Guglielmo Marconi: ‘The man who listened to the future’

By Michele Raviart and Devin Watkins

Guglielmo Marconi was born at the Marescalchi Palace in Bologna on April 25, 1874.

Her father, Giuseppe, was a landowner in the Italian province of Emilia and her mother, Annie Jameson, had come to Italy to study.”bel canto” singing. She was Irish, a British citizen and granddaughter of the founder of the famous Jameson whiskey distillery.

Among his many experiments, Marconi invented the first radio capable of transmitting beyond line of sight in 1895.

After receiving the first patent for his “wireless telegraph” in England, Marconi established the London-based Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, later the Marconi Company.

Two years later, he opened a branch in the United States, which was then sold to General Electric and became RCA. At the end of his life, Marconi held 70 patents.

Nobel Prize for life-saving invention

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun, for his “contribution to the development of wireless telegraphy”. He accepted it in December 1909 in Stockholm, at the age of 35.

Its radio technology became mandatory on all ships around the world after the Mayday's radio calls helped save more than 720 people during the tragic sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

In 1922, Marconi inaugurated a new radio station in London from which, by order of the British government, the BBC was born.

Then, on February 12, 1931, Pope Pius XI became the first pope to address the world by radio, saying in Latin: “In arcano dei consilium, succidimus in loco principis apostolorum.»

At the request of the Pope, Marconi had personally created Radio Vatican, which was integrated in 2015 into the newly created Dicastery for Communication and which continues to be the radio of the Holy See.

Pope Pius XI on the new Vatican Radio

Marconi’s “big cell phone” for the Pope

Among his other inventions, Marconi created a “big cell phone” that connected Pope Pius XI's car to the Vatican and the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, near Rome.

Several years later, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, told participants at a conference in the United States: “Marconi, these are our roots. We are the branches.”

After him, Sir Martin Cooper, who invented the cell phone as we know it today, said: “In fact, my invention, the small cell phone, descends from Marconi's intuition and the large cell phone of Marconi. »

The radios went silent when he died

On July 20, 1937, Guglielmo Marconi died in Rome following one of his frequent heart attacks.

Radio stations around the world, increasingly present in public spaces and homes, simultaneously interrupted their broadcasts for two full minutes.