Peter Costello
Guglielmo Marconi Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World
by Marc Raboy (Oxford University Press, £25.00)
The Vatican is said to be slow to communicate its views on issues, due to its own bureaucracy. But this is only partially true. L’Osservatore Romano, for instance, was founded in 1861 to propagate the claims of the Vatican under threat of extinction by the Kingdom of Italy in the drive towards unification.
So it was that soon after the Vatican City had come to terms with the new, now Fascist Italy, the Vatican through Guglielmo Marconi established in 1931 Vatican Radio, whose worldwide broadcasts reached a far wider audience than the paper did. As it had for de Valera in establishing the first Irish station at Athlone in 1933, radio enabled the seemingly besieged Church to speak directly to the world, providing the Church (if I can adapt de Valera’s words when he opened his station) with” a bridge” between the Pope in Rome and his adherents around the globe.
The connectivity of radio and its propagation by Marconi is the main theme of this very large biography. When I first read of Marconi at the age of eight it was in a context of “the inventor” of radio. This he was not in any true sense. Scientifically speaking he built on the work of Hertz, Branly and others. What he did do, as an astute businessman, was to develop its commercial potential.
Publicity
The publicity attached to such early incidents as the arrest of Dr Crippin and the sinking of the Titanic, in both of which radio messages, then called ‘Marconigrams’, played a significant part.
A decade or so later radio was well established, as a government venture in some places and pure business in the USA and elsewhere.
But here again, as with the printing press and the internet, the new medium moved rapidly far beyond what Marconi had originally envisaged.
It is an exaggeration to say (as the author does) that Marconi was “the man who networked the world” – that distinction belongs to the original telegraphic network which influenced the late 19th century dissemination of news and opinion. Less easy to study is the social effect of radio – though the famous Orson Welles ‘Martian invasion scare’ (1938) gave some indication of just what it could do to spread hysteria and fear – and in the outcome – hatred.
But this is a biography and it follows the personal life of Marconi. Here in Ireland we always hear of him in the context of early experimental broadcasts, and the station near Clifden. His mother was a Jameson of the distilling family, and her family house is the mansion which still stands in front of the RTÉ premises at Montrose.
But by far the most novel part of this book, the real meat of the matter, is the exploration of the last decades of Marconi’s life – he died in 1937 – and such topics as his commercial schemes worldwide and his relations with the new Fascist regime in Italy.
There was a time when Marconi would be referred to in those round-up articles on “Catholic scientists” – but his relations with religion and the Church were not simple. He was happy enough to call himself a Christian, and the Roman Rota was pleased to annul his marriage when he divorced his wife – but then to get such a verdict is often merely a matter of a deep enough pocket and good connections.
But when Marconi passed away L’Osservatore Romano reported he had had died “a Christian death”. He was said to have breathed his last while a priest who had been called to his bedside recited the Pater Noster. All this was quite false.
How can we be so certain? “Thanks to the Church’s obsession with having its secret record of the true story, we know what really happened,” Professor Raboy writes. Despite what the Vatican paper had reported, a week or two later both the priest and Marconi’s nurse, interrogated by the Vicariate of Rome, agreed that he was already dead when the priest came back at 3.45 “and had died without receiving the last rites”.
Details
These details of Marconi’s last hour, supported too by his Fascist Secret Police file, fill nearly two pages. But the anecdote illustrates the nature of Roboy’s extraordinary research, which has been not only intensive but wideranging.
He illuminates the career of a remarkable Hiberno-Italian in such rich detail that the book also casts in a search light in many areas of life in the early 20th Century, both social and political.
But it reminds us that what our great inventors provide quickly becomes something very different to what they intended. Rather than an instrument of peace and prosperity, radio when Marconi died, had become already an instrument of conflict.
It was, as Catholic philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, a “hot medium” that was essential to the creation of the initial impulse towards Arab nationalism under Nasser, which has now grown into Islamic terrorism through the internet.
Would that we could all see the ultimate outcome of our actions.