cover image Marconi

Marconi

Giancarlo Massini, Giancarlo Masini. Marsilio Publishers, $26 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-56886-028-2

A precocious farm boy with a passion for electronics, 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) carried out the first wireless telegraph transmission in 1895, assuring the birth of radio. The Italian inventor and entrepreneur founded the world's first wireless telegraphy company in London two years later, with a network of stations extending from China to Morocco. First published in Italy in 1976, this admiring biography ably traces Marconi's experiments, his triumphant public demonstrations of radio and the science underlying his inventions. Italian science journalist Masini, who lives in California, is less successful in probing the contradictions of the possessive, absent husband who had numerous affairs, the Italian senator who avowedly hated politics, the tender father who financially cut off the three children of his first marriage, the ardent nationalist who became Mussolini's staunch supporter and an active propagandist for the fascist cause. (Apr.)