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Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World
A little over a century ago, the world went wireless. Cables and all their limiting inefficiencies gave way to a revolutionary means of transmitting news and information almost everywhere, instantaneously. By means of "Hertzian waves," as radio waves were initially known, ships could now make contact with other ships (saving lives, such as on the doomed S.S. Titanic ); financial markets could coordinate with other financial markets, establishing the price of commodities and fixing exchange rates; military commanders could connect with the front lines, positioning artillery and directing troop movements. Suddenly and irrevocably, time and space telescoped beyond what had been thought imaginable. Someone had not only imagined this networked world but realized it: Guglielmo Marconi.
As Marc Raboy shows us in this enthralling and comprehensive biography, Marconi was the first truly global figure in modern communications. Born to an Italian father and an Irish mother, he was in many ways stateless, working his cosmopolitanism to advantage. Through a combination of skill, tenacity, luck, vision, and timing, Marconi popularized--and, more critically, patented--the use of radio waves. Soon after he burst into public view at the age of 22 with a demonstration of his wireless apparatus in London, 1896, he established his Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company and seemed unstoppable. He was decorated by the Czar of Russia, named an Italian Senator, knighted by King George V of England, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics--all before the age of 40. Until his death in 1937, Marconi was at the heart of every major innovation in electronic communication, courted by powerful scientific, political, and financial interests. He established stations and transmitters in every
corner of the globe, from Newfoundland to Buenos Aires, Hawaii to Saint Petersburg.
Based on original research and unpublished archival materials in four countries and several languages, Raboy's book is the first to connect significant parts of Marconi's story, from his early days in Italy, to his groundbreaking experiments, to his protean role in world affairs. Raboy also explores Marconi's relationshps with his wives, mistresses, and children, and examines in unsparing detail the last ten years of the inventor's life, when he returned to Italy and became a pillar of Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Raboy's engrossing biography, which will stand as the authoritative work of its subject, proves that we still live in the world Marconi created.
As Marc Raboy shows us in this enthralling and comprehensive biography, Marconi was the first truly global figure in modern communications. Born to an Italian father and an Irish mother, he was in many ways stateless, working his cosmopolitanism to advantage. Through a combination of skill, tenacity, luck, vision, and timing, Marconi popularized--and, more critically, patented--the use of radio waves. Soon after he burst into public view at the age of 22 with a demonstration of his wireless apparatus in London, 1896, he established his Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company and seemed unstoppable. He was decorated by the Czar of Russia, named an Italian Senator, knighted by King George V of England, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics--all before the age of 40. Until his death in 1937, Marconi was at the heart of every major innovation in electronic communication, courted by powerful scientific, political, and financial interests. He established stations and transmitters in every
corner of the globe, from Newfoundland to Buenos Aires, Hawaii to Saint Petersburg.
Based on original research and unpublished archival materials in four countries and several languages, Raboy's book is the first to connect significant parts of Marconi's story, from his early days in Italy, to his groundbreaking experiments, to his protean role in world affairs. Raboy also explores Marconi's relationshps with his wives, mistresses, and children, and examines in unsparing detail the last ten years of the inventor's life, when he returned to Italy and became a pillar of Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Raboy's engrossing biography, which will stand as the authoritative work of its subject, proves that we still live in the world Marconi created.
888 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 18, 2016
On June 5, 1944 Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech announcing the fall of Rome to Allied forces. Seeking to distinguish Benito Mussolini and his supporters from the rest of the Italian people, he lauded the many contributions Italians made to civilization. Among the great Italians he singled out by name in this context was Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor who won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the development of radio technology. It was a reflection of the stature he possessed as a man whose name was synonymous with the dominant communications medium of the era.
One of the great achievements of Marc Raboy's book is in conveying the many facets of Marconi's life, one that was lived, often simultaneously, in the worlds of science, business, and politics. The son of a well-to-do Italian landowner and his Irish wife, Marconi developed an early interest in science. Interested in the recently-announced discovery of "Hertzian waves," he experimented with using them for wireless communication, and in his early twenties he succeeded. Moving to England, he soon became an international celebrity with the demonstration of his device, and he soon launched a company that at one point threatened to establish a monopoly on usage of the airwaves. within a few short years Marconi was an international celebrity, one whose name was synonymous with progress. This would be later exploited by Mussolini, who roped a willing Marconi into supporting his Fascist regime.
Benefiting from the release of some previously unavailable papers, Raboy succeeds in providing a comprehensive life of Marconi set withing the context of his age. It's a considerably rich book, full of details of Marconi's inventions and his business activities, yet one that manages to remain remarkably readable as well. It is difficult to imagine that Raboy's life of Marconi will be bettered -- though if it is, it would have to be by a truly remarkable book.
One of the great achievements of Marc Raboy's book is in conveying the many facets of Marconi's life, one that was lived, often simultaneously, in the worlds of science, business, and politics. The son of a well-to-do Italian landowner and his Irish wife, Marconi developed an early interest in science. Interested in the recently-announced discovery of "Hertzian waves," he experimented with using them for wireless communication, and in his early twenties he succeeded. Moving to England, he soon became an international celebrity with the demonstration of his device, and he soon launched a company that at one point threatened to establish a monopoly on usage of the airwaves. within a few short years Marconi was an international celebrity, one whose name was synonymous with progress. This would be later exploited by Mussolini, who roped a willing Marconi into supporting his Fascist regime.
Benefiting from the release of some previously unavailable papers, Raboy succeeds in providing a comprehensive life of Marconi set withing the context of his age. It's a considerably rich book, full of details of Marconi's inventions and his business activities, yet one that manages to remain remarkably readable as well. It is difficult to imagine that Raboy's life of Marconi will be bettered -- though if it is, it would have to be by a truly remarkable book.
July 13, 2023
On the whole, it would appear that Raboy has produced what is going to be the standard biography of Guglielmo Marconi for sometime to come, and provides the reader with an almost month by month accounting of the man's activities, besides putting Marconi into context.
As might be expected, most of the page-count is devoted to Marconi's adventures in technology, as his tinkering as a young man ultimately led to the wireless revolution, and then to his never ending battle to defend his intellectual property. In regards to what Marconi's greatest talent might have been, Raboy suggests that it was an ability to strip away extraneous matters and relentlessly pursue the main avenues of advance to a successful conclusion; regardless of the cost.
However, the main reason I wanted to read this work is that Raboy deals forthrightly with the more dubious elements of Marconi's life; particularly how he was an early adherent of Mussolini's Fascist regime, and was ultimately an uncompromising defender of Italy's conquest of Ethiopia. That this came to pass might simply be a commentary on how as much as Marconi was a great example of a cosmopolitan Edwardian figure, he was also a product of Italy's struggle for great power status. Raboy further observes that, for all the individualist and unconventional elements of Marconi's personality, when it came to politics he was very much a conformist, if for no other reason that it was going to take access to political power to implement his technological vision. Marconi might have had some personal reservations with Mussolini's policies, but that didn't prevent him from taking prestigious positions in the regime and executing Fascist policies. It was only when the realization dawned that war between Rome and London was in the cards that reality set in for the man as to what he had ultimately signed up for. Marconi's death in 1937 was probably a mercy.
As might be expected, most of the page-count is devoted to Marconi's adventures in technology, as his tinkering as a young man ultimately led to the wireless revolution, and then to his never ending battle to defend his intellectual property. In regards to what Marconi's greatest talent might have been, Raboy suggests that it was an ability to strip away extraneous matters and relentlessly pursue the main avenues of advance to a successful conclusion; regardless of the cost.
However, the main reason I wanted to read this work is that Raboy deals forthrightly with the more dubious elements of Marconi's life; particularly how he was an early adherent of Mussolini's Fascist regime, and was ultimately an uncompromising defender of Italy's conquest of Ethiopia. That this came to pass might simply be a commentary on how as much as Marconi was a great example of a cosmopolitan Edwardian figure, he was also a product of Italy's struggle for great power status. Raboy further observes that, for all the individualist and unconventional elements of Marconi's personality, when it came to politics he was very much a conformist, if for no other reason that it was going to take access to political power to implement his technological vision. Marconi might have had some personal reservations with Mussolini's policies, but that didn't prevent him from taking prestigious positions in the regime and executing Fascist policies. It was only when the realization dawned that war between Rome and London was in the cards that reality set in for the man as to what he had ultimately signed up for. Marconi's death in 1937 was probably a mercy.
June 20, 2018
Review title: On the radio, Marconi's radio
My review title is an ironic reference to the great Warren Zevon song Mohammad's Radio, chosen because the cadence fits so well with the song and because Marconi invented wireless communication via radio waves as both a technology and business. Raboy's authoritative biography establishes Marconi's proper place in those disciplines and in the broader history and culture of his world, and most important, the networked future he created.
Born in Italy to an Italian father and Irish mother (her extended family responsible for Jameson's whiskey), young Marconi lived in both worlds, bilingual and well-traveled from a very early age. He began his tinkering with early electric gear in Italy but moving to London with the encouragement and support of a Jameson uncle to patent the technology and establish the business. Raboy develops the theme that Marconi was always an outsider; asked by an author working on his own Italian biography of Marconi, Raboy asserted that Marconi was "unequivocally" Italian, while the Italian author just as firmly placed Marconi as British. Some contemporary scientists considered him a tinkerer at best and a business promoter at worst, while businessmen denigrated his business acumen as a lone inventor, one of the last of the inventor-heros in the mold of Edison and Ford. His personal life, as he married first an Irish woman then, after a difficult divorce that required Vatican intervention, an Italian woman, was characterized by constant travel and separation from his family; with periods of isolation at remote coastal installations and adulatory attention in the media, Marconi was an outsider even in here.
Marconi crossed the Atlantic more than 30 times before World War I, crisscrossing between his remote coastal wireless stations and the business capitals of London and New York . He would have sailed on the Titanic's only voyage but couldn't wait the extra few days for its departure, and sailed on the Lusitania on its final west-bound trip before it was sunk by German torpedoes. He was at the center of the technical, business, political, and nascent celebrity culture of the first decades of the 20th century. As Raboy writes, he bridged the Victorian, Edwardian, and modernity eras, the quintessential outsider who was always in the center of the news.
And he not only networked the world, he foresaw the world his network would create. In 1913, after completing successful experiments in what he called "wireless telephony" and would shortly be implemented as radio broadcasting, Marconi wrote:
Marconi' s technique, which served him with remarkable success in bridging science, technology, politics, and commerce: "test a simple hypothesis and then develop its practical application. He was simultaneously thinking about a new technology, the design of a mechanical apparatus, the operational and organizational steps necessary to establish a new system, and the political hurdles that needed to be crossed." (p. 479) it was a model he repeated throughout his long career from brash young outsider (the half Italian, half Irish unknown creating his company in England) to senior statesman (inventing shortwave radio broadcasting and using it to integrate the Empire).
Marconi, laser-focused on wireless as a communications technology carrying business, political, and journalistic messages, mostly missed the potential of radio as a broadcasting entertainment and audience-collecting phenomenon. Much like early inventors of the silicon era such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Marconi was sometimes better as a creator of a technological system than as a prophet of its future uses. But even late to the realization of radio's potential, the market position of Marconi's companies in the UK in the 1920s was so strong that the British government decided that the establishment of a government monopoly (the BBC) was the best alternative to the potential (and what they correctly saw as the near certainty of) a commercial monopoly of radio broadcasting by Marconi. The geographic size and more competitive market in the US resulted in a different model of government-issued licenses to commercial radio broadcasting companies.
By the peak of his career in the first two decades of the 20th century, Marconi was a world citizen, but the growing schism in Europe between democracy and fascism drove him to identify linguistically, politically, and geographically with Italy. His fame won him appointments by rising dictator Mussolini as administrator of national science academies designed to apply science and technology to the service of Italian honor, economic growth, and legitimacy of the fascist regime. Raboy takes a detailed look at Marconi's relationship with his political ally, who both benefited from Marconi's fame but feared the independent voice it afforded him. For his part Marconi used his positions to try to win funding of continued research and development of radio technologies, while influencing government direction without endangering his privileged status. As antisemitism became a national policy position with a violent final solution for Italy's German ally, Mussolini followed suit. Marconi, who Raboy documents conclusively was never antisemitic either publicly or privately, had to negotiate this dangerous political landscape, and while Raboy never finds evidence that Marconi supported antisemitic policies (such as refusing admittance of Jewish scientists to his academies) he also finds no evidence of Marconi speaking out to defend Jews from the rising legal violence.
In July 1937, before war irrevocably split his native countries and would have forced him to take a stand for or against fascist policies on science and race, Marconi died of a heart attack. His legacy was firmly in place, the world networked by the radio waves he was the first to exploit scientifically, technologically and financially. While patent counterclaims tried to prove that competitors were first in the laboratory, Marconi deserves credit for "inventing" wireless and crucially "the conditions for exploiting it." (p. 673). Raboy has provided the authoritative proof that Marconi's radio networked our 21st century world.
My review title is an ironic reference to the great Warren Zevon song Mohammad's Radio, chosen because the cadence fits so well with the song and because Marconi invented wireless communication via radio waves as both a technology and business. Raboy's authoritative biography establishes Marconi's proper place in those disciplines and in the broader history and culture of his world, and most important, the networked future he created.
Born in Italy to an Italian father and Irish mother (her extended family responsible for Jameson's whiskey), young Marconi lived in both worlds, bilingual and well-traveled from a very early age. He began his tinkering with early electric gear in Italy but moving to London with the encouragement and support of a Jameson uncle to patent the technology and establish the business. Raboy develops the theme that Marconi was always an outsider; asked by an author working on his own Italian biography of Marconi, Raboy asserted that Marconi was "unequivocally" Italian, while the Italian author just as firmly placed Marconi as British. Some contemporary scientists considered him a tinkerer at best and a business promoter at worst, while businessmen denigrated his business acumen as a lone inventor, one of the last of the inventor-heros in the mold of Edison and Ford. His personal life, as he married first an Irish woman then, after a difficult divorce that required Vatican intervention, an Italian woman, was characterized by constant travel and separation from his family; with periods of isolation at remote coastal installations and adulatory attention in the media, Marconi was an outsider even in here.
Marconi crossed the Atlantic more than 30 times before World War I, crisscrossing between his remote coastal wireless stations and the business capitals of London and New York . He would have sailed on the Titanic's only voyage but couldn't wait the extra few days for its departure, and sailed on the Lusitania on its final west-bound trip before it was sunk by German torpedoes. He was at the center of the technical, business, political, and nascent celebrity culture of the first decades of the 20th century. As Raboy writes, he bridged the Victorian, Edwardian, and modernity eras, the quintessential outsider who was always in the center of the news.
And he not only networked the world, he foresaw the world his network would create. In 1913, after completing successful experiments in what he called "wireless telephony" and would shortly be implemented as radio broadcasting, Marconi wrote:
'The popular anticipation of pocket wireless telephones by means of which a passenger flying in an aeroplane over France or Italy might "ring up" a friend walking about the streets of London with a receiver in his pocket cannot be said to have been as yet practicality realized but there is nothing inconceivable or even impracticable about such an achievement and the progress of wireless telephony seems to be pointing in that direction.' (p. 382)
Marconi' s technique, which served him with remarkable success in bridging science, technology, politics, and commerce: "test a simple hypothesis and then develop its practical application. He was simultaneously thinking about a new technology, the design of a mechanical apparatus, the operational and organizational steps necessary to establish a new system, and the political hurdles that needed to be crossed." (p. 479) it was a model he repeated throughout his long career from brash young outsider (the half Italian, half Irish unknown creating his company in England) to senior statesman (inventing shortwave radio broadcasting and using it to integrate the Empire).
Marconi, laser-focused on wireless as a communications technology carrying business, political, and journalistic messages, mostly missed the potential of radio as a broadcasting entertainment and audience-collecting phenomenon. Much like early inventors of the silicon era such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Marconi was sometimes better as a creator of a technological system than as a prophet of its future uses. But even late to the realization of radio's potential, the market position of Marconi's companies in the UK in the 1920s was so strong that the British government decided that the establishment of a government monopoly (the BBC) was the best alternative to the potential (and what they correctly saw as the near certainty of) a commercial monopoly of radio broadcasting by Marconi. The geographic size and more competitive market in the US resulted in a different model of government-issued licenses to commercial radio broadcasting companies.
By the peak of his career in the first two decades of the 20th century, Marconi was a world citizen, but the growing schism in Europe between democracy and fascism drove him to identify linguistically, politically, and geographically with Italy. His fame won him appointments by rising dictator Mussolini as administrator of national science academies designed to apply science and technology to the service of Italian honor, economic growth, and legitimacy of the fascist regime. Raboy takes a detailed look at Marconi's relationship with his political ally, who both benefited from Marconi's fame but feared the independent voice it afforded him. For his part Marconi used his positions to try to win funding of continued research and development of radio technologies, while influencing government direction without endangering his privileged status. As antisemitism became a national policy position with a violent final solution for Italy's German ally, Mussolini followed suit. Marconi, who Raboy documents conclusively was never antisemitic either publicly or privately, had to negotiate this dangerous political landscape, and while Raboy never finds evidence that Marconi supported antisemitic policies (such as refusing admittance of Jewish scientists to his academies) he also finds no evidence of Marconi speaking out to defend Jews from the rising legal violence.
In July 1937, before war irrevocably split his native countries and would have forced him to take a stand for or against fascist policies on science and race, Marconi died of a heart attack. His legacy was firmly in place, the world networked by the radio waves he was the first to exploit scientifically, technologically and financially. While patent counterclaims tried to prove that competitors were first in the laboratory, Marconi deserves credit for "inventing" wireless and crucially "the conditions for exploiting it." (p. 673). Raboy has provided the authoritative proof that Marconi's radio networked our 21st century world.
October 22, 2016
From New Book Network: Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it was he who pioneered the concept of wireless global communications. As a teenager he was fascinated by the recent discovery of radio waves, and by the time he was in his early twenties he had developed an apparatus that used these waves to transmit and receive messages. Traveling to London, he demonstrated a gift for publicity as he established himself as a technological pioneer in an age of rapidly emerging wonders.
Thanks to his unassailable patents, Marconi soon created a global communications empire, one that made his name synonymous with radio and was so dominant that it brought the nations of the world together in an unprecedented international agreement to regulate the field of wireless telegraphy. Raboy recounts Marconi’s roving life as a celebrated figure, the development of his multinational business concerns, and his later relationship with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and the shadow it cast over his posthumous reputation.
Link: http://newbooksnetwork.com/marc-raboy...
Thanks to his unassailable patents, Marconi soon created a global communications empire, one that made his name synonymous with radio and was so dominant that it brought the nations of the world together in an unprecedented international agreement to regulate the field of wireless telegraphy. Raboy recounts Marconi’s roving life as a celebrated figure, the development of his multinational business concerns, and his later relationship with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and the shadow it cast over his posthumous reputation.
Link: http://newbooksnetwork.com/marc-raboy...
December 11, 2021
Last year I read 350 pages of the 680 pages of this book.
This is a huge and dense tome.
The first couple hundred pages are compelling but then it really falls off.
So last year, I put it on my shelf intending to finish it one day…
But I find myself today reading an excellent book ("Inventing American Broadcasting" by Susan J. Douglas) of which a significant portion or the narrative is devoted to Marconi … and I realize that said book is doing a better job of narrating Marconi’s life and work than Mr. Raboy’s book… and I realize that I really can’t see myself in the future slogging through the 300+ remaining pages of Mr. Raboy’s book … so I have moved it from my “Finish it One Day” Goodread’s shelf to my “Abandoned” Shelf.
This is a huge and dense tome.
The first couple hundred pages are compelling but then it really falls off.
So last year, I put it on my shelf intending to finish it one day…
But I find myself today reading an excellent book ("Inventing American Broadcasting" by Susan J. Douglas) of which a significant portion or the narrative is devoted to Marconi … and I realize that said book is doing a better job of narrating Marconi’s life and work than Mr. Raboy’s book… and I realize that I really can’t see myself in the future slogging through the 300+ remaining pages of Mr. Raboy’s book … so I have moved it from my “Finish it One Day” Goodread’s shelf to my “Abandoned” Shelf.
January 1, 2019
Exhaustively researched biography of the wireless pioneer. The focus is on Marconi's day to day life - where was he and what was he doing on such and such a date - and particularly on his relationship with the fascist state of Mussolini. Readers looking for an in depth study of Marconi's technical achievements will likely be disappointed.
July 7, 2025
Ci sono molti pezzi che avrebbero tranquillamente potuto essere resi con meno parole o in maniera meno pedante, ma complessivamente questa biografia di Marconi è molto interessante ed equilibrata.
Si percepisce l'ammirazione verso il genio bolognese, senza però sfociare nell'apologia e con un consistente e robusto apparato bibliografico.
Si percepisce l'ammirazione verso il genio bolognese, senza però sfociare nell'apologia e con un consistente e robusto apparato bibliografico.
January 14, 2021
This is one of the best biographies that I have read of an incredibly interesting man. Written is a clear lucid style with a tremendous flow to the story ..Not just the absorbing story of Marconi but also the historic and social aspects of the period ..
October 31, 2024
Agree with other reviews being thoroughly researched and detailed. I was hoping to learn more about the technical details of Marconi's work. Just not a good fit. Quit about a third complete. Will donate it to the library.
July 30, 2019
Excellent biography of one of the most consequential inventors of the 20th century. I wish some of the 700 pages would dig deeper into the technical aspects of his inventions.
August 8, 2023
A demigod that weaved the world together with global communication.
August 20, 2023
Such a visionary that ended up down the WRONG path in the end. OOPS. 73s de AE9XT
February 1, 2024
A biography of the man Marconi! It would be interesting if there were more technical information about the various phases of technology involved in the history of wireless, radio.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews