Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World 1st Edition

A very well written biography of the very ambitious Marconi. A good read.

Good technical non fiction story

Very well researched, outstanding work of non-fiction.As others have said, from a historical perspective - it's top notch.With that in mind, it's a five star book.. is it "exciting"... no... not really but its history and informative !

Brilliantly researched, this book shows Marconi to be, in many ways, the Steve Jobs of the last century. Marconi’s creation of wireless communication was the mother of all start-ups and his business model provided the template for our digital age. Above all this book tells a terrific story and is a wonderful read.

I know the Oxford University Press has an excellent reputation, but if they don't get in decent editors, I'm not going to put up with too many more of their publications. The biography is not particularly well-written, which is too bad, but errors such as "he returned again to..." By virtue of the fact that he returned, the RE part of the word means BACK or AGAIN, so there's no need to return again. It's like saying "descending down the stairs." The DE part of the word means DOWN, so no need to say down when you say descend.

Detail is outstanding. I like a book that gets into the background of the person, the politics, the business or his inventions.

In the pantheon of the modern world’s icons of science and technology names like Edison, Einstein and more recent additions like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates stand almost unchallenged. One name, however, “Guglielmo Marconi” is largely forgotten – does anyone know what he looked like; are iconic posters showing his hair in disarray sold at novelty shops; do we even know that his first name was Guglielmo?? Marc Raboy, a Canadian historian, has taken on the monumental and clearly necessary task of adding Marconi’s name to our “Mt. Rushmore” of technological giants of our contemporary age. And, by and large, with his hefty tome, Raboy succeeds.Raboy skillfully traces Marconi’s family background from his birth in Bologna, Italy in 1874 to what we would call today an upper middle class Italian father and Irish mother, to his death mourned worldwide in Rome in 1937. As Raboy shows, in considerable detail, during those 63 years Marconi remade the globe by developing a system based of communication that replaced underground and undersea cables, with electromagnetic over the air waves that eventually moved from simple Morse Code to the radio broadcasting that we now take for granted. Raboy describes the remarkable story of Marconi with little formal scientific education while growing up in England who then at age eighteen began to study at the University of Bologna where he first learned of the recently discovered phenomenon of Hertzian Waves. Marconi intuitively recognized that these forms of electromagnetic waves could be used to send “wireless” telegraph messages. By the 1890’s, Marconi, building on some of the work of others, began conducting experiments that led to the first true and financial viable system of wireless communication. By 1897, because of lack of support and interest from the Italian government, he had moved his operations to Great Britain where he established the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company that became the mainstay for his commercial and financial success. With experimentation that lengthened the distance the wireless telegraph messages could be sent, it was not long before Marconi’s company began to establish subsidiaries in other European nations and overseas. While Marconi received the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for his work with electromagnetic waves, it was not until the successful life saving transmission of messages from the sinking Titanic in 1912 that governments and investors were ultimately convinced that the Marconi wireless method of communication would soon girdle the globe.By 1915, Marconi and his assistants began to examine the possibility of audio transmissions that, with the work of others, eventually would lead to the development of radio and planted the seeds for television broadcasting. As Raboy notes, while Marconi is justifiable credited with developing the first viable wireless telegraph system, it is his invention of the idea of a, “globally networked, mobile and wireless,” linked world that was by far his most important contribution and, as Raboy adds, this made, “Marconi . . . the central figure in the emergence of the modern understanding of communication.”Raboy’s biography quite rightly focusing on Marconi’s technological and commercial successes also includes significant details about his marital and parental difficulties: he had numerous affairs (some platonic and some not), needed Vatican approval to have his first marriage annulled; and was a neglectful father to his children. Most significantly, and perhaps the part of his life that keeps Marconi in history’s shadows, was his support in the late 1920’s and 1930’s of Mussolini’s Fascist Italian dictatorship that also included his support for Italy’s world-wide condemned invasion of Ethiopia. Raboy struggles at times to make sense of the contradictions between Marconi’s belief that radio technology would foster world peace while he supported its use in war by Italy and other nations. But regardless of this weighty and important caveat, Raboy has provided us with a remarkable story of the man who perhaps more than any other made the world we have come to know as our own.

Good story