Book Description
Guglielmo Marconi was a young man fascinated with the recently discovered phenomenon of electricity. Telegraph wires were already being used to send messages with electricity—there was even a cable under the Atlantic Ocean making communication between continents possible. But when Marconi learned about the electromagnetic waves scientists had discovered, he thought that they could be used to send messages without wires. In 1894, when he was 20 years old, Marconi began his experiments in sending messages: first a few feet, next a few yards, then over a mile, and at last across the Atlantic Ocean.

Marconi's wireless telegraphy made it possible, for the first time, for ships at sea to communicate with the land and with each other. Marconi's work provided the foundation for the amazing developments in electronic technology that occurred in the 20th century—radio, television, radar, sonar, microwave ovens—and are still occurring at dizzying speed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Marconi did not invent the radio
Marconi's radio patents were overturned by US Supreme Court in favor of Nikola Tesla's earlier work. Any radio ideas Marconi had were stolen from Tesla. Even alot of encyclopedias are mis informed about the this subject. Suggest reading Tesla Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney to get the facts straight, references are included. ... Read more

Book Description
Inspiring stories of scientific pioneers and their successes and failures along the path of scientific discovery spark interest among readers. Each of these books include:

• Glossary
• For More Information section
• Index

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Guglielmo Marconi, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2623 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Columbia Journalism Review, published by Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism on July 1, 1999. The length of the article is 1199 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Online journalist Matt Drudge, who works from his apartment in Los Angeles, CA, and continual technological innovations, indicate anyone with a modem and an idea can become a "journalist" in the 21st century. Computerized access to the World Wide Web is as significant a historical development as the printing press. The Internet will provide greater access to both legitimate news and questionable gossip.

Citation Details
Title: From Marconi to Murrow to--Drudge?(inventor Guglielmo Marconi, journalist Edward R. Murrow, online journalist Matt Drudge)
Author: Lawrence K. Grossman
Publication: Columbia Journalism Review (Refereed)
Date: July 1, 1999
Publisher: Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
Volume: 38Issue: 2Page: 17

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Book Description
The world at the turn of the twentieth century was in the throes of "Marconi-mania"-brought on by an incredible invention that no one could quite explain, and by a dapper and eccentric figure (who would one day win the newly minted Nobel Prize) at the center of it all. At a time when the telephone, telegraph, and electricity made the whole world wonder just what science would think of next, the startling answer had come in 1896 in the form of two mysterious wooden boxes containing a device Marconi had rigged up to transmit messages "through the ether." It was the birth of the radio, and no scientist in Europe or America, not even Marconi himself, could at first explain how it worked...it just did.

Here is a rich portrait of the man and his era-a captivating tale of British blowhards, American con artists, and Marconi himself-a character par excellence, who eventually winds up a virtual prisoner of his worldwide fame and fortune. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Good Biography
This is a great Biography of Marconi, who is the father of radio.I never read Marconi's story before - it was well worth the wait - the author did a fantastic job with Mr. Marconi's life and his adventures with wireless radio.

the Tesla thief, still glorified...?
Surprised that the book fails on a major point: to talk about the highly supportable contention that Marconi stole Tesla's technological ideas, since Marconi visited Tesla and since Tesla was such a "businessman innocent" that he let people root around in his papers for ideas as a friendship gesture.

Still, an intersting read on the early 20th century through various technological vingnettes about the effects of radio that you would find no where else--until a better book is published of course, in my opinion.

We learn much about aerials, but not much about inventions.
This book, at 291 pages, is a quick read.It can be read in about two hours.We learn that Marconi's main contribution was to combine Heinrich Hertz's invention of radio waves with Oliver Lodge's invention of the coherer.We learn of Marconi's discovery of radio waves bouncing off the upper atmosphere, an effect essential for trans-Atlantic radio waves (paves 53-55, 258).We learn of Marconi's "spark method" which worked better than Edison's jumping current method.We learn that it was actually David Hughes (pages 97-98) and Oliver Heaviside (pages 128-131), not Marconi, who built the first wireless.We also learn that Nathan Stubblefield was the inventor of a wireless that could transmit not just Morse code, but also voices and music.

Much of the book tells about Marconi's efforts at building higher aerials and scouting out locations to build aerials, e.g., on various ships, in Cape Cod, Newfoundland, or Santa Catalina Island.In fact, this is the major thrust of the book:scouting out locations for building aerials.The book should not have been called "Signor Marconi's Magic Box," since we learn nothing about the "spark method" or the "coherer" beyond their names.Instead, the book should have been called "Signor Marconi Builder of Aerials."The word "patent" occurs 19 times in the book, but here the word patent is just used in passing, and we learn nothing about the patents, or how they represented improvements over the earlier state of the radio art."Patent" does not even occur in the index.

The book spends a good deal of time utilizing literary devices, especially the literary device of describing the weather, and the literary device of naming personalities with little or no direct relevance to Marconi.For example, we are told that "on a misty morning three days later a Russian hospital ship sighted another vessel" (page 200). We learn that "the men who were working ran out into the snow in mad rejoicing" (page 146).We find that "day after day through the hot summer months of 1895 . . ."(page 16).We are told that "tens of thousands of chimneys filled the air with the sooty haze" (page 21).We read that "this was a deeply romantic corner of England, a treacherous rocky coast. . . where people still talked of lost bounties of wrecked . . . Spanish galleons" (page 72).We also read that "outside, his men braved the icy winds which blew small icebergs into Glace Bay" (page 100).Moreover, we learn about "out on the snowy wastes of Brant Rock . . ." (page 208).Additionally, we read that "in the summer heat the stony earth shimmers" (page 281) and that "a storm blew up from the northwest" (page 264).The author is a confirmed name-dropper.We learn the names of Marconi's competitors, and the names of Marconi's love interests, literary figures, sports figures, and political figures of the time (e.g., King Victor Emmanuel; Reginald Fessenden; Nevil Maskelyne; Frank Fayant; Alexander Popov; Gordon Bennett; Eugene Ducretet; Inez Milholland; Thomas Lipton; Lionel James; Rossini; Chopin; Arthur Conan Doyle; Frederick Treves; Amos Dolbear; Alaxandre Dumas; Nellie Melba; Beatrice O'Brien; Edmund Gurney; Frederic Myers; Leonore Piper; George Bernard Shaw; Joseph Pulitzer; and Cristina Bezza-Scali; Rudyard Kipling; Bob Fitzsimmons; Jim Jeffries; Jack Dempsey; Henry McClure; just to name a few).On and on and on goes the list of irrelevant names. The book devotes atleast ten times more space describing Marconi's romantic interests than describing the engineers who work for Marconi.

To conclude, the author Gavin Weightman provides us with a book having a misleading title (Signor Marconi's Magic Box) and a misleading subtitle (The Most Remarkable Invention of the 19th Century).The book contains only a moderate amount of interesting material, but a huge amount of fluff.The book does not explain the nature of a coherer, a Herzian wave, or the spark method, and reveals very little about Marconi's collaborators and coworkers, essentially nothing about Marconi's business partners, and essentially nothing about what Marconi had actually invented.In striking contrast is Tom Lewis' book Empire of the Air.Tom Lewis covers the history of radio with the insight expected of somebody who is an electrical engineer having a J.D. and an M.B.A. Five stars to Tom Lewis' book Empire of the Air.

Like Early Wireless Itself: Useful, but Flawed
From the title, you might suppose this book to be a history of early wireless, with an emphasis on Marconi's work.And so it is, to some degree.It is much more a biography of Marconi, for whom Weightman has an evident fondness.But it is a weak biography, in that it does not delve into Marconi's life too deeply, or too long.Indeed, the book effectively ends (or rather, just stops) at the First World War, with a final chapter or two about the last years of Marconi's life 20 years later.And it's a somewhat incomplete story of early wireless, concentrating (understandably) mostly on Marconi's work, with only glimpses of the advances made by so many other pioneers.Still, it is an interesting and informative read, fleshing out the bare bones of the earliest years of an emerging technology.It just left me wondering what happened to the second half of the book.

Looking (and thinking) inside the box
The story of the development of wireless technology is complicated and surrounded by claim and counter claim. Marconi is undoubtedly the central figure of this story but the main characters are interwoven like the twisted pair wires that were replaced by the increasing use of telegraph communications.

Einstein has said that scientific advance is opaque with foresight, transparent with hindsight, and this book amply illustrates the point. It is easy to look back on the breakthroughs of Guiglielmo Marconi and belittle the impact. Yet much of the enormous advances at the end of the 20th century would not have been possible without Marconi (or rather the technology STARTED by Marconi's discoveries). Marconi was a strange mixture of modern and ancient, and did not understand the theoretical background of his advances. Nor does the reader need to understand the science of signal transmission to thoroughly enjoy the book. It is interesting and enlightening to see the attempts to rationalise how `radio' worked, particularly by some of his contemporaries. I suspect that some of our own imperfect understandings will be viewed with similar wonder when viewed from the other side of lucid explanations.

The story is generally well told, and is particularly effective when describing three Atlantic dramas in the years just before the First World War. The passengers rescued from the steam ships Republic and Titanic owed their rescue to both the technology, and to the seriously dedicated wireless operators. Indeed, the operators from the Titanic only ceased transmitting about 20 minutes before the vessel went down, and one of the pair perished. In the third drama, Dr Crippen was apprehended in New York after `escaping' on a trans-Atlantic voyage - the ship's captain recognised the man who had murdered his wife, and the `Marconi men' on board informed the authorities. Both English and French newspapers published the `chase', charting the positions of both Crippen's vessel, and that of the following Inspector Drew (in a faster vessel, which arrived first in New York).

Marconi's advances shine through the pages of the book, but even though it is not dwelt upon, Marconi as a man receives very much less favourable coverage. I suppose if he had been a `better' person, he would not have made the breakthroughs of which we are all grateful.

Peter Morgan (morganp@supanet.com) ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Epoca, published by Thomson Gale on November 24, 2005. The length of the article is 535 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: La radio no la inventó Marconi ... sino el español Cervera: un investigador descubre que el comandante de ingenieros se adelantó 11 años al italiano: el inventor de la radio no fue Marconi, sino un militar español, según ha descubierto el profesor Ángel Faus.(Julio Cervera)
Author: María Corisco
Publication: Epoca (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 24, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Issue: 1076Page: 82(2)

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