and often improvised or played music he knew by heart. He once said: “I love music. I had a serious musical education from my mother. Playing the piano, and developing my sensitivity for harmonious and delicate notes, has been of great help to me in the scientific field”.
Annie lived happily in the beautiful ancient town of Bologna with her two towers, medieval palaces and porticoes and characteristic pink stone that lights up in the sunset. When the Marconi family was not in Bologna they used to spend part of the year at Villa Griffone, Giuseppe’s country house. Villa Griffone is a Seventeenth Century villa in a magnificent position on top of a hill which catches the breeze even in summer, in the district of Pontecchio, a village in the district of Sasso Marconi near Bologna. Over the centuries it has undergone various transformations; it is a bright comfortable house with many windows opening onto a pleasant landscape surrounded by fertile fields and vineyards and shaded by lemon and chestnut trees. The walls are very thick, the rooms are large and there is a spacious hall, a beautiful stone staircase and the floors too are flagged in stone.
When he was at Villa Griffone Guglielmo spent many hours of the day shut up in the granary which he had turned into a laboratory, studying and making experiments, surrounded by his rudimentary instruments, the same ones that can still be admired today, some in London in the Science Museum in South Kensington and Chelmsford, others in Milan in the Leonardo da Vinci Museum, and some in Rome at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. All this meant that he could not always enjoy the company of his mother, father and older brother Alfonso; he used to shut himself away, concentrating on the work that was to bring his passionate research to a conclusion. He was so busy that for two years the family had to give up their usual winter move to Livorno and Florence.
At that time many physicists and researchers in different parts of the world were trying to construct instruments which would generate and detect the radiation of electro-magnetic waves, study their properties and pick them up at a certain distance, starting from the theory of electric waves developed by the Scottish researcher Maxwell: among these, Righi in Italy, Edison in America, Hertz in Germany, Lodge in England and Branly in France.
Guglielmo knew about the studies of Professor Righi, who was carrying out experiments in a laboratory in the hills on the other side of the River Reno from Villa Griffone. He decided to go and see him to discover whether Righi had acquired any useful information for the research which interested him so much. My husband told me that he went on horseback, since the climb was so steep, but that was the first and last time he went because although he felt respect for the scientist he saw that Righi was very skeptical about his research. Guglielmo realized at once that the Professor’s work was quite different from what he himself had in mind and was, in fact, already achieving.
He told me he decided to turn to new systems of research which the above-mentioned scientists had not thought of. With the profound intuition which was a characteristic of his genius he was convinced that another type of electromagnetic waves, different from those used up to then in the laboratories, would be necessary to receive communications from far-off stations and surmount the natural obstacles on the way. This intuition made it possible for him to succeed in trasmitting signals over various distances. So, strengthened by his belief in his own ideas, he went on with his work alone, never consulting anyone else and making totally unique experiments at Villa Griffone, absorbed in his research to find the way to use these waves. At last Guglielmo achieved his purpose: to communicate freely in the void of the ether without the use of wires. He reached his goal where the other scientists still searched and searched...
One of my husband’s first important inventions was his new improved “coherer”. Apparatus consisting of a detector of high-frequency discharges using a glass tube and a conducting powder had already existed since 1884. This apparatus, however, although it had been modified and perfected by various scientists for other purposes was in Guglielmo’s opinion very primitive and ineffective. He wanted to apply this instrument to long-distance wireless transmissions. After much research and many ingenious modifications, Marconi transformed the apparatus, reducing the diameter of the tube, inserting two silver electrodes very close together and filling it with a powder consisting of nickel and silver filings with traces of mercury, all in a vacuum. Guglielmo explained these things to me simply and clearly. These modifications so greatly increased the effectiveness of the apparatus that he himself considered it to be a new instrument of his own invention. Thus perfected, the “coherer” acquired an unequalled sensitivity and resistance. This is the reason why he had no hesitation in calling it, as I have already said, one of his first important inventions, a true creation of his own, thanks to which the capacity of transmissions from one station to another was gradually increased. The signals could be picked up not only indoors but also by a receiver system placed outside the house. I think it is important to tell all this because Guglielmo spoke to me about it more than once. He wanted me to know the truth. He trusted me and he knew that I in my turn would speak about it to the future generations.
My husband always remembered with pride his first success when he was still an adolescent. He told me that one day at Villa Griffone, after much experimentation, he called his mother. “Come with me”, he said. “I have something to show you. A surprise.” Annie Jameson Marconi was blonde with beautiful long hair and soft blue eyes. An English cousin of hers told me that she was an intelligent and determined woman. She had very high principles and her whole life was dedicated to bringing up her two sons Alfonso and Guglielmo who was nine years younger than his brother. She was the first to realize that there was something special about her younger son, a sensitive and thoughtful child, quite different from his older brother in character, intellect and tastes. Mother and son understood each other and got on very well together. He told me, “I knew she would never doubt me and would believe in my intuition. I wanted to show her that by just pressing the button of a bell, fixed to the floor, in the centre of the room, would be possible to ring another bell in the next-door room with the door closed. Annie Marconi watched this experiment and was astonished. It was almost a game but she took it seriously. She called her husband so that he too could see this demonstration. Giuseppe Marconi watched very carefully and shook his head in perplexity. Then he began to search all around, thinking that there must be a hidden electric wire. He looked carefully along the walls of the two rooms and investigated the floor, lifting up the carpet. He could not understand how the bell could ring in the next-door room without a connecting wire and with the door closed. Giuglielmo found all this incredulity very funny.
He told me that his father was rather skeptical about his experiments but he did not feel offended or allow himself to be influenced by this because he was absolutely certain he would succeed. He respected his father but went on with his studies with his mother’s support. She even spent two winters in Villa Griffone at Pontecchio so as not to leave her son alone during those years of hard work. Some old people from Bologna still remember it. Although the fires were lit in the fireplaces, the intense cold in the villa was hard to bear. Although his mother felt the cold she wanted to make this sacrifice for Guglielmo so that he could develop whatever he had in mind. Alfonso, his older brother, told me that when Guglielmo was in the granary he was so taken up with his studies and experiments, so determined to succeed, that he even forgot to eat and became very thin. One can see this clearly in photographs taken at the time. He shut himself away for days on end until late in the evening. He did not have meals with the family and sometimes his mother, worried about him, would bring him a bowl of nourishing broth which he would refuse. He never touched a mouthful until he had achieved his aim. His father used to grumble about this younger son, this “eccentric” who wasted time and money with his coils and wires, shut up there in the silk worms’ room which he had transformed into a laboratory.
All this happened before 1895, before the famous experiment of Pontecchio which connected the granary of Villa Griffone to the country on the other side of the hill beyond the garden in front of the villa along the now historic avenue. When Guglielmo told me about those days, he always told me how deeply grateful he felt to his mother. Once they went together to the Sanctuary of the Madonna on Mount Oropa near Biella. He stood for a long time admiring the view, thinking that God had put the forces of nature at man’s disposal and he felt sure that with His help he would succeed in exploiting them for the good of humanity. These are his words: “The free paths of space for the transmission of human thought have had a great fascination for me ever since