by reading back- 3 ward, the way that the Chinese do, fitting together the pieces of his story with my memories. Some of these are family legends that have a shrewd validity of their own, since they are essentially truth. The most memorable of them (and whether it is precisely true or only based on what happened does not make it less revealing) I heard from my grandmother, my father s mother. I was barely in my teens and she was an old, old woman. Looking back, I realize that her Irish skin was still fair, her Irish-tinged voice still musical. She had never been taller than five-foot-three and in old age she was tiny, tinier even than the granddaughter to whom she spoke. The glinting auburn hair had faded and was dyed a rakish shade, the wife who had deplored her husband s meanness with money was now a widow who pinched every farthing. She hoarded her possessions in locked trunks crammed into corners of her London flat. Still, I liked to visit her because she smelled of chocolates. They must have been one of her few extravagances, the sweets she bought to entice her grandchildren to call. What she told me seemed infinitely remote. I found it im possible to believe that she was talking about herself and my father. Rather, these were characters out of a dream. Sitting in the gray light of a London afternoon, she carried me back on the soft cadences of her speech more than thirty years to a summer night in Italy, The air was sweet with the scent of drying hay, she told me, alive with the chirruping of crickets, wrapping the Marconi house in a cocoon of sound. The long twilight had given way to heavy darkness and the large rooms and wide hallways, their stone floors bare, were cool and silent. It was close to midnight and my grand mother was asleep. She was waked, she remembered, by a hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently but urgently and the light from a candle her younger son held in his other hand. "Mother?" he said and, sensing the urgency in his tone, she got up quickly, pulled on a warm dressing gown and followed him. The top floor of the big, foursquare white house had been 4 Guglielmo s to use as he pleased for three months. In his hands, it had become a laboratory. The family, his dictatorial Italian father and his poetic Irish mother (the old woman in the high- backed chair who sat facing me), his adoring older brother Alfonso and his half brother, Luigi, the gay cousins, Italian and Irish, all knew about it and responded to Guglielmo s scientific mysteries in their own fashions. I see now, there can never have been the slightest doubt in his mind which of them he wanted with him that night in 1894. Guglielmo led his mother up three flights of shallow, stone steps into his inner world, full of jars and instruments. As she watched, he bowed his blond head over a telegraph key set on a workbench under a window and tapped it delicately with one finger. From the far end of the long double room came a gentle, in sistent sound. A bell was ringing, little louder than the crickets but with concise, wakeful clarity. Between the transmitter under his hand and the tiny tinkling lay nothing but air. The Marconi family came originally from the minute moun tain hamlet of Capugnano, high in the Apennines which stand like a wall between Florence and Bologna. The winters are cruel in the Porretta Pass and they have made its people austere and hardy. The men of the clan lived by the land, cutting wood from the chestnut thickets and raising oats and maize in small and stubborn fields. Still higher, the rocky slopes are sparsely clad with birches and firs. The Marconis were landed gentry in this small society, living simply in the thin, luminous air on their holdings which spanned from Capugnano to the larger town of Porretta. On the back of a pew in the old church at Porretta I have seen the name Marconi carved in the chestnut.

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