How Marconi Gave Us the Wireless World
【A】A hundred years before iconic figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs permeated our lives, an Irish-Italian inventor laid the foundation of the communication explosion of the 21st century. Guglielmo Marconi was arguably the first truly global figure in modern communication. Not only was he the first to communicate globally, he was the first to think globally about communication. Marconi may not have been the greatest inventor of his time, but more than anyone else, he brought about a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
【B】Today’s globally networked media and communication system has its origins in the 19th century, when, for the first time, messages were sent electronically across great distances. The telegraph, the telephone, and radio were the obvious predecessors of the Internet, iPods, and mobile phones. What made the link from then to now was the development of wireless communication. Marconi was the first to develop and perfect this system, using the recently-discovered “air waves” that make up the electromagnetic spectrum.
【C】Between 1896, when he applied for his first patent in England at the age of 22, and his death in Italy in 1937, Marconi was at the center of every major innovation in electronic communication. He was also a skilled and sophisticated organizer, an entrepreneurial innovator, who mastered the use of corporate strategy, media relations, government lobbying, international diplomacy, patents, and prosecution. Marconi was really interested in only one thing: the extension of mobile, personal, long-distance communication to the ends of the earth (and beyond, if we can believe some reports). Some like to refer to him as a genius, but if there was any genius to Marconi it was this vision.
【D】In 1901 he succeeded in signaling across the Atlantic, from the west coast of England to Newfoundland in the USA, despite the claims of science that it could not be done. In 1924 he convinced the British government to encircle the world with a chain of wireless stations using the latest technology that he had devised, shortwave radio. There are some who say Marconi lost his edge when commercial broadcasting came along; he didn’t see that radio could or should be used to frivolous (无聊的) ends. In one of his last public speeches, a radio broadcast to the United States in March 1937, he deplored that broadcasting had become a one-way means of communication and foresaw it moving in another direction, toward communication as a means of exchange. That was visionary genius.
【E】Marconi’s career was devoted to making wireless communication happen cheaply, efficiently, smoothly, and with an elegance that would appear to be intuitive and uncomplicated to the user—user-friendly, if you will. There is a direct connection from Marconi to today’s social media, search engines, and program streaming that can best be summed up by an admittedly provocative exclamation: the 20th century did not exist. In a sense, Marconi’s vision jumped from his time to our own.
【F】Marconi invented the idea of global communication—or, more straightforwardly, globally networked, mobile, wireless communication. Initially, this was wireless Morse code telegraphy (电报通讯), the principal communication technology of his day. Marconi was the first to develop a practical method for wireless telegraphy using radio waves. He borrowed technical details from many sources, but what set him apart was a self-confident vision of the power of communication technology on the one hand, and, on the other, of the steps that needed to be taken to consolidate his own position as a player in that field. Tracing Marconi’s lifeline leads us into the story of modern communication itself. There were other important figures, but Marconi towered over them all in reach, power, and influence, as well as in the grip he had on the popular imagination of his time. Marconi was quite simply the central figure in the emergence of a modern understanding of communication.
【G】In his lifetime, Marconi foresaw the development of television and the fax machine, GPS radar, and the portable hand-held telephone. Two months before he died, newspapers were reporting that he was working on a “death ray”, and that he had “killed a rat with an intricate device at a distance of three feet.” By then, anything Marconi said or did was newsworthy. Stock prices rose or sank according to his pronouncements. If Marconi said he thought it might rain, there was likely to be a run on umbrellas.
【H】Marconi’s biography is also a story about choices and the motivations behind them. At one level, Marconi could be fiercely autonomous and independent of the constraints of his own social class. On another scale, he was a perpetual outsider. Wherever he went, he was never “of” the group; he was always the “other,” considered foreign in Britain, British in Italy, and “not American” in the United States. At the same time, he also suffered tremendously from a need for acceptance that drove, and sometimes stained, every one of his relationships.
【I】Marconi placed a permanent stamp on the way we live. He was the first person to imagine a practical application for the wireless spectrum, and to develop it successfully into a global communication system—in both terms of the word; that is, worldwide and all-inclusive. He was able to do this because of a combination of factors—most important, timing and opportunity—but the single-mindedness and determination with which he carried out his self-imposed mission was fundamentally character-based; millions of Marconi’s contemporaries had the same class, gender, race, and colonial privilege as he, but only a handful did anything with it. Marconi needed to achieve the goal that was set in his mind as an adolescent; by the time he reached adulthood, he understood, intuitively, that in order to have an impact he had to both develop an independent economic base and align himself with political power. Disciplined, uncritical loyalty to political power became his compass for the choices he had to make.
【J】At the same time, Marconi was uncompromisingly independent intellectually. Shortly after Marconi’s death, the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi—soon to be the developer of the Manhattan Project—wrote that Marconi proved that theory and experimentation were complementary features of progress. “Experience can rarely, unless guided by a theoretical concept, arrive at results of any great significance…on the other hand, an excessive trust in theoretical conviction would have prevented Marconi from persisting in experiments which were destined to bring about a revolution in the technique of radio-communications.” In other words, Marconi had the advantage of not being burdened by preconceived assumptions.
【K】The most controversial aspect of Marconi’s life—and the reason why there has been no satisfying biography of Marconi until now—was his uncritical embrace of Benito Mussolini. At first this was not problematic for him. But as the regressive (倒退的) nature of Mussolini’s regime became clear, he began to suffer a crisis of conscience. However, after a lifetime of moving within the circles of power, he was unable to break with authority, and served Mussolini faithfully (as president of Italy’s national research council and royal academy, as well as a member of the Fascist Grand Council) until the day he died—conveniently—in 1937, shortly before he would have had to take a stand in the conflict that consumed a world that he had, in part, created.
