Personal communications have moved on in leaps and bounds in recent years – with video calling and internet-on-the-move now accepted as common place but 100 years ago, the world was a very different place.
In this special feature, Managing Change salutes the ingenuity and determination of Guglielmo Marconi, the “father” of wireless who freed us from the ties of cables and wires and showed the world that there was a better way….
Like most inventors-cum-businesspeople, Marconi faced his share of problems, cashflow headaches and bad press from the sceptics, but his vision carried him through the bad times to the day he ultimately changed the world.
Most people know Marconi as the pioneer of wireless, but he was also credited with saving thousands of lives following the sinking of an American passenger ship, giving many aboard the Titanic the gift of rescue – and even aiding in the capture of infamous cellar murderer, Dr. Crippen.
Marconi also played a role in the formation of Cable & Wireless, RCA and the BBC and paved the way for television - not at all bad for a boy who failed to make the grade for the Italian Naval Academy !
Born in 1874, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing in Italy but was a solitary youngster, happiest when taking apart mechanical objects and devising scientific toys.
His family encouraged his love of science and he began experiments at home after attending lectures by a pioneer of work on wireless waves.
Sadly, he was beaten to the headlines by British physicist, Oliver Lodge, who succeeded in transmitting Morse signals over 150 metres but fortunately – for Marconi at least - Lodge could see no commercial application for his discovery.
Hard to imagine it now, but in Marconi’s youth all communications were constrained by fixed cable and visible distance and he faced criticisms from established scientists who claimed that wireless waves could never travel around the world because it wasn’t flat!
He persuaded his family to set him up in business and came to London, where he soon lodged the world’s first wireless patent for telegraphy using Hertzian waves. He earned celebrity status following a public demonstration in London but his glory was marred by claims that he was peddling the products of Lodge’s brain and not his own.
Success, of course, depended on extending the range of transmission and Marconi quickly trebled that. However, costs rose - on premises, on salaries for technicians and scientists and on the world's first coastal wireless stations – on the Isle of Wight and in Bournemouth.
Within two years he had opened the world's first wireless factory at Chelmsford in Essex and he soon sent his first wireless message across the channel.
Later, he was granted the famous ‘Four Sevens’ patent for a tuning device to solve the problem of interference (jamming) of signals and the company went from strength to strength.
Marconi set up a new company to cash in on maritime work and won lucrative contracts with the Admiralty, Lloyds and various shipping companies
and in 1901, he achieved his aim of sending a signal across the Atlantic.
He was quoted afterwards as saying: “The chief question was whether wireless waves would be stopped by the curvature of the earth. All along I had been convinced that this was not so and the final answer came at 12.30 when I heard dot…dot… dot !”
Marconi had three daughters with his first wife (although one died in infancy) and his only son, Guilio was born in 1910. After the marriage failed, he remarried in 1927 and had another daughter.
In 1909, around 1,700 lives were saved following wireless distress calls from a sinking passenger ship and Marconi then shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with one of the founders of his company's rival, the Telefunken company of Germany.
In July 1910, he made the headlines again when a ship used wireless to alert police in England that murderer, Crippen, was aboard and it soon became compulsory for all large ships to have wireless.
During the First World War, Marconi personnel played a major role for Britain - training army signallers, developing air-to-air telegraphy and locating enemy Zeppelins and submarines.
Back in Italy, Marconi was elevated to the Senate in Rome but his work went on and he equipped a luxury steam yacht as a floating laboratory. He also used it for holidays with his children and to entertain royalty and Hollywood film stars.
Meanwhile, wireless rapidly became a popular new source of home entertainment. In 1922, programmes from a temporary studio near Chelmsford attracted so many listeners that a new subsidiary, Marconiphone, was set up to manufacture broadcast receivers. Later, government intervention led to Marconi and his largest competitors joining forces and the forerunner of the BBC was born.
On board his yacht, Marconi developed a new high-speed Beam System and a new company, Cable and Wireless Ltd, was set up to take over the system.
Despite suffering attacks of angina, Marconi refused to slow down and in 1931 he supervised the Pope's first broadcast to Catholics worldwide. The same year, on the 30th anniversary of his first transatlantic signal, his own voice circled the world.
Marconi’s last years were devoted to new experiments in blind navigation by radio beacon – the precursor of today’s radar.
He died in Rome in July 1937 and wireless stations and transmitters all over the world fell silent as a mark of respect to the man who revolutionised global communications.
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