Signor Marconi's Magic Box (40 page)

Elsewhere in the grounds there is a stone bust of Marconi facing away from the villa. On close inspection there is a pockmark made by a bullet in the back of the head, an idle act of vandalism perpetrated by a German soldier billeted at Griffone during the Second World War, for which an apology was later received. Towering over everything is a giant metal sculpture of Marconi, black and sombre, and close by an intriguing piece of mangled metal that a small plaque identifies as the only remaining relic of a beautiful white steam yacht which Marconi had owned and on which he spent a large part of the years before his death.

In contrast to the hideous, fascistic bunker in which Marconi is buried is the beautifully restored apparatus used in the inventor’s youthful experiments in the airy rooms of the Villa Griffone itself. The worktable in his recreated attic laboratory, with a window that looks out from the back of the villa to the vineyard on the hillside, is strewn with all the enthusiastic amateur’s make-do bits of equipment: glass vials, rolls of wire, archaic-looking batteries, metal filings and the little hand-bellows used for moulding the miniature coherer. It is hard to imagine now that this was the birthplace of what was regarded at the time of Marconi’s death as the most spectacular and influential new technology of the twentieth century. Though he had long before lost the lead in the development of what became known as radio, Marconi’s world fame had not yet waned in the 1930s, and when news of his death was transmitted around the world every newspaper devoted pages to the details of his state funeral and the story of his remarkable life.

By the time the armistice was signed in November 1918 wireless had changed almost beyond recognition. It would be only four years before the broadcasting of radio programmes swept across America like a smouldering fire that had suddenly burst into flame. Marconi’s little boxes became museum pieces, as the valve replaced the spark and the crystal set and the ‘Maggie’. The Marconi
Companies in the United States and Britain had both been taken over by government during the war, and there was a reluctance to allow them to regain their previous dominance. The US Navy wanted to control all wireless in America. It lost that battle, but the government engineered the creation in October 1919 of a giant new company, the Radio Corporation of America, RCA. In effect American Marconi was forced to sell up as RCA bought out every American patent relating to radio, including those of de Forest and Fessenden which had fallen into the hands of other companies.

It took several years for the British government to decide on the future of radio broadcasting. New licences for wireless ‘telephony’, the transmission of speech and music, were issued by the Post Office, and in 1920 engineers of the Marconi Company began to play records and concerts over the air from a small studio at their offices in Chelmsford, Essex. The very first advertised broadcast, which could be heard by only a few enthusiasts with crystal sets or valve receivers, was made from Chelmsford at 7.10 p.m. on 15 June 1920, with the sponsorship of the
Daily Mail
. ‘The Australian nightingale’ Dame Nellie Melba sang three songs into a telephone microphone with a cigar-box ‘horn’: ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’ and the ‘Addio’ from
La Bohème
.

Broadcasting of this kind was a new departure for the Marconi Company, which soon began to manufacture radio receivers for the general public. In 1923 it became part of the British Broadcasting Company, making a few hours of programmes a week under strict control by government. To forestall a broadcasting free-for-all like that in America, in 1926 the government created the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had a monopoly on all programmes. The Marconi Company continued to thrive as a major supplier of crystal sets and valve receivers to the rapidly growing population of ‘listeners’, as well as to aircraft and the military. The Morse code era was not over: wireless telegraphy was used by ships for many years after broadcasting began, as a relatively cheap and efficient form of communication.

Through all these momentous changes, Marconi himself steered
his own course, as single-mindedly as ever. Though his company had made the first radio broadcasts in Britain, he took little interest in this new form of entertainment, except as one of the growing number of listeners. In 1919 he began negotiations with the British Admiralty to buy a steam yacht that had been taken as a spoil of war. It had been built in Scotland and was owned originally by the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria, who had christened it the
Rovenska
. To help pay for it Marconi had sold the family home in Rome, very much against the wishes of Beatrice and the children. By February 1920 the yacht had been completely refurbished under the supervision of the ever loyal George Kemp, and renamed
Elettra
- electricity - and Marconi took his family and some guests on a cruise of the Mediterranean. The children loved the ship with its crew of thirty, its saloons and wireless cabin. But it was the end for Beatrice when she discovered that among those on board was Marconi’s latest conquest. Bea had known that he had had lovers before, and had forgiven him. But now she was prepared to let him sail away on his own, and they finally separated.

The
Elettra
became Marconi’s home and his laboratory. He was still obsessed with the distance wireless waves could be sent, and sailed the world’s oceans experimenting with short waves transmitted from his yacht to shore stations. The inhibiting influence of daylight, which had always baffled him, continued to have inexplicable effects on all the different wavelengths he tried, though he was now sending and receiving signals over distances of more than four thousand miles. Marconi continued to mix in the most elevated society, welcoming kings and queens aboard the
Elettra
and enjoying discreet affairs with an unknown number of elegant ladies. When his mother died in London at the age of eighty and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, Marconi was in Italy, and did not get to the funeral.

In October 1922 the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini came to power after the march of his supporters on Rome, and Senatore Marconi soon became a close friend and supporter. The following year Beatrice, who had found a lover, the Marchese Liborio
Marignoli, whom she wanted to marry, asked Marconi for a divorce. This was no simple matter in Catholic Italy, but by making themselves temporary citizens of the free city of Fiume the divorce went through in February 1924 on the grounds of Bea’s adultery, and in April she married Marignoli.

A free man on his great white yacht, Marconi was rumoured several times to be about to remarry. He wrote to Beatrice during these years as if to a friend and confidante, saying on occasion how lonely he was. In 1926 he fell in love with a beautiful and much younger Italian woman, Cristina Bezzi-Scali, but because he was technically a Protestant and divorced, and she was from the Catholic nobility - her father was in the Vatican - marriage appeared to be impossible. As always, Marconi consulted the experts, and found that it might be possible for his first marriage to be annulled if it could be shown there was ‘not proper consent’ to it. Beatrice agreed to connive in this fiction, and the annulment was granted after Marconi had given evidence before a commission at Westminster Cathedral in London.

It was in that year, 1926, that the puzzle about how wireless waves travelled around the world was finally solved. Marconi had always believed that only very long waves could travel any distance, but during the war he had experimented with very short waves, which he concentrated into a beam with the idea of improving ship to ship communication. He discovered that these short waves could travel great distances; amateur radio enthusiasts in America, confined by law to short waves, made the same discovery. It was an experiment carried out by an Englishman, Professor Edward Appleton of Cambridge University, which provided the explanation. A directional beam was transmitted vertically upwards and it bounced back. Oliver Heaviside, the eccentric Hermit of Paignton who had died in obscurity in 1925, despite the efforts of his many admirers around the world to persuade him to accept the recognition he deserved, had got it right back in 1902. The ionosphere which reflected wireless signals turned out to be a complex three-layered sandwich of particles which had a variable effect on
wireless waves of different lengths.
¹⁵
Its composition was affected by the sun’s rays - which explained the difference in the distance signals would travel during the day and the night. This finally put paid to a theory of the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an enthusiastic spiritualist, that the greater distances achieved by Marconi at night were proof of the mysterious ‘powers of darkness’ which spiritualist mediums exploited.

Professor Appleton paid glowing tribute to Marconi in an appreciation published in the
Daily Mail
on 21 July 1937, the day after Marconi’s death:

The distinguished former rival of Marconi, Sir Oliver Lodge, had continued his pursuit of the spirits while Marconi was discovering the power of short waves, which cracked the problem of daytime transmission at a distance. If anything Lodge’s belief in the afterlife had become stronger since the death of the youngest of his six sons, Raymond, in the trenches of the First World War (Lodge had six daughters as well, twelve children in all). The terrible news that Raymond had died of shrapnel wounds arrived by telegram in mid-September 1915, and within a few days Lodge and his wife were consulting mediums in the hope of receiving messages from their son. Lodge even believed that he had been
warned of Raymond’s death by his old friend, the late Frederic Myers, in a ‘cross correspondence’ message. In 1916 Lodge published a sensational book, called simply
Raymond
, giving an account of his spiritualist experiences. At the time there was massive popular interest in the afterlife, as so many families had lost sons whose bodies they would never see, and who would have no proper funeral.

Paradoxically, it was Marconi’s discoveries with wireless that allowed Lodge to test a spiritualist theory. In 1927 Lodge asked the first Director-General of the BBC, John Reith, if he could carry out an experiment in telepathy in a radio broadcast. It was organised by the Society for Psychical Research, whose members attempted to ‘transmit’ through the ether to listeners all over the world a set of images - a bunch of white lilac, a man in a mask, a Japanese print and two different playing cards - that they were shown. The hope was that listeners would pick up the ‘transmitted’ images telepathically. Twenty-five thousand impressions were sent by listeners to the SPR offices from around the world, but they bore little resemblance to the images that the SPR members had viewed, and the experiment was judged at best inconclusive, at worst a failure. Lodge continued to believe, however, that both spiritualist messages and wireless waves could travel through the ‘ether’, though by the 1930s scientists were beginning to realise that that mysterious substance had been no more than a figment of the imagination. Quietly, the ether theory drifted into history.

Marconi had no interest in spiritualism, and always became short-tempered when, as frequently happened, he was asked if he might soon be able to communicate with Mars. He had no time for such idle speculation, being more preoccupied with the complications of his private life. These were resolved when he married Cristina in April 1927. Three years later their only child was born, a girl who was named Maria Elettra Elena Anna. She was cared for much of the time by her grandmother Countess Bezzi-Scali in Rome, while Marconi and Cristina continued to travel the world, often on board the
Elettra
. Wherever they went Marconi was greeted as a distinguished guest. The honours accumulated on him
like crustacea on a cruising whale. He continued to experiment, chiefly while at sea on his yacht, which was now able to pick up wireless broadcasts from all over the world.

In the last years of his life Marconi abandoned the Villa Griffone and lived in a sumptuous apartment in Rome. He had suffered several heart attacks, and became seriously ill when on a visit to London in 1934. Despite his failing health, and against the advice of his doctor, he took up the cause of Italy when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia the following year. He sailed to Brazil as the Fascist leader’s envoy in October 1935 to seek the support of the many Italians living there, and then to England, where he met Edward VIII at the time of the abdication crisis. On his travels he had made many broadcasts putting the Italian case in the Abyssinian conflict, but when he sought permission from the BBC to do the same in Britain he was told politely that while he could broadcast about anything he liked, he would not be allowed to put Mussolini’s case on British radio.

Marconi continued to support Mussolini, and was due to meet the Italian leader at six o’clock on the evening of 19 July 1937 to talk about his latest experiments with ultra-short-wave radio. In the morning he took Cristina and Elettra to the station: it was Elettra’s seventh birthday the following day and they were going to Viareggio, expecting Marconi to follow. But in the afternoon he became too ill to leave his apartment. He had converted to Catholicism after his second marriage, and a priest was called to administer the last rites. When the news of Marconi’s death broke early the following morning, the first person at the deathbed was Mussolini, who ordered that a state funeral should be held.