Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World

Raboy, Marc. Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 863 pp. $39.95.Guglielmo Marconi, the man most widely recognized as the inventor of radio, was an international celebrity in the early twentieth century. Countless newspaper and magazine articles profiled and championed him, and the persistent press coverage helped affirm his claim to be the technology's principle inventor. Others had transmitted signals without wires before Marconi, and he was not the most expert scientist working in the emerging field of wireless telegraphy. He had an undeniable entrepreneurial flair, though, and was the first to put forth an entire system for communication and establish a successful company to exploit the technology.As part of his campaign of self-promotion, Marconi often co-opted work done by employees of his company. The scientist James Ambrose Fleming, for example, played a central role in the transmission of trans-Atlantic wireless signals in 1901. 'This feat, more than any other, established Marconi's international reputation, though Fleming had agreed to a salary contract which specified that credit must be given to Marconi. Years later, Charles Franklin helped create a new method for communicating via shortwave radio. The technology was eventually adopted by Britain's imperial wireless chain, and known as the Marconi beam system.Despite the voluminous press coverage that Marconi was able to generate during the height of his fame, he has not been the subject of a solid biography until now. Previous works have all been limited in some way, with Marconi himself exerting editorial influence over the earliest biographies. More than simply filling a gap in scholarship, you could say this 863-page tome obliterates it. Marc Raboy, a professor in the department of art history and communication studies at McGill University, plumbed archives in multiple countries to produce this meticulously researched biography. The Bodleian Library in Oxford contains the Marconi Archives, which holds many of his personal papers and some records of the original Marconi Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company, though the author also tracked down relevant material in numerous other archives; in fact, the preface to the 140 pages of endnotes devotes more than two pages to simply listing the archives. Original research findings are mixed with summaries and critiques of previous studies, and Raboy is not shy about alerting readers to information that had not been discussed before. Ostensibly, the focus is on Marconi, the man, though in telling his story in such detail, Raboy also provides a rich chronology of how wireless communication was used, commercialized, and regulated during the first decades of the twentieth century. Many media historians will find this material of particular interest, along with descriptions of how various countries tried to establish dominance over this new form of commuof nication. Raboy has a particular interest in Marconi's personal life, and mines numerous letters, written to various women, more deeply than anyone before. Marconi's latein-life support for Mussolini, fascism, and anti-Semitism pose other major points of discussion, and are admittedly controversial topics that previous biographers tried to downplay. …

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