Thunderstruck

schooling began when he was twelve years old, when his parents sent him to Florence to the Istituto Cavallero, where his solitary upbringing now proved a liability. He was shy and had never learned the kind of tactics necessary for making and engaging friends that other children acquired in their first years in school. His daughter, Degna, wrote, “The expression on Guglielmo’s face, construed by his classmates as arising from a sense of superiority, was actually a cover for shyness and worry.”

At the istituto he discovered that while he had been busy learning English, his ability to speak Italian had degraded. One day the principal told him, “Your Italian is atrocious.” To underscore the point, or merely to humiliate the boy, he then ordered Marconi to recite a poem studied in class earlier that day. “And speak up!” the principal said.

Marconi made it through one line, when the class erupted in laughter. As Degna put it, “His classmates began baying like hounds on a fresh scent. They howled, slapped their thighs, and embarked on elaborate pantomimes.”

Years later one teacher would tell a reporter, “He always was a model of good behavior, but as to his brain —well, the least said, the soonest mended. I am afraid he got many severe smackings, but he took them like an angel. At that time he never could learn anything by heart. It was impossible, I used to think. I had never seen a child with so defective a memory.” His teachers referred to Marconi as “the little Englishman.”

Other schools and tutors followed, as did private lessons on electricity by one of Livorno’s leading professors. Here Marconi was introduced to a retired telegrapher, Nello Marchetti, who was losing his eyesight. The two got along well, and soon Marconi began reading to the older man. In turn, Marchetti taught him Morse code and techniques for sending messages by telegraph.

Many years later scientists would share Marconi’s wonder at why it was that he of all people should come to see something that the most august minds of his day had missed. Over the next century, of course, his idea would seem elementary and routine, but at the time it was startling, so much so that the sheer surprise of it would cause some to brand him a fraud and charlatan—worse, a foreign charlatan—and make his future path immeasurably more difficult.

To fully appreciate the novelty, one has to step back into that great swath of history that Degna later would call “The Great Hush.”

IN THE BEGINNING, IN THE INVISIBLE realm where electromagnetic energy traveled, there was emptiness. Such energy did exist, of course, and traveled in the form of waves launched from the sun or by lightning or any random spark, but these emanations rocketed past without meaning or purpose, at the speed of light. When men first encountered sparks, as when a lightning bolt incinerated their neighbors, they had no idea of their nature or cause, only that they arrived with a violence unlike anything else in the world. Historians often place humankind’s initial awareness of the distinct character of electrical phenomena in ancient Greece, with a gentleman named Thales, who discovered that by rubbing amber he could attract to it small bits of things, like beard hair and lint. The Greek word for amber was elektron.

As men developed a scientific outlook, they created devices that allowed them to generate their own sparks. These were electrostatic machines that involved the rubbing of one substance against another, either manually or through the use of a turning mechanism, until enough electrostatic charge—static electricity—built up within the machine to produce a healthy spark or, in the jargon of electrical engineers, a disruptive discharge. Initially scientists were pleased just to be able to launch a spark, as when Isaac Newton did it in 1643, but the technology quickly improved and, in 1730, enabled one Stephen Gray to devise an experiment that for sheer inventive panache outstripped anything that had come before. He clothed a boy in heavy garments until his body was thoroughly insulated but left the boy’s hands, head, and feet naked. Using nonconducting silk strings, he hung the boy in the air, then touched an electrified glass tube to his naked foot, thus causing a spark to rocket from his nose.

The study of electricity got a big boost in 1745 with the invention of the Leyden jar, the first device capable of storing and amplifying static electricity. It was invented nearly simultaneously in Germany and in Leyden, the Netherlands, by two men whose names did not readily trip from the tongue: Ewald Jurgen von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek. A French scientist, the Abbe Nollet, simplified things by dubbing the invention the Leyden phial, although for a time a few proprietary Germans persisted in calling it a von Kleist bottle. In its best-known iteration, the Leyden jar consisted of a glass container with coatings of foil on the inside and outside. A friction machine was used to charge, or fill, the jar with electricity. When a wire was used to link both coatings, the jar released its energy in the form of a powerful spark. In the interests of science Abbe Nollet went on to deploy the jar to make large groups of people do strange things, as when he invited two hundred monks to hold hands and then discharged a Leyden jar into the first man, causing an abrupt and furious flapping of robes.

Naturally a competition got under way to see who could launch the longest and most powerful spark. One researcher, Georg Richman, a Swede living in Russia, took a disastrous lead in 1753 when, in the midst of an attempt to harness lightning to charge an electrostatic device, a huge spark leaped from the apparatus to his head, making him the first scientist to die by electrocution. In 1850 Heinrich D. Ruhmkorff perfected a means of wrapping wire around an iron core and then rewrapping the assembly with more wire to produce an “induction coil” that made the creation of powerful sparks simple and reliable—and incidentally set mankind on the path toward producing the first automotive ignition coil. A few years later researchers in England fashioned a powerful Ruhmkorff coil that they then used to fire off a spark forty-two inches long. In 1880 John Trowbridge of Harvard launched a seven-footer.

Along the way scientists began to suspect that the sudden brilliance of sparks might mask deeper secrets. In 1842 Joseph Henry, a Princeton professor who later became the first director of the Smithsonian Institution, speculated that a spark might not be a onetime burst of energy but in fact a rapid series of discharges, or oscillations. Other scientists came to the same conclusion and in 1859 one of them, Berend Fedderson, proved it beyond doubt by capturing the phenomenon in photographs.

But it was James Clerk Maxwell who really shook things up. In 1873 in his A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism he proposed that such oscillations produced invisible electromagnetic waves, whose properties he described in a series of famous equations. He also argued that these waves were much like light and traveled through the same medium, the mysterious invisible realm known to physicists of the day as ether. No one yet had managed to capture a sample of ether, but this did not stop Maxwell from calculating its relative density. He came up with the handy estimate that it had 936/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000ths the density of water. In 1886 Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of such waves through laboratory experiments and found also that they traveled at the speed of light.

Meanwhile other scientists had discovered an odd phenomenon in which a spark appeared to alter the conducting properties of metal filings. One of them, Edouard Branly of France, inserted filings into glass tubes to better demonstrate the effect and discovered that simply by tapping the tubes he could return the filings to their nonconducting state. He published his findings in 1891 but made no mention of using his invention to detect electromagnetic waves, though his choice of name for his device was prophetic. He called it a radio-conductor. At first his work was ignored, until Oliver Lodge and his peers began to speculate that maybe Hertz’s waves were what caused the filings to become conductive. Lodge devised an improved version of the Branly tube, his “coherer,” the instrument he unveiled at the Royal Institution.

Lodge’s own statements about his lecture reveal that he did not think of Hertzian waves as being useful; certainly the idea of harnessing them for communication never occurred to him. He believed them incapable of traveling far—he declared half a mile as the likely limit. It remained the case that as of the summer of 1894 no means existed for communicating without wires over distances beyond the reach of sight. This made for lonely times in the many places where wires did not reach, but nowhere was this absence felt more acutely than on the open sea, a fact of life that is hard to appreciate for later generations accustomed to pthe immediate world-grasp afforded by shortwave radio and cellular telephone.

The completeness of this estrangement from the affairs of land came home keenly to Winston Churchill in 1899 on the eve of the Boer War, when as a young war correspondent he sailed for Cape Town with the commander of Britain’s forces aboard the warship Dunottar Castle. He wrote, “Whilst the issues of peace and war seemed to hang in their last flickering balance, and before a single irrevocable shot had been fired, we steamed off into July storms. There was, of course, no wireless at sea in those days, and, therefore, at this