Thunderstruck

became conductors—they “cohered”—and allowed current to flow. By tapping the tube with his finger, Lodge returned the filings to their nonconductive state, and the circuit went dead.

Though seemingly a simple thing, in fact the audience had never seen anything like it: Lodge had harnessed invisible energy, Hertz’s waves, to cause a reaction in a remote device, without intervening wires. The applause came like thunder.

Afterward Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished mathematician and physicist and secretary of the Royal Society, came up to Lodge to congratulate him. He knew of Lodge’s tendency toward distraction. What Lodge had just demonstrated seemed a path that even he might find worthy of focus. “Well, now you can go ahead,” Rayleigh told Lodge. “There is your life work!”

But Lodge did not take Lord Rayleigh’s advice. Instead, once again exhibiting his inability to pursue one theme of research to conclusion, he left for a vacation in Europe that included a scientific foray into a very different realm. He traveled to the Ile Roubaud, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France, where soon very strange things began to happen and he found himself distracted anew, at what would prove to be a critical moment in his career and in the history of science.

For even as Lodge conducted his new explorations on the Ile Roubaud, far to the south someone else was hard at work—ingeniously, energetically, compulsively—exploring the powers of the invisible world, with the same tools Lodge had used for his demonstration at the Royal Institution, much to Lodge’s eventual consternation and regret.

THE GREAT HUSH

IT WAS NOT PRECISELY A VISION, like some sighting of the Madonna in a tree trunk, but rather a certainty, a declarative sentence that entered his brain. Unlike other lightning-strike ideas, this one did not fade and blur but retained its surety and concrete quality. Later Marconi would say there was a divine aspect to it, as though he had been chosen over all others to receive the idea. At first it perplexed him—the question, why him, why not Oliver Lodge, or for that matter Thomas Edison?

The idea arrived in the most prosaic of ways. In that summer of 1894, when he was twenty years old, his parents resolved to escape the extraordinary heat that had settled over Europe by moving to higher and cooler ground. They fled Bologna for the town of Biella in the Italian Alps, just below the Santuario di Oropa, a complex of sacred buildings devoted to the legend of the Black Madonna. During the family’s stay, he happened to acquire a copy of a journal called Il Nuovo Cimento, in which he read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz written by Augusto Righi, a neighbor and a physics professor at the University of Bologna. Something in the article produced the intellectual equivalent of a spark and in that moment caused his thoughts to realign, like the filings in a Lodge coherer.

“My chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it into practice,” he said later. “In fact Oliver Lodge had, but he had missed the correct answer by a fraction. The idea was so real to me that I did not realize that to others the theory might appear quite fantastic.”

What he hoped to do—expected to do—was to send messages over long distances through the air using Hertz’s invisible waves. Nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible. Quite the opposite. To the rest of the scientific world what he now proposed was the stuff of magic shows and seances, a kind of electric telepathy.

His great advantage, as it happens, was his ignorance—and his mother’s aversion to priests.

WHAT MOST STRUCK PEOPLE on first meeting Guglielmo Marconi was that no matter what his true age happened to be at a given moment, he looked much older. He was of average height and had dark hair, but unlike many of his compatriots, his complexion was pale and his eyes were blue, an inheritance from his Irish mother. His expression was sober and serious, the sobriety amplified by his dark, level eyebrows and by the architecture of his lips and mouth, which at rest conveyed a mixture of distaste and impatience. When he smiled, all this changed, according to those who knew him. One has to accept this on faith, however. A search of a hundred photographs of him is likely to yield at best a single half-smile, his least appealing expression, imparting what appeared to be disdain.

His father, Giuseppe Marconi, was a prosperous farmer and businessman, somewhat dour, who had wanted his son to continue along his path. His mother, Anne Jameson, a daughter of the famous Irish whiskey empire, had a more impulsive and exploratory nature. Guglielmo was their second child, born on April 25, 1874. Family lore held that soon after his birth an elderly gardener exclaimed at the size of his ears—“Che orecchi grandi ha!”—essentially, “What big ears he has!”—and indeed his ears were larger than one might have expected, and remained one of his salient physical features. Annie took offense. She countered, “He will be able to hear the still, small voice of the air.” Family lore also held that along with her complexion and blue eyes, her willful nature was transferred to the boy and established within him a turbulence of warring traits. Years later his own daughter, Degna, would describe him as “an aggregate of opposites: patience and uncontrollable anger, courtesy and harshness, shyness and pleasure in adulation, devotion to purpose and”—this last for her a point of acute pain—“thoughtlessness toward many who loved him.”

Marconi grew up on the family’s estate, Villa Griffone, in Pontecchio, on the Reno River a dozen or so miles south of Bologna, where the land begins to rise to form the Apennines. Like many villas in Italy, this one was a large stone box of three stories fronted with stucco painted the color of autumn wheat. Twenty windows in three rows punctuated its front wall, each framed by heavy green shutters. Tubs planted with lemon trees stood on the terrace before the main door. A loggia was laced with paulownia that bloomed with clusters of mauve blossoms. To the south, at midday, the Apennines blued the horizon. As dusk arrived, they turned pink from the falling sun.

Electricity became a fascination for Marconi early in his childhood. In that time anyone of a scientific bent found the subject compelling, and nowhere was this more the case than in Bologna, long associated with advances in electrical research. Here a century earlier Luigi Galvani had done awful things to dead frogs, such as inserting brass hooks into their spinal cords and hanging them from an iron railing to observe how they twitched, in order to test his belief that their muscles contained an electrical fluid, “animal electricity.” It was in Bologna also that Galvani’s peer and adversary, Count Alessandro Volta, constructed his famous “pile” in which he stacked layers of silver, brine-soaked cloth, and zinc and thereby produced the first battery capable of producing a steady flow of current.

As a child, Marconi was possessive about electricity. He called it “my electricity.” His experiments became more and more involved and consumed increasing amounts of time. The talent he exhibited toward tinkering did not extend to academics, however, though one reason may have been his mother’s attitude toward education. “One of the enduring mysteries surrounding Marconi is his almost complete lack of any kind of formal schooling,” wrote his grandson, Francesco Paresce, a physicist in twenty-first-century Munich. “In my mind this had certainly something to do with Annie’s profound distaste for the Catholic Church ingrained in her by her Protestant Irish upbringing and probably confirmed by her association with the late nineteenth-century society of Bologna.” At the time the city was closely bonded to the Vatican. In a letter to her husband Annie sought assurances that Marconi would be allowed to learn “the good principles of my religion and that he not come into contact with the great superstition that is commonly taught to small children in Italy.” The city’s best schools were operated by Jesuits, and this from Annie’s point of view made them inappropriate for Marconi. She made her husband swear that he would not let his son “be educated by the Priests.”

She tutored Marconi or hired tutors for him and allowed him to concentrate on physics and electricity, at the expense of grammar, literature, history, and mathematics. She also taught him piano. He came to love Chopin, Beethoven, and Schubert and discovered he had a gift not just for reading music on sight but also for mentally transposing from one key to another. She taught him English and made sure he spoke it without flaw.

What schooling Marconi did have was episodic, occurring wherever the family happened to choose to spend its time, perhaps Florence or Livorno, an important Italian seaport known to the British as Leghorn. His first formal