The discovery of the wireless telegraph is Marconi's chief claim to remembrance.

From The Holiday Magazine, illustrations facing pages 100 and 110. CONTENTS How Guglielmo Marconi Telegraphs Without Wires Santos-Dumont and His Air-Ship

STORIES OF INVENTORS HOW GUGLIELMO MARCONI TELEGRAPHS WITHOUT WIRES

It is of the boy and man Marconi that this chapter will tell, and through him the story of his invention, for the personality, the talents, and the character of the inventor made wireless telegraphy possible.

It was an article in an electrical journal describing the properties of the "Hertzian waves" that suggested to young Marconi the possibility of sending messages from one place to another without wires.

It would seem that Marconi was not the kind of boy to produce a revolutionising invention, for he was not in the least spectacular, but, on the contrary, almost shy, and lacking in the aggressive enthusiasm that is supposed to mark the successful inventor; quiet determination was a strong characteristic of the young Italian, and a studious habit which had much to do with the great results accomplished by him at so early an age.

Although born in Bologna (in 1874) and bearing an Italian name, Marconi is half Irish, his mother being a native of Britain.

So Marconi invented a little device which was in circuit with the recorder and tapped the coherer tube with a tiny mallet at just the right moment, causing the particles to separate, or decohere, and so break the circuit and stop the local battery current.

Marconi's transmitting apparatus consisted of electric batteries, an induction coil by which the force of the current is increased, a telegrapher's key to make and break the circuit, and a pair of brass knobs.

The apparatus was crude at first, and worked spasmodically, but Marconi knew he was on the right track and persevered.

After a year of experimenting on his father's property, Marconi was able to report to W.H. Preece, chief electrician of the British postal system, certain definite factsnot theories, but facts.

For a long time Marconi used modifications of the tin boxes which were a feature of his early trials, but later balloons covered with tin-foil, and then a kite six feet high, covered with thin metallic sheets, was used, the wire leading down to the sending and receiving instruments running down the cord.

From this little vessel Marconi sent and received wireless signals day after day, no matter what the state of the weather.

On the coast of Cornwall, near Penzance, England, Marconi erected a great station.

Whether Marconi stood to one side and directed or took hold with his men, there was no doubt who was master.

One cold December day in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sat still in a room in the Government building at Signal Hill, St. Johns, Newfoundland, with a telephone receiver at his ear and his eye on the clock that ticked loudly nearby.

Two months after receiving the message from Poldhu at St. Johns, Marconi set sail from England for America, in the Philadelphia, to carry out, on a much larger scale, the experiments he had worked out with the tug three years ago.

Message after message came and went until one hundred and fifty miles of sea lay between Marconi and his station.

Then the great personages on both sides of the water congratulated and complimented each other by Marconi's wireless system.

The Marconi station at Glacé Bay, Cape Breton, is now receiving messages for cableless transmission to England at the rate of ten cents a wordnewspaper matter at five cents a word.

Marconi, pioneer of radio. SEE EPSTEIN, SAMUEL.

Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. (PWH); 11Oct62; R302441. GUITRY, LANA MARCONI.

Mme Sacha Guitry, nee Lana Marconi (W); 17Oct62; R303041.

SEE GUITRY, LANA MARCONI.

We vibrate in sympathy with a few strings here and therewith the tiny X-rays, actinic rays, light waves, heat waves, and the huge electromagnetic waves of Hertz and Marconi; but there are great spaces, numberless radiations, to which we are stone deaf.