A compelling look into 'Marconi's Magic Box'

By Laurence Schorsch, Globe Correspondent, 9/9/2003

Nowadays, radio seems like a poor relation of satellite TV or the Internet. But a little more than 100 years ago, the idea of sending signals through the air -- without wires -- would have seemed magical to most people. The magic became real in London in May 1896 when a 22-year-old inventor named Guglielmo Marconi gave the first public demonstration of radio technology. He started a revolution, and the excitement of these early days of radio is wonderfully caught in a new book by Gavin Weightman, "Signor Marconi's Magic Box."

Marconi isn't a household name like Ford or Edison, partly because the companies that bore his name are now out of business, and partly because he was a quiet and unassuming man from a well-to-do family, and not prone to memorable (or eccentric) pronouncements. His mother was a member of the wealthy Jameson family, makers of Jameson's Irish whiskey, and his father was a prosperous Italian landowner. The money and connections of the Jamesons made it relatively easy for Marconi to start his own wireless company. Though we may not get an inspiring, by-his-own-bootstraps success story here, there is excitement enough when we watch Marconi, hounded by ruthless competitors, struggle to perfect his technology.

Near-instant communication at a distance was nothing new. Telegraph lines crisscrossed America and Europe, and the first transatlantic cable had been laid in 1866. But maintaining and laying these lines was expensive, and the cost was paid for by high telegraph rates. Marconi knew that wireless transmission could be cheaper, but his first instruments were crude and had a range of less than a mile. He gradually increased that range, first from England to ships sailing off the coast, then across the Channel to France, and finally, on Dec. 12, 1901, across the Atlantic from Cornwall to Newfoundland. In 1903, he made the first transmission from the United States to England from Cape Cod. (You can see the ruins of the radio station, abandoned in 1920, in Wellfleet today.)

Marconi knew that his best hope for success would be supplying radios to ships, which when at sea, were mostly incommunicado. The first use of radios on ships were for telegrams and other mundane business, but everything changed on Jan. 23, 1909, when the ocean liner Republic collided with another ship and started to sink. Its radio operator sent out a distress call, and by the next morning, he said, "As far as the eye could see were ships. Every liner and every cargo boat equipped with wireless that happened to be within a 300-mile radius. . . ." All but three passengers were saved, and Marconi was a hero in the popular press. Later that year, he received the ultimate scientific accolade, a Nobel Prize for physics.

Marconi was a practical scientist, a tinkerer, interested in making things work, not in theory. "There can have been few successful inventors," the author writes, "with as little theoretical understanding of their own achievements as Marconi." He was also a great publicist, never making claims he couldn't back up, and always willing to demonstrate his technology publicly. In many ways, he was more businessman than inventor, and was "wedded to the technology he trusted, adapting it gradually but always making sure that it worked as advertised."

The book makes excellent reading, and the only problem is that the author, like Marconi, doesn't seem too interested in the theoretical side of things. Some important issues -- for instance, Marconi's critical struggles to tune his wireless to specific frequencies -- are never properly explained. Still, "Signor Marconi's Magic Box" is often hard to put down, if in the end, its subject, a quiet man who devoted his life to his invention, remains a somewhat vague and distant figure.