Trechos de Marconi: The Man Who Networked The World (2016), de Marc Raboy.
In late July [1914], with parts of Europe already at war, a delegation of Marconi senior engineers visited Berlin, where they were hosted with courtesy and hospitality by Telefunken. The grand finale of the visit was an inspection of the German high-power station at Nauen, with its massive, newly installed antennas. Nauen was the centrepiece of Telefunken's increasingly global commercial network, but as soon as the Marconi delegation left, the station was closed to normal operations and taken over by the German military, who had been standing by, waiting for the foreign visitors to leave. On July 30, a wireless message from the British Admiralty to the Grand Fleet cancelled all naval leave, an ominous precaution; on August 1, the use of wireless was suspended for merchant vessels in British territorial waters, and on August 2, the government took control of all wireless communication. On August 3, experimental stations in the United Kingdom were closed. A few weeks earlier, [Guglielmo] Marconi had said in a public speech, "The value of wireless telegraphy may one day be put to a great practical and critical test; then perhaps there will be a true appreciation of the magnitude of our work." That test had now come; wireless became what writer Harold Begbie called "the invisible weapon of war."
- - -
Italy declared war on Austria and severed diplomatic relations with Germany on May 23, 1915. The Tribune reported that day that "Marconi has been called to Rome by the Italian government." The paper recalled that he was a reserve lieutenant in the Italian navy, and quoted him saying his work would be "the supervision of the wireless, with headquarters in Rome." His travelling companion was described as a "lawyer, writer and suffragist." The St. Paul arrived in Liverpool on May 30, and on June 2 the Tribune carried Inez's first signed report. Under a huge photo of her and the byline "Inez Milholland Boissevain," the paper's glamorous new foreign correspondent described how a German U-boat had chased the St. Paul as far as the mouth of the Mersey in an effort to kidnap Marconi.
- - -
Marconi was welcomed as an unequivocal war booster. The Ministry of War heralded his arrival in Rome, commissioned him as a lieutenant in the army's Corps of Dirigible Engineers, and accepted his offer to make Villa Griffone available as a military hospital. On June 19, 1915, the date of his appointment, he received a note informing him that the king was convinced he would render important services to Italy.
- - -
As D'Annunzio later put it, his poetry and Marconi's radio were both employed as instruments of war.
Now here they were, both in Rome and in uniform.
[...] Milholland, Marconi, and D'Annunzio made a powerfully intoxicating triangle in wartime Rome.
- - -
One day, D'Annunzio accompanied Marconi on an inspection visit to the wireless station at Centocelle, two dashing soldiers in uniform, with sabres on their knees. As they drove through the outlying Roman landscape and its relics of homage to antiquity, they talked about the future. Arriving at the airfield they could hear the dots and dashes of the wireless receiver. Marconi, as he always did, examined the transmitter with his delicate, agile hands, moving D'Annunzio, who saw sensuality in the gesture. "It was a blustery day," he later recalled, and "the whirling wind, lifting the ash from the sepulchers, transformed it into the seeds of the future." D'Annunzio was so moved that he wrote an epic prose paean to Marconi that he called L'eroe Magico.
- - -
Marconi always spoke of his invention as an instrument of peace, but now he was enveloped in the discourse of D'Annunzio, which was unequivocal in its glorification of war. Back in Rome they parted, each off to his own assignment at the front.
- - -
Marconi was upbeat about the war. "Here the war is really (bar the loss of men) going very well and I think we have every reason to be very proud indeed of the Army. ... We expect important developments soon," he wrote to Beatrice. He described the army's dirigible unit, where he was working, as "a kind of cavalry" with smart, practical uniforms. He hardly had time to see anyone; all the men he knew were at the front, the women in the Croce Rossa, the Italian Red Cross.
Marconi's assignment brought him closer to the fighting than he had been in North Africa in 1911 - still at a safe distance, although on one occasion, he told a reporter, he had "narrowly escaped being blown to pieces by an enemy shell." He also had a soldier seconded to look after him. Early in July 1915, he watched the Italian bombardment of Gorizia at the first battle of the Isonzo, on the eastern Austrian (Slovenian) front, through field glasses from a neighbouring mountain, describing it as "awe-inspiring ... crash upon crash, echoing and re-echoing throughout the surrounding valleys." It was the fiercest Italian-Austrian engagement to date. The mountain slopes were strewn with dead, and Italian troops bayoneted Austrians by the hundreds; nonetheless, Italian losses alone numbered more than one hundred thousand. Marconi was a bit closer to the action at Monte Grappa, in the Veneto, where he had to crouch in the trenches while heavy Austrian shelling whistled around him.
A few weeks later, Marconi was back in England, remarkably agile at transitioning from the war front to the corporate boardroom.
- - -
In September, he was off on a dizzying tour of the French front, meeting all the great generals and lunching with Marshall Ferdinand Foch.
- - -
Alongside all these duties, Marconi also made a new experimental breakthrough. At the end of 1915, working with Charles S. Franklin, one of his long-standing research associates, Marconi began experimenting with short wavelengths, returning to the part of the spectrum he had used in his earliest work. Using short wavelengths was important insofar as it freed other parts of the radio band for other traffic, but especially because shortwave transmission required substantially less power than the longwaves Marconi had been using since 1901.
- - -
Marconi was now adept at travelling across war-torn Europe, and on January 21, 1916, he and Sheridan crossed the Channel between Folkestone and Dieppe, risking German submarines. Passing through Paris, Turin, and Genoa, they eventually reached Milan, where Marconi's arrival at the central train station was hailed by a cheering crowd of admirers. By now, this was all routine for him.
- - -
His latest findings, he said, "are far reaching and concern the future practice of the entire success of wireless telegraphy and telephony, whether over long or short distances or conducted by means of ordinary spark system, grounded sparks or continuous waves." The Italian government was giving him a completely free hand, so long as nothing he did interfered with naval or military signalling, and even that he could do with prior consent.
- - -
As far as Marconi was concerned, the most sensational event of this period was the Battle of Jutland on May 31 and June 1, where wireless played a crucial role that was not fully revealed until after the war.
Marconi engineer H.J. Round had developed a wireless direction-finding system shortly before the outbreak of hostilities; the War Office was aware of his work and Round was attached to military intelligence at the start of the war. A network of wireless direction-finding stations was developed along the entire Western Front as well as along the British coastlines. These stations were able to obtain bearings from German submarines and Zeppelins, providing vital information regarding their movements. On May 30, Round noticed an unusual amount of activity with the German fleet at Wilhelmshaven, on the North Sea. The tracking system was able to follow the ships as they moved north, toward the Danish peninsula of Jutland. The signals allowed the British to ascertain the position of the German ships with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Anticipating the movements of the German fleet, the British attacked in what was the only major naval engagement of the war.
- - -
Wireless was also being used in conjunction with the war's other new technology, aircraft, providing an unprecedented concentration of military power; airborne wireless communication was simply the most effective tool yet for both reconnaissance and fire-power precision. One important development for aerial navigation was a gizmo known as "the Marconi-Bellini-Tosi radiogoniometer" - basically a wireless compass that enabled the user to take the bearings of oncoming aircraft, a kind of early reverse GPS system. Developed by two Italian officers, Ettore Bellini and Alessandro Tosi, the apparatus got its name after the inventors sold their patents to the Marconi company in 1912. During the war, Marconi wrote, "it was quite possible from the receiving station on top of Marconi House, in London, to listen to the wireless signals of approaching Zeppelins while they were crossing the North Sea, preparative for a raid on England, and to determine accurately the direction of their approach."
- - -
By now, wireless was playing a role in all the theatres of war, particularly Palestine, where it was critical in the advance of British troops across the Sinai in 1917. Sir Archibald Murray, commander of the British troops in Egypt, characterized wireless as the modern substitute for the biblical "pillars of smoke and flame" that had guided the children of Israel on their way to the Promised Land: "Through the medium of signal stations and wireless installations, the desert was subdued and made habitable whilst adequate lines of communication were established between the advancing troops and their ever-receding base."
- - -
By the beginning of 1918, Marconi's diplomatic career was in full swing and taking up most of his time. He was still chairman of the board and technical advisor of the London-based Marconi company, president of the Banca Italiana di Sconto, and overseeing a talented bevy of research engineers, but by far most of his energy was now going into helping to position Italy favourably in anticipation of the end of the war.
- - -
On June 30 [1918] he arrived in London at the head of the Italian delegation to a conference of parliamentarians from the allied countries (the Inter-Allied Parliamentary Commercial Conference) called to begin exploring the new economic order that would emerge from the war.
- - -
Marconi had strong words for Germany and the role of German science in the ongoing war. His antagonism toward Germany - and German science in particular - was deep-rooted in his own early-career experience. But now it took on a political tone as well. "It is now thirty seven months since Italy entered the war that was being waged to save the world from becoming a Prussian possession, and I can only say that we shall go on fighting as long as is necessary, that is until Prussian militarism is utterly destroyed." On the typed copy of his remarks, he added by hand: "One word about science - It was generally believed that the progress of science inevitably meant peace. That notion has failed - Germany has utilized science to the utmost, but I say with sorrow and regret that Germany in this war has prostituted her scientific achievements."
[...] Marconi bought in completely to the new ideology of international trade that was beginning to replace the idea of colonialism.
- - -
On November 11, 1918, at 5:40 a.m., Marshall Foch sent a message announcing the end of hostilities and the taking effect of the armistice as of 11:00 a.m. that day. The Marconi company proudly lauded the fact that "a wireless message, the first open act of war, was also the last." An urban legend promoted by the company had it that Marconi (who would have had to be up somewhat earlier than usual if this were the case) heard the announcement at his home on the Gianicolo Hill in Rome, and was the first to inform the Italian Cabinet. Actually, Marconi told British writer Harold Begbie he had been the first in Italy to learn of the abdication of the kaiser, two days before the armistice, on November 9. "I was sitting in my room in Rome, and the box [Marconi's personal wireless receiver] was on the table at my side, when suddenly a message began to arrive. ... It was a message from Germany and the news was ... that the Kaiser had abdicated. I took up the telephone and rang up the Prime Minister of Italy."
Company historian W.J. Baker wrote that until his death, Marconi "never ceased to look upon (wireless) as a potential means of promoting peace and understanding between the nations." But we shouldn't forget that he also saw it as an instrument of war.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIUnFhOTVLcGh0OGc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g57z0qFdPdQ
http://www.radiomarconi.com/marconi/storia1.html
http://www.rsi.ch/speciali/la-grande-guerra/dal-fronte/La-radio-nella-Prima-Guerra-1254376.html
http://www.fmboschetto.it/lavori_studenti/WWI/radio_WWI_2A.pdf
- - -
Italy declared war on Austria and severed diplomatic relations with Germany on May 23, 1915. The Tribune reported that day that "Marconi has been called to Rome by the Italian government." The paper recalled that he was a reserve lieutenant in the Italian navy, and quoted him saying his work would be "the supervision of the wireless, with headquarters in Rome." His travelling companion was described as a "lawyer, writer and suffragist." The St. Paul arrived in Liverpool on May 30, and on June 2 the Tribune carried Inez's first signed report. Under a huge photo of her and the byline "Inez Milholland Boissevain," the paper's glamorous new foreign correspondent described how a German U-boat had chased the St. Paul as far as the mouth of the Mersey in an effort to kidnap Marconi.
- - -
Marconi was welcomed as an unequivocal war booster. The Ministry of War heralded his arrival in Rome, commissioned him as a lieutenant in the army's Corps of Dirigible Engineers, and accepted his offer to make Villa Griffone available as a military hospital. On June 19, 1915, the date of his appointment, he received a note informing him that the king was convinced he would render important services to Italy.
- - -
As D'Annunzio later put it, his poetry and Marconi's radio were both employed as instruments of war.
Now here they were, both in Rome and in uniform.
[...] Milholland, Marconi, and D'Annunzio made a powerfully intoxicating triangle in wartime Rome.
- - -
One day, D'Annunzio accompanied Marconi on an inspection visit to the wireless station at Centocelle, two dashing soldiers in uniform, with sabres on their knees. As they drove through the outlying Roman landscape and its relics of homage to antiquity, they talked about the future. Arriving at the airfield they could hear the dots and dashes of the wireless receiver. Marconi, as he always did, examined the transmitter with his delicate, agile hands, moving D'Annunzio, who saw sensuality in the gesture. "It was a blustery day," he later recalled, and "the whirling wind, lifting the ash from the sepulchers, transformed it into the seeds of the future." D'Annunzio was so moved that he wrote an epic prose paean to Marconi that he called L'eroe Magico.
- - -
Marconi always spoke of his invention as an instrument of peace, but now he was enveloped in the discourse of D'Annunzio, which was unequivocal in its glorification of war. Back in Rome they parted, each off to his own assignment at the front.
- - -
Marconi was upbeat about the war. "Here the war is really (bar the loss of men) going very well and I think we have every reason to be very proud indeed of the Army. ... We expect important developments soon," he wrote to Beatrice. He described the army's dirigible unit, where he was working, as "a kind of cavalry" with smart, practical uniforms. He hardly had time to see anyone; all the men he knew were at the front, the women in the Croce Rossa, the Italian Red Cross.
Marconi's assignment brought him closer to the fighting than he had been in North Africa in 1911 - still at a safe distance, although on one occasion, he told a reporter, he had "narrowly escaped being blown to pieces by an enemy shell." He also had a soldier seconded to look after him. Early in July 1915, he watched the Italian bombardment of Gorizia at the first battle of the Isonzo, on the eastern Austrian (Slovenian) front, through field glasses from a neighbouring mountain, describing it as "awe-inspiring ... crash upon crash, echoing and re-echoing throughout the surrounding valleys." It was the fiercest Italian-Austrian engagement to date. The mountain slopes were strewn with dead, and Italian troops bayoneted Austrians by the hundreds; nonetheless, Italian losses alone numbered more than one hundred thousand. Marconi was a bit closer to the action at Monte Grappa, in the Veneto, where he had to crouch in the trenches while heavy Austrian shelling whistled around him.
A few weeks later, Marconi was back in England, remarkably agile at transitioning from the war front to the corporate boardroom.
- - -
In September, he was off on a dizzying tour of the French front, meeting all the great generals and lunching with Marshall Ferdinand Foch.
- - -
Alongside all these duties, Marconi also made a new experimental breakthrough. At the end of 1915, working with Charles S. Franklin, one of his long-standing research associates, Marconi began experimenting with short wavelengths, returning to the part of the spectrum he had used in his earliest work. Using short wavelengths was important insofar as it freed other parts of the radio band for other traffic, but especially because shortwave transmission required substantially less power than the longwaves Marconi had been using since 1901.
- - -
Marconi was now adept at travelling across war-torn Europe, and on January 21, 1916, he and Sheridan crossed the Channel between Folkestone and Dieppe, risking German submarines. Passing through Paris, Turin, and Genoa, they eventually reached Milan, where Marconi's arrival at the central train station was hailed by a cheering crowd of admirers. By now, this was all routine for him.
- - -
His latest findings, he said, "are far reaching and concern the future practice of the entire success of wireless telegraphy and telephony, whether over long or short distances or conducted by means of ordinary spark system, grounded sparks or continuous waves." The Italian government was giving him a completely free hand, so long as nothing he did interfered with naval or military signalling, and even that he could do with prior consent.
- - -
As far as Marconi was concerned, the most sensational event of this period was the Battle of Jutland on May 31 and June 1, where wireless played a crucial role that was not fully revealed until after the war.
Marconi engineer H.J. Round had developed a wireless direction-finding system shortly before the outbreak of hostilities; the War Office was aware of his work and Round was attached to military intelligence at the start of the war. A network of wireless direction-finding stations was developed along the entire Western Front as well as along the British coastlines. These stations were able to obtain bearings from German submarines and Zeppelins, providing vital information regarding their movements. On May 30, Round noticed an unusual amount of activity with the German fleet at Wilhelmshaven, on the North Sea. The tracking system was able to follow the ships as they moved north, toward the Danish peninsula of Jutland. The signals allowed the British to ascertain the position of the German ships with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Anticipating the movements of the German fleet, the British attacked in what was the only major naval engagement of the war.
- - -
Wireless was also being used in conjunction with the war's other new technology, aircraft, providing an unprecedented concentration of military power; airborne wireless communication was simply the most effective tool yet for both reconnaissance and fire-power precision. One important development for aerial navigation was a gizmo known as "the Marconi-Bellini-Tosi radiogoniometer" - basically a wireless compass that enabled the user to take the bearings of oncoming aircraft, a kind of early reverse GPS system. Developed by two Italian officers, Ettore Bellini and Alessandro Tosi, the apparatus got its name after the inventors sold their patents to the Marconi company in 1912. During the war, Marconi wrote, "it was quite possible from the receiving station on top of Marconi House, in London, to listen to the wireless signals of approaching Zeppelins while they were crossing the North Sea, preparative for a raid on England, and to determine accurately the direction of their approach."
- - -
By now, wireless was playing a role in all the theatres of war, particularly Palestine, where it was critical in the advance of British troops across the Sinai in 1917. Sir Archibald Murray, commander of the British troops in Egypt, characterized wireless as the modern substitute for the biblical "pillars of smoke and flame" that had guided the children of Israel on their way to the Promised Land: "Through the medium of signal stations and wireless installations, the desert was subdued and made habitable whilst adequate lines of communication were established between the advancing troops and their ever-receding base."
- - -
By the beginning of 1918, Marconi's diplomatic career was in full swing and taking up most of his time. He was still chairman of the board and technical advisor of the London-based Marconi company, president of the Banca Italiana di Sconto, and overseeing a talented bevy of research engineers, but by far most of his energy was now going into helping to position Italy favourably in anticipation of the end of the war.
- - -
On June 30 [1918] he arrived in London at the head of the Italian delegation to a conference of parliamentarians from the allied countries (the Inter-Allied Parliamentary Commercial Conference) called to begin exploring the new economic order that would emerge from the war.
- - -
Marconi had strong words for Germany and the role of German science in the ongoing war. His antagonism toward Germany - and German science in particular - was deep-rooted in his own early-career experience. But now it took on a political tone as well. "It is now thirty seven months since Italy entered the war that was being waged to save the world from becoming a Prussian possession, and I can only say that we shall go on fighting as long as is necessary, that is until Prussian militarism is utterly destroyed." On the typed copy of his remarks, he added by hand: "One word about science - It was generally believed that the progress of science inevitably meant peace. That notion has failed - Germany has utilized science to the utmost, but I say with sorrow and regret that Germany in this war has prostituted her scientific achievements."
[...] Marconi bought in completely to the new ideology of international trade that was beginning to replace the idea of colonialism.
- - -
On November 11, 1918, at 5:40 a.m., Marshall Foch sent a message announcing the end of hostilities and the taking effect of the armistice as of 11:00 a.m. that day. The Marconi company proudly lauded the fact that "a wireless message, the first open act of war, was also the last." An urban legend promoted by the company had it that Marconi (who would have had to be up somewhat earlier than usual if this were the case) heard the announcement at his home on the Gianicolo Hill in Rome, and was the first to inform the Italian Cabinet. Actually, Marconi told British writer Harold Begbie he had been the first in Italy to learn of the abdication of the kaiser, two days before the armistice, on November 9. "I was sitting in my room in Rome, and the box [Marconi's personal wireless receiver] was on the table at my side, when suddenly a message began to arrive. ... It was a message from Germany and the news was ... that the Kaiser had abdicated. I took up the telephone and rang up the Prime Minister of Italy."
Company historian W.J. Baker wrote that until his death, Marconi "never ceased to look upon (wireless) as a potential means of promoting peace and understanding between the nations." But we shouldn't forget that he also saw it as an instrument of war.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIUnFhOTVLcGh0OGc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g57z0qFdPdQ
http://www.radiomarconi.com/marconi/storia1.html
http://www.rsi.ch/speciali/la-grande-guerra/dal-fronte/La-radio-nella-Prima-Guerra-1254376.html
http://www.fmboschetto.it/lavori_studenti/WWI/radio_WWI_2A.pdf
