Signor Marconi's Magic Box: The Most Remarkable Invention of the 19th Century and the Amateur Inventor Whose Genius Sparked a Revolution (review)

Gavin Weightman's slender biography of Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), the British-Italian who invented wireless telegraphy, is aimed at a lay readership. Devoid of footnotes, bibliography, and jargon, this "really intimate account of Marconi's life" contains forty-five engagingly written chapters in 291 pages of large-font type. That averages out to about six-and-a-half pages per chapter. To be sure, few of Technology and Culture's regular readers will consider picking up this old-fashioned heroic-inventor tale for themselves, but should they recommend it to nonacademics, or assign it to undergraduates? Unless they are looking for a book principally about Marconi's celebrity, the answer is no.

Yet Signor Marconi's Magic Box is not without worth. Weightman clearly, convincingly, and enthusiastically depicts Marconi's talent for generating publicity for himself and his wireless company. That said, it should also be said that the narrative is larded with factoids of dubious relevance. Jack the Ripper makes an appearance on page one, for instance, and one of the longer chapters recounts how Edward VII's appendicitis delayed his own coronation. One continually learns about the day-to-day affairs of the employees, relatives, lovers, and royalty who moved through Marconi's celebrated life. This kind of detail can enliven popular history, but a little goes a long way and after a few chapters it begins to cloy.

Too often Weightman strays from his principal subject for no apparent reason except that during Marconi's lifetime certain people—famous people usually—lived, or that certain events occurred. Weightman invokes Jack the Ripper to emphasize the notoriety of London's East End, where the serial killer claimed his last victim in 1888 and where Marconi staged a demonstration of wireless in Toynbee Hall eight years later. But that notoriety had no more to do with the demonstration than Lenin's attendance at several lectures in the same building, which Weightman also mentions. These are minor offenses, of course, but many more follow. In contrast, the book rarely provides more than superficial descriptions of the technology that brought Marconi his fame. We see plenty of the outside of the magic box, but almost nothing of its inside.

The most serious flaw is thematic inconsistency. Most chapters read well enough individually, probably because their short length curbs Weightman's tendency to wander off the subject. But those who read the entire book from start to finish will encounter one abrupt shift after another, simply because Weightman tries to cover too much ground. Indeed, until I reached the end I would have been hard-pressed to state exactly what this book is about. To illustrate that point, consider the wildly divergent scope of three consecutive chapters. Chapter 28 examines the work of Marconi's American rivals in the wireless business, Reginald Fessenden and Lee de Forest—all in five pages. Chapter 29 describes Marconi's wedding day in seven pages, and chapter 30 tells about the role of wireless in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Because this jarringly erratic pattern is most apparent to those who read the whole book, perhaps a few carefully chosen chapters would suffice as a reading assignment for high school or college students.