Signor Marconi's Magic Box: The Most Remarkable Invention of the 19th Century and the Amateur Inventor Whose Genius Sparked a Revolution

by Gavin Weightman (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $22.78

  The world at the turn of the twentieth century was in the throes of Marconi-mania -brought on by an incredible invention that no one could quite explain, and by a dapper and eccentric figure (who would one day win the newly minted Nobel Prize) at the centre of it all. At a time when the telephone, telegraph, and electricity made the whole world wonder just what science would think of next, the startling answer had come in 1896 in the form of two mysterious wooden boxes containing a device Marconi had rigged up to transmit messages through the ether. It was the birth of the radio, and no scientist in Europe or America, not even Marconi himself, could at first explain how it worked...it just did.Here is a rich portrait of the man and his era-a captivating tale of British blowhards, American con artists, and Marconi himself-a character par excellence, who eventually winds up a virtual prisoner of his worldwide fame and fortune.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.35

  Gavin Weightman tells the story of how Guglielmo Marconi invented the wireless - and how it amused Queen Victoria, saved the lives of the Titanic survivors, tracked down criminals and began the radio revolution. The wireless was one of the most fabulous inventions of the 19th century: the public thought it was magic, the popular newspapers regarded it as miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day (in Europe and America) could not understand how it worked. In 1897, when the first wireless station was established by Marconi in a few rooms of the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, nobody knew how far these invisible waves could travel through the ether , carrying Morse coded messages decipherable at a receiving station. (The definitive answer was not discovered until the 1920s, by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry filling the airwaves with a cacophony of sounds - most of it American). Marconi himself was the son of an Italian father and an Irish mother (from the Jameson whiskey family); he grew up in Italy and was fluent in Italian and English, but it was in England that his invention first caught on. Marconi was in his early twenties at the time (he died in 1937). With the new telegraphy came the real prospect of replacing the network of telegraphic cables that criss-crossed land and sea at colossal expense. Initially it was the great ships that benefited from the new invention - including the Titanic, whose survivors owed their lives to the wireless.