Читать книгу Marconi My Beloved - Maria C. Marconi - Страница 41

Not long after our marriage I asked my husband “What made you think of inventing radio-telegraphy?” He answered that ever since he was eight years old he had been sure that he would invent something very useful for humanity which would make him famous so that he would be considered different from other men. He did indeed succeed in doing so. With his genius and perseverance he was able to abolish distances, accomplishing the miracle of instant communication through space. He told me that when he was fourteen years old, using some wires and a broom-stick, he built the first antenna! He established the first contact between the air and the earth from the stone balcony at the front of the house where he spent his holidays with his parents on the sea front of Livorno.

Guglielmo had heard about Hertz’s discoveries in the field of electro-magnetic waves; he was excited by the discoveries and immediately had the idea of using them in his experiments on wireless communications over a distance. He understood the importance of the herzian waves but having a deeper and more complete personal intuition about this phenomenon he made a thorough study of them in order to develop and extend his research. Although he was so young, he was very determined and even during the summer months while he was enjoying his holidays in the country or at the seaside he always dedicated hours and hours to his scientific research work.

During the winter when the weather was colder the Marconi family used to move for a month or two to the milder climate of Livorno or Florence. In Livorno they would rent a flat in Viale Margherita with a view of the sea. Here Guglielmo met Professor Vincenzo Rosa, a professor of physics, who immediately noted that the young Marconi had an aptitude and a passion for physics and saw that his studies were very individual and quite different from those of his contemporaries. He realized that here was a brilliant mind whose depth and breadth of spirit and scientific ability he admired. They also used to meet sometimes in Bologna. In Livorno, in the State Technical High School at No. 9, Via Cairoli, there is a memorial plaque in honour of Guglielmo Marconi to commemorate his attendance at the school and his frequent visits there. Another memorial plaque was dedicated to him by the Scientific High School of Florence in Piazza Santa Trinità. Both cities wanted to commemorate his studies and residence there. The first time I returned to Italy soon after our marriage I went with my husband to see these two plaques. I remember so well his saying to me, with a smile, “It’s a rare thing for a person to read his own memorial plaque during his lifetime!”

The following are some of the events of his youth and his first inventions. My husband came from a distinguished and respected family from Bologna. His father Giuseppe Marconi was a well-known landowner with extensive agricultural estates both in Emilia and Romagna. A successful businessman, he took a particular interest in all his farm-workers because he wanted them to live in respectable comfort with their families on his land. Guglielmo’s mother Annie was born Annie Jameson, a member of the Jameson family of Irish whiskey distillers. Her grandfather John Jameson was born in Alloa in Scotland and became Sheriff Clerk of Clackmannonshire. He went to Ireland and bought an interest in a distillery in Bow Street in Dublin. Her father Andrew set up a whiskey distillery in Fairfield near Enniscorthy, County Wexford in the south-east of Ireland.

Andrew and his family lived in a beautiful old moated house, Daphne Castle, surrounded by a park near Enniscorthy. Here Annie was born in 1839, one of six children. She was a lovely girl, charming and vivacious. The whole family had a passion for music. It was their favourite occupation and they used to play different instruments together in the evenings. Annie played the piano and she also had a very beautiful soprano voice. To her family’s disapproval (it was quite out of the question for a young girl of good family to become an opera singer in those days) she was offered an engagement to sing at the Covent Garden Opera House in London. She was forbidden to accept but after much discussion and argument she was allowed to go to Italy to study singing with a famous teacher of the time. The Jameson whiskey firm had business contacts with a Bologna banker called De Renoli and Annie was sent to stay with his family. De Renoli’s daughter had died while giving birth to a son, Luigi, and their widowed son-in-law Giuseppe Marconi spent much of his time with them. He was charming and lively with a good sense of humour and he and Annie soon fell in love.

When Annie returned home to Ireland she asked permission to marry Giuseppe. Her family was just as shocked at Annie’s choice of husband as they had been at the thought of her singing at Covent Garden and they refused their consent to the marriage. Annie was ordered to forget him and, apparently obedient, she remained at home and led a social life going to parties and meeting suitable young men approved of by her family. However, she continued to correspond secretly with Giuseppe. She had a far stronger will than anyone realized and her mind was already made up. When she came of age she ran away from home and crossed the stormy waters of the Channel to France while Giuseppe drove across the Alps in his carriage. They met in Boulogne-sur-mer, a romantic town by the sand dunes and were married there on 16th April 1864. She and her family were reconciled after the birth of her first child, Alfonso the following year. Nine years were to go by before the birth of her second son, Guglielmo.

Annie transmitted her love of music to her sons. The two brothers were both gifted musicians. Alfonso played the violin while Guglielmo was a talented pianist. His mother taught him to play from an early age and she would sing while he played. All his life whenever it was possible he arranged to have a piano nearby and if he had a spare moment he would sit down at the piano and his beautiful hands would fly over the keys. He could read music at first sight and often improvised or played music he knew by heart. He once said: “I love music. I had a serious musical education from my mother. Playing the piano, and developing my sensitivity for harmonious and delicate notes, has been of great help to me in the scientific field”.

Annie lived happily in the beautiful ancient town of Bologna with her two towers, medieval palaces and porticoes and characteristic pink stone that lights up in the sunset. When the Marconi family was not in Bologna they used to spend part of the year at Villa Griffone, Giuseppe’s country house. Villa Griffone is a Seventeenth Century villa in a magnificent position on top of a hill which catches the breeze even in summer, in the district of Pontecchio, a village in the district of Sasso Marconi near Bologna. Over the centuries it has undergone various transformations; it is a bright comfortable house with many windows opening onto a pleasant landscape surrounded by fertile fields and vineyards and shaded by lemon and chestnut trees. The walls are very thick, the rooms are large and there is a spacious hall, a beautiful stone staircase and the floors too are flagged in stone.

When he was at Villa Griffone Guglielmo spent many hours of the day shut up in the granary which he had turned into a laboratory, studying and making experiments, surrounded by his rudimentary instruments, the same ones that can still be admired today, some in London in the Science Museum in South Kensington and Chelmsford, others in Milan in the Leonardo da Vinci Museum, and some in Rome at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. All this meant that he could not always enjoy the company of his mother, father and older brother Alfonso; he used to shut himself away, concentrating on the work that was to bring his passionate research to a conclusion. He was so busy that for two years the family had to give up their usual winter move to Livorno and Florence.

At that time many physicists and researchers in different parts of the world were trying to construct instruments which would generate and detect the radiation of electro-magnetic waves, study their properties and pick them up at a certain distance, starting from the theory of electric waves developed by the Scottish researcher Maxwell: among these, Righi in Italy, Edison in America, Hertz in Germany, Lodge in England and Branly in France.

Guglielmo knew about the studies of Professor Righi, who was carrying out experiments in a laboratory in the hills on the other side of the River Reno from Villa Griffone. He decided to go and see him to discover whether Righi had acquired any useful information for the research which interested him so much. My husband told me that he went on horseback, since the climb was so steep, but that was the first and last time he went because although he felt respect for the scientist he saw that Righi was very skeptical about his research. Guglielmo realized at once that the Professor’s work was quite different from what he himself had in mind and was, in fact, already achieving.

He told me he decided to turn to new systems of research which the above-mentioned scientists had not thought of. With the profound intuition which was a characteristic of his genius he was convinced that another type of electromagnetic waves, different from those used up to then in the laboratories, would be necessary to receive communications from far-off stations and surmount the natural obstacles on the way. This intuition made it possible for him to succeed in trasmitting signals over various distances. So, strengthened by his belief in his own ideas, he went on with his work alone, never consulting anyone else and making totally unique experiments at Villa Griffone, absorbed in his research to find the way to use these waves. At last Guglielmo achieved his purpose: to communicate freely in the void of the ether without the use of wires. He reached his goal where the other scientists still searched and searched...

One of my husband’s first important inventions was his new improved “coherer”. Apparatus consisting of a detector of high-frequency discharges using a glass tube and a conducting powder had already existed since 1884. This apparatus, however, although it had been modified and perfected by various scientists for other purposes was in Guglielmo’s opinion very primitive and ineffective. He wanted to apply this instrument to long-distance wireless transmissions. After much research and many ingenious modifications, Marconi transformed the apparatus, reducing the diameter of the tube, inserting two silver electrodes very close together and filling it with a powder consisting of nickel and silver filings with traces of mercury, all in a vacuum. Guglielmo explained these things to me simply and clearly. These modifications so greatly increased the effectiveness of the apparatus that he himself considered it to be a new instrument of his own invention. Thus perfected, the “coherer” acquired an unequalled sensitivity and resistance. This is the reason why he had no hesitation in calling it, as I have already said, one of his first important inventions, a true creation of his own, thanks to which the capacity of transmissions from one station to another was gradually increased. The signals could be picked up not only indoors but also by a receiver system placed outside the house. I think it is important to tell all this because Guglielmo spoke to me about it more than once. He wanted me to know the truth. He trusted me and he knew that I in my turn would speak about it to the future generations.

My husband always remembered with pride his first success when he was still an adolescent. He told me that one day at Villa Griffone, after much experimentation, he called his mother. “Come with me”, he said. “I have something to show you. A surprise.” Annie Jameson Marconi was blonde with beautiful long hair and soft blue eyes. An English cousin of hers told me that she was an intelligent and determined woman. She had very high principles and her whole life was dedicated to bringing up her two sons Alfonso and Guglielmo who was nine years younger than his brother. She was the first to realize that there was something special about her younger son, a sensitive and thoughtful child, quite different from his older brother in character, intellect and tastes. Mother and son understood each other and got on very well together. He told me, “I knew she would never doubt me and would believe in my intuition. I wanted to show her that by just pressing the button of a bell, fixed to the floor, in the centre of the room, would be possible to ring another bell in the next-door room with the door closed. Annie Marconi watched this experiment and was astonished. It was almost a game but she took it seriously. She called her husband so that he too could see this demonstration. Giuseppe Marconi watched very carefully and shook his head in perplexity. Then he began to search all around, thinking that there must be a hidden electric wire. He looked carefully along the walls of the two rooms and investigated the floor, lifting up the carpet. He could not understand how the bell could ring in the next-door room without a connecting wire and with the door closed. Giuglielmo found all this incredulity very funny.

He told me that his father was rather skeptical about his experiments but he did not feel offended or allow himself to be influenced by this because he was absolutely certain he would succeed. He respected his father but went on with his studies with his mother’s support. She even spent two winters in Villa Griffone at Pontecchio so as not to leave her son alone during those years of hard work. Some old people from Bologna still remember it. Although the fires were lit in the fireplaces, the intense cold in the villa was hard to bear. Although his mother felt the cold she wanted to make this sacrifice for Guglielmo so that he could develop whatever he had in mind. Alfonso, his older brother, told me that when Guglielmo was in the granary he was so taken up with his studies and experiments, so determined to succeed, that he even forgot to eat and became very thin. One can see this clearly in photographs taken at the time. He shut himself away for days on end until late in the evening. He did not have meals with the family and sometimes his mother, worried about him, would bring him a bowl of nourishing broth which he would refuse. He never touched a mouthful until he had achieved his aim. His father used to grumble about this younger son, this “eccentric” who wasted time and money with his coils and wires, shut up there in the silk worms’ room which he had transformed into a laboratory.

All this happened before 1895, before the famous experiment of Pontecchio which connected the granary of Villa Griffone to the country on the other side of the hill beyond the garden in front of the villa along the now historic avenue. When Guglielmo told me about those days, he always told me how deeply grateful he felt to his mother. Once they went together to the Sanctuary of the Madonna on Mount Oropa near Biella. He stood for a long time admiring the view, thinking that God had put the forces of nature at man’s disposal and he felt sure that with His help he would succeed in exploiting them for the good of humanity. These are his words: “The free paths of space for the transmission of human thought have had a great fascination for me ever since that moment. Unlimited sources of inspiration for new achievements for the benefit of humanity exist in them”. A smile lighting up his face, my husband told me, “When I told one of our farm-workers Marchi to go with my brother Alfonso to the other side of the hill and listen for the first signal I sent from Villa Griffone I asked him to fire a shot the moment he heard it. I sent the signal of the letter “S” with the transmitter I had built for this experiment. On the other side of the hill I had set up a receiver which I had also built myself that picked up my signal perfectly. Just think, my dear Cristina, what enormous satisfaction I felt when I heard the shot after working so hard to achieve my aim: to communicate in the open, even surmounting obstacles!” In that historic moment, as he himself said, wireless telegraphy was born. I, too, understood that this perfectly successful experiment had marked the beginning of a new era which was to transform our whole existence. Starting from this first positive result, Guglielmo continued to develop and perfect his invention. He succeeded in transmitting over greater and greater distances also by using the power of conduction of the earth which was then unknown. An extraordinary intuition of my husband’s in the field of the propagation of electro-magnetic waves concerned the conductivity of the earth in long-distance transmissions. With his brilliant mind he invented and perfected the antenna-earth system, the essential key to the development of the entire radio-telegraphic system.

In the same year, 1895, after his first demonstration experiments at Pontecchio, Guglielmo showed his invention to the military authorities and representatives of the Italian Government in Rome but unfortunately without success. “They didn’t believe me!” he told me. There is an eloquent little picture by Bemporad in the Domenica del Corriere of the time which illustrates this. So he said to his mother: “Mother, you are English; let us go to London”. Wasting no time, he collected together the various pieces of his scientific instruments in a big wooden crate which he took with him and he and his mother left for London. Guglielmo had always been very fond of England which he thought of as his second home and which he had often visited when he was a boy. He arrived there full of confidence and enthusiasm with his exceptional invention for wireless communication through the ether. In London, Guglielmo was made welcome and the importance of his invention immediately understood. He was glad to meet his cousin Henry Jameson Davis again. Henry was a good-looking man with a very exuberant character, a few years older than him. Guglielmo was always grateful to him because of the kindness he showed him during this stay in London which was so important for his future. I remember that when I went to London with Guglielmo many years later I too met his cousin Henry Jameson Davis who always showed his sincere affection for my husband. He was Colonel of the Regiment of Irish Volunteers and wore his smart uniform with pride.

Thanks to a letter of introduction from A.A. Campell Swinton, an eminent electrical engineer of the day, Guglielmo was able to show his invention to Mr. William Preece, then Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, who immediately understood its enormous scientific value: it would make it possible for the Great Britain of Queen Victoria to communicate with its Dominions all over the world quickly and in secret. From then on--this was 1896--he lived more in London than in Italy. He recognized that the English had believed in him and recalled with emotion his first experiences in radio transmission: one from the roof of the General Post Office, another from the roof of St.Thomas’s Hospital across the Thames and still another from the “Needles”, rocks near the Isle of Wight, across the Solent.

Guglielmo told me that after the world-wide recognition of his discovery, his father felt sorry that he had ever had doubts about his son’s success. When the newspapers spoke of him and his inventions, he cut out the articles and the photographs and kept them carefully, regretting that he had not believed in him right from the beginning.

My husband told me some other stories about his youth at Villa Griffone. I remember one in particular; about the bicycle. He wanted one that so he could go to the nearby village, which is now called Sasso Marconi, to get the materials he needed for the construction of his apparatus there in the granary. He had no money of his own to spend and his father was strict and did not approve of buying things which seemed to him to be strange and useless. Finally Guglielmo persuaded him to lend him twenty-five lire and so was able to buy himself the longed-for bicycle. He often used it to go to Sasso and get what he needed immediately. As soon as he could, to his great satisfaction, he repaid his father the twenty-five lire.

Years later I often went to Bologna with my husband and I loved visiting the places where he had spent his summers as a boy with his parents and where he had begun his first experiments in radio-telegraphy. One day in September, 1928 Guglielmo took me to the church of Pontecchio. The church had been decorated especially for our visit; there were flowers everywhere and they had prepared a stool for us to kneel upon, covered in red damask silk, which was usually kept just for weddings. Many people from the village and the neighbourhood were present and when we came out of the church everyone greeted us joyously, clapping and cheering as we went by because Guglielmo, like his father, was much loved by the farm-workers and employees of the Marconi estates.

My husband wanted me to meet the Parish Priest, Don Domenico Calzolari, who had been there ever since Guglielmo was a child. The priest, who was now ninety years old, remembered him very well and told me: AWhen I went to visit the Marconi family at Villa Griffone for the first time, I took a lamb as a present, with a little bell tied around its neck with a red ribbon. How Guglielmo jumped for joy! He was a beautiful child of about two or three, with fair hair and blue eyes. He often came to Pontecchio with his father in a light four-wheeled gig, drawn by two ponies with smart red English harness, given him by his mother.

Guglielmo had very happy memories of the summer months that he spent with his parents at Pontecchio during his childhood and adolescence. One of his best friends was the little Tettè Malvasìa, whose family were friends and neighbours there in the country. He loved the long warm days and said that the summer was never too hot at Villa Griffone. He told me that in the afternoons he used to go for long walks on their land and as he walked he always thought about the possibility of communicating over a distance using electro-magnetic waves. He would throw little stones into the ponds to study the phenomenon of the concentric circles that formed in the water; he always had the propagation of waves in mind. He stuck sticks in the stream to test the antenna which upset the women who came to do their washing there. He often climbed to the top of the hill to admire the sunset. My husband had the soul of a poet and the beauties of nature moved him deeply. A beautiful sunset or the changeable appearance of the sea could send him into raptures. Sometimes as we sailed on board the Elettra he held me close as we stood on the bridge and together we watched the stormy sea in silence and admiration.