Italo-Hibernian

Columbus discovered America; Hudson discovered New York; Benjamin Franklin discovered the spark That Edison discovered would light up the

dark ;

Marconi discovered the wireless telegraph Across the ocean blue. But the greatest discoveree. . .

The old musical comedy song-might well have gone back to another inventor of Bologna, Italy, who lived centuries before Guglielmo Marconi. This wight was a butcher, too fat to fight but keenly alive to the tortures of hunger which soldiers often suffer. As the warriors of Bologna prepared one time to sally forth against the Milanese, he conceived the notion of supplying many of them with chopped beef, pork and veal, seasoned and stuffed tightly into the intestinal tubing of a pig. He showed them how they might wind this provender about their necks or waists to carry it easily; how they might tie and cut it in short lengths to share with their fellows or ration themselves. The invention met with instant and universal approval.

Bologna also produced Luigi Galvani, in the 18th Century, whose experiments with electricity and the nerves and muscles of the legs of frogs gave rise to "galvanism" and kindred terms. But it was not until the end of the 19th Century that Bologna again made a contribution of truly world-wide proportions. After the sausage came wireless telegraphy, whose founder's marital vicissitudes loomed in the press last week as his works do every week.

Guglielmo Marconi was in Rome last week, just as the Rota, (highest Catholic marriage court) was about to hand down a decision annulling his marriage, in 1905, to the Hon. Beatrice O'Brien. Two years ago the Marconis obtained a divorce in Fiume, under the accommodating D'Annunzio regime. Onetime Signora Marconi has since remarried. It was supposed that Catholic annulment was sought either that she might have her marriage sanctioned by her Church, or that Signor Marconi too might remarry with Catholic ritual. Gossips thought they knew his new lady--one Elizabeth Paynter, 19, of Cornwall, Eng.--and insisted that it was in behalf of his annulment that Signor Marconi last week sought and obtained an audience with the Pope.

Be all that as it may have been, there was much else for the Pope to talk over with Guglielmo Marconi. The Pope, besides having been a hardy mountaineer, is a radio enthusiast. As he awaited .the inventor's approach, as he fingered the gold medal he was about to bestow, the Pope may have reflected momentarily upon just a few of the week's news items, indicative of the vast sphere which this intense, blue-eyed, light-haired Italo-Hibernian set in motion as a youth only 30 years ago. The Pope may have realized:

That on five continents, amateur radio operators were tuning up their sets to participate in history's first world amateur radio conven tion, an event proposed by South Africans and held last week from the General Electric Co.'s station at Schenectady, N. Y.

That at Astoria, L. I., two Chinamen--Wei Yoh Wu and Pin Ling Shen--were discovered by the press. They had been studying in the U. S. for several years and were about ready to go back to China to set on foot there a radio industry which might quickly swell to the enormous proportions achieved in occidental countries.

That from deepest Brazil, near the headwaters of the Rio Roosevelt ("River of Doubt"), Explorer George Miller Dyott, beleaguered by hostile savages, made himself heard by radio in far-off Washington, D. C., where the Brazilian minister swiftly promised to notify his Government, send aid.

That according to a survey published last week by U. S. Commissioner of Navigation D. B. Carson, the U. S. had 528 broadcasting stations, Canada 47, France, Germany and Spain 21 each. Great Britain 20, Mexico 17, Brazil 12; and that U. S. radio dealers, having sold paraphernalia totaling 60 millions in 1922, last year sold 450 millions' worth.

That a major problem confronting the impending session of Congress is how to regulate and assign to 528 U. S. stations the 90 or so available wavelengths (in the long-wave range).

When Inventor Marconi reached the Presence and knelt and was blessed, he was interrogated and graciously complimented, doubtless largely upon his latest development of short-wave directional communication--the "beam" system--for the British Postoffice between Britain and Canada and experimentally between Britain and Africa, India, Australia (TIME, Nov. 1). Had his most holy listener been less well posted on such matters, Signor Marconi might have traced his own career, and thus the history of radio, somewhat as follows:

"My mother was an Irish girl, my father an Italian country gentleman, a combination which may largely account for the intensity that has characterized me from boyhood. After excellent tutoring on the parental estate near Bologna, coupled with travel to and from England in the summers, I was ready to enter the University of Bologna (where Dante' and Petrarch studied, where Tasso stood trial for his gall-dipped pen). I studied also at Leghorn and was in my impressionable 'teens when first introduced to the electro-dynamic theories of Clerk Maxwell, the experiments in inductive telegraphy of Sir William H. Preece, Thomas Edison, A. W. Heaviside, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes and many another, and to the classical researches of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, who identified Edison's 'aetheric force' as electric waves in space. As a youth of 20 I gave myself over completely to the development of devices for propagating and detecting electric waves to the end of practical communication. Not to become too technical, I improved Sir Oliver Lodge's 'coherer' into a vacuum tube, discovered the value of the grounded terminal, the efficacy of elevated antennae or aerials. I learned at the same time how to send out broadcast waves of electric and magnetic force in periodic discharges controlled by an ordinary Morse telegraph key, recorded by a Morse printing telegraphic instrument. In 1895, aged 21, I succeeded in transmitting and detecting intelligible messages back and forth over our estate, at increasing distances, and went the next year to England, to take out patents and to lay my work before the Post-office authorities.

"My demonstrations, held first or the roof of the Postoffice, later on Salisbury Plain and across Bristol Channel, were so successful that the Italian Government invited me home in 1897, to demonstrate at Spezia, and in Rome before King Humbert and Queen Margherita, Again success was mine. The distance over which I could send anc receive messages was constantly increasing--first a room's length then a building's, a mile, four miles ten miles, twenty miles. . . .

"The theorists and imitators wert following up my work, but always I remained far ahead of them, constantly meeting new problems which I swiftly grappled anc solved. I returned to England anc formed a company, since known as Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co Ltd., to exploit my work (I have ever been known as a good business man). Permanent stations were built. The first commercia transaction was when I followed the Kingstown Regatta races oJ 1898, on a tug behind the yachts flashing results to the Express ai Dublin. That same year, Queer Victoria was on the Isle of Wight during Cowes Week and at her command I kept her in constant touch with H. R. H. Edward (VII) of Wales on the royal yacht, Osborne. I spanned the English Channel by wireless that year; extended the range up to 74 miles for messages between battleships; was ready with equipment for use in the Boer War. In 1899 the first wireless S.O.S. message was sent to shore, with direct effect, from the East Goodwin lightship, which was rammed in a fog.

"In 1900 I took out my famed Patent No. 7777, for a 'tuned' or syntonized system of wireless telegraphy, permitting the clearer re ception of messages, and of more than one message simultaneously on the same antenna. By 1901 I had so built up the power of my transmitter that I attempted talking from Cornwall to Newfoundland--with success on the very first trial. (This feat bore out my old contention, assailed by many, that the curvature of the earth would not impede the progress of electric waves.) The following year saw the extension of transatlantic communication to Capes Breton and Cod from Cornwall and I noted, for the first time, the now familiar 'night effect' (greater clarity of signals and greater range by night than by day).

"Pioneering was over. Wireless telegraphy was established as an art and science of significance to all the world. The King of Italy sent a message from Spezia via Kronstadt to the Tsar of Russia and both decorated me, I was given the cruiser Carlo Alberto to cruise upon and experiment further. The freedom of Rome was mine when I visited there in 1903-- a modern 'triumph.' I instituted the first ocean daily newspaper, on the S. S. Campania, sent press despatches and many messages for friends back and forth between the Old and New Worlds,

"In 1905 I married, my wife becoming a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elena, which post she seldom filled since our three children became a great care and besides, she used to accompany me everywhere on my yacht, Elettra, aboard which I experimented much. The year 1905 also found me perfecting and patenting a horizontal directional transmitting aerial and predicting that I could soon reach the antipodes more easily than nearby places. 1905 was also notable for me as the year of my company's suit against the DeForest Wireless Telegraph Co. (Inventor Lee De Forest of the U. S., subsequently of 'phonofilm' fame). In pro nouncing his decision in my favor, Judge William K. Townsend of the U. S. Circuit Court was at pains to dispel all doubt as to whether or not I was actually the founder of wireless telegraphy. In a magnificently flowery peroration, quite appropriately Latin in feeling, His Honor pictured me as a fearless forerunner, embarking courageously upon a limitless sea of Hertzian waves.

"I opened my stations to the public in 1907, received the Nobel Prize in physics for 1909 and in 1910 talked to Buenos Aires from Ireland. Al ways I was building up the power of my transmission and in 1912 patented the 'timed spark' system, by which continuous discharges of exceedingly long waves (14,000 metres and more) could be employed.

"1912 was also the year of the unpleasant 'Marconi scandal,' in which I had no part. The British Postoffice approved a tender of my British company to build stations for its use. Godfrey Isaacs, manager of both my British and American companies, advised his brother Rufus, then Attorney General, later Lord Reading, the Lord Chief Justice and Viceroy of India, to buy shares in the American company. Rufus Isaacs bought -L-10,000 worth, soon selling -L-1,000 to David Lloyd-George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. The affair came to light. Mr. Lloyd-George was bitterly assailed for profiting privately from official information. Parliament, however, acquitted me of all stigma and let the others off as having been merely 'indiscreet.' "In 1914 I was honored with the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order. The Fritz and Franklin medals in the U. S. were also mine; all the important crosses and decorations of Italy descended upon me; indeed in 1909 the King of Italy himself had nominated me as an Italian Senator, which I forthwith, of course, became.

"When the War broke out, we radio engineers, all of us, at once fell to adapting radio to warfare. For my part, I returned to experiments of my boyhood with the short-wave range, seeking to devise means of secret communication. We evolved the 'direction finder' for spotting the enemy's sending stations and giving our own ships their bearings. I worked out a rudimentary (compared to now) system of 'narrow-casting,' using skeleton parabolic mirrors to converge my waves in a beam, thus saving generative power and preventing messages from being diffused 'broadcast' into the enemy camp. My long-wave work also continued and in 1918 I reached Australia from Great Britain.

"The inventive energy exerted during the War, and its later overflow into commercial and popular radio when peace came, are well known. It was not, however, until 1924, that we fully appreciated the superiority of short waves over long ones for daylight work. It is with short waves that all my present experiments are concerned; with short waves that I have supplied the British Postoffice with its Canadian 'beam' service and propose linking the entire Empire. Here still, not to divagate upon my work in wireless telephony, my multiple message inventions, my experiments with music and many another related field, I find myself leading the world's radio engineers."

But Senator Marconi is no laboratory-hugging genius like the late Charles Proteus Steinmetz or Thomas Alva Edison. He hunts the fox, rides the bicycle, dines at his club, has parties of young people aboard his yacht. In conquering a new world he has not lost an old.

*An earlier song, "Mr. Dooley," also mentioned Marconi: And young Marconi eats macaroni With Mister Dooley, ooley, ooley, oo.

/-On the ground that in the Marconis' marriage contract was a clause providing that they should separate if ever either desired it--a clause which would void any marriage in the eyes of Rome, where mar riage is a sacrament, indissoluble.