Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio, told by his daughter Eelettra

The future began 150 years ago, when Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna «in a stormy birth». His father Giuseppe, a landowner, dreamed of him as a technical expert. His Irish mother Annie Jameson, one of those Jamesons who had founded the whiskey distillery of the same name in 1780, wanted him happy.

GRADUATED WITH EFFORT – And Guglielmo was happy when he tinkered with the devices he built himself, convinced as he was that we could communicate wirelessly, via radio waves. At 21, after having failed at school (he graduated with difficulty, he never took a degree), he succeeded in an experiment that would, wrote D’Annunzio, “put the seal on an era”: in the kitchen of his villa in Sasso – today Sasso Marconi – pressed a telegraph button and 2 kilometers away, beyond the Celestini hill, a bell rang. Brother Alfonso, who was guarding the “ring”, fired a rifle shot into the air. It is the birth certificate of the radio, but also the announcement of a wireless world, free from wires (TV, cell phone, wifi: everything starts there).

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BRAIN DRAIN ANTE LITTERAM – In Italy, his ideas were not understood. An official of the Royal Ministry of Posts, a certain La Marca, after having listened to them wrote: «This boy should be locked up in Lungara», which was the criminal asylum in Rome. William then left with his mother for England. In London, as a self-taught inventor he knew how to become an entrepreneur: he accumulated financing, registered the patent, founded the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. In 1901 he achieved the first transoceanic wireless transmission, connecting Cornwall to Canada. In 1909 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics by popular acclaim: in January of that year, the ocean liner Republic was rammed and 737 passengers were saved only because the radio operator – then called the radio operator – sent the first SOS in history.
In via Condotti, in Rome, in the noble palace of her in-laws where she died of angina pectoris in 1937, we meet her daughter Elettra, 94 years old on July 20th, and her nephew Gugliemo, who is a prince on his father’s side (Carlo Giovanelli) and Marconi on his mother’s side.

FAILED PHYSICS 6 TIMES – Elettra: «My father was an optimist. He explained his inventions to me, his tools seemed like games to me. For all children the world is new, but what he showed me was truly new.” Guglielmo: «That’s why they didn’t understand him: he was too far ahead, he seemed like a heretic. At university he failed his physics exam six times. My grandfather’s biography contains a perfect moral for young people: “Don’t give up!”».

He was an “accessible”, playful scientist. E.: «My mother Cristina sometimes told me: “Don’t disturb him, your father does great things”. We lived most of the year on board the yacht whose name was like me, Elettra (70 meters long, with a crew of 25 men, ed.), and he had his own rooms for experiments. Then when he finished, he came to call us: “Elettra, Cristina, come and hear the voices from Australia, from Africa” ».
G.: «Speaking of ships: my grandfather should have been on the Titanic. There is the invitation with his name, he refused to honor previous work commitments. When the survivors, saved by wireless operators Philips and Bride, arrived at New York Harbor, he was there to welcome them.”

Elettra, a “domestic” memory of her father? E. «At home I always heard that he had invented “wireless” communication. So, when I was 4 years old, I went to him with a needle and a doll’s dress in my hand and said: “Dad, can you teach me how to sew without thread?”. I still have his laugh here in my head. And then I remember when he wanted to extract gold from the sea, using electric waves as magnets. From the water he pulled bags with seaweed and gold threads on board, it was like magic. He made me separate the red ones from the yellow ones, and the blue ones from the green ones. Then he put them in glass containers, I think he gave them to the Pope.”
G.: «Grandfather feared being spied on, especially by the Germans. He wrote his intuitions on Electra’s tablecloths and then had them washed, to erase the formulas, the accounts, the ideas.”
E.: «When we left the yacht, in November, he destroyed everything: the devices, the results of the experiments. Mum wanted to keep them in sealed boxes, but he was terrified that the others would copy him and said to her, pointing to his temples: “I have everything here, I’ll complete them next season”. Then he had the heart attack. Many professors came to beg us to hand over his papers, his instruments, but we had nothing.”

Were you working on other inventions? G.: «He designed what he called a “blocking ray”, but Pius XI made him understand the danger of the project and he destroyed everything. He carried out some experiments, Donna Rachele, Mussolini’s wife, talks about it: they were going to Ostia and at a certain point all the cars stopped. It would have been a very powerful weapon… Imagine being able to paralyze enemy tanks. The regime called it the ‘death ray’.”
E.: «Dad, however, always said that his discoveries should serve to improve the world, not destroy it».
G.: «And then blind navigation. The Italian military technicians didn’t understand, the English ones perfected it: this is how radar was born.”

Elettra, her father died the day she turned 7. «He collapsed into an armchair that is over there, in the room where my son now sleeps. I was in Viareggio, we were holidaying at the Astor hotel. At the time the news was “shouted”, and to protect me they kept the newsboys away from the hotel. I often dream that he is alive. My way of remembering him is by looking in the mirror: I look like him, I have his eyes, the beautiful hands with which he played the piano.”

Guglielmo, your grandfather was criticized for joining fascism. G: «At the end of 1936, a few months before his death, he asked for an audience with Mussolini, who was already planning to reach an agreement with Germany (the Pact of Steel with Hitler dates back to 1939, ed.). He advised him to give up, because he knew the progress of British military technology. He was courageous, the Duce did not tolerate dissent. In fact he resented: “You speak like that because your mother is English”.
E.: «He returned home pale, dejected. He told my mother: “The alliance with the Germans will be the end of Italy”. In Cardiff they blocked a monument in honor of him, because “Marconi was a fascist and anti-Semitic”.
G.: «Now they will do it, it was an internal political dispute. I teach History at Unimeier, archives are my profession. Studying them, I discovered that the Jews reported them (with the letter E, ed.) to protect them, not to chase them away. No Jew was removed when he presided over the Italian Academy and the CNR.”

Is it true that Mussolini put him at the head of a commission to investigate UFOs? G.: «Yes, the Special Research Cabinet 33. Under him was Enrico Fermi. My grandfather was absolutely convinced that extraterrestrials existed.”

You are not technological. It doesn’t even have WhatsApp. «In this I am a conservative, I have an old Nokia. Too much technology is harmful to health and conviviality.”

And she has no children: the Marconis risk “extinct” with her. «I’m still young (he’s 57, ed.). Robert De Niro had a baby at 79. My wife (Vittoria Ludovica Rubini, ed.) is 21 years younger than me. I guarantee you: the Marconis don’t end here.”

Alessandro Penna