Celebrating Marconi and his scientific vision in the service of humanity
An event Saturday at the Marconi Museum in the Vatican celebrates 150 years since the birth of the man who founded Vatican Radio. Present, alongside the prefect and directors of the Dicastery for Communication, were the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, and the grandson of Guglielmo Marconi.
By Vatican News
This week marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor-entrepreneur who created Vatican Radio in 1931 at the request of Pope Pius XI.
Marconi, received the Nobel Prize in Physics, alongside German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun, for their “contribution to the development of wireless telegraphy”, a technology that became mandatory on all ships around the world after the May 1 radio calls helped save more than 720 people. during the tragic sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
As Marconi's grandson – also named Guglielmo Marconi – said Saturday morning during a celebration of the inventor's life and work at the Vatican Museum dedicated to the Nobel laureate, his grandfather's technology continues to save lives and continues to be used for the good of humanity.
Speaking to Vatican Radio's Stefanie Stahlhofen, Marconi's grandson explained that his family's attendance at the Vatican goes back many years:
“My family has always been very close to the Vatican because my grandmother, Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali, Countess Bezzi-Scali, who married Guglielmo Marconi, came from a very strong Catholic and Vatican family. Her father, Count Francesco Bezzi-Scali, was brigadier general of the Pope's noble guard.
And when Marconi married my grandmother, she introduced him to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, then Secretary of State of the Holy See and future Pope Pius XII.
Thanks to this contact, he met Pius XI who was a great man, a pope very sensitive to progress and science, and he asked my grandfather to build a Vatican radio.
Thus, from 1930 to 1931, my grandfather stayed almost a year in Rome for this purpose, and this was the beginning of the first blessing of a pope to the entire Christian world, on February 12, 1931, with the famous broadcast of the inauguration (from Vatican Radio) which we still have in the archives of the Luce Institute.
Celebrating Marconi at the Vatican
What does it mean to you that there is also a museum here in the Vatican Gardens that remembers all of this?
It's like coming home. I have been here at the Vatican since I was little, first with my grandmother for the ceremonies, then with my mother. And so, for me, it’s homecoming.
And it is very important, this alliance between progress, ethics, science and faith.
I want to remember that radio still helps many people, the lives of many people at sea, those who flee tragedies, civil wars, dictatorships… Marconi, through radio, still saves thousands and thousands of lives.
He had this very famous quote…
Yes, his famous quote was: “My inventions are intended to save humanity, not to destroy it.”
What do you hope for the future?
That there will always be an ethical science and not a destructive science! »
Marconi's grandson, Guglielmo Marconi, speaking to Vatican Radio's Stefanie Stahlhofen
