Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Tuesday 31/1/2006
Tune your wireless to dead air and let it play for a minute: Marconi is no more. The company has been quietly absorbed into Ericsson, and the name has become merely a brand. As a teenage nerd who had pictures of Guglielmo on his bedroom wall above his Marconiphone CR300/1 ship's radio, and who worked for Marconi Space and Defence Systems for just long enough to work out that life in defence electronics was nothing like the glossy brochures, I find this very emotive.
On the other hand, Gugli was a randy, scheming so-and-so born into a wealthy and very well connected family — grandson of Andrew Jameson, who owned the eponymous Irish whiskey company — who used patents as weapons, preferred publicity over accuracy, and was a huge fan of Il Duce. His success was not due to inventiveness or scientific nous, which he possessed in very small measures, but to a keen eye for new ideas wherever they came from or whoever owned them, determination, showmanship and workaholic perfectionism.
And then there was the Marconi Scandal of 1912. Not only was Gugli hard at work on women apart from his wife, but Lloyd George was accused of insider trading in Marconi shares — which he bought before it was announced that Marconi had won a contract for 18 UK radio stations. And the attorney general was the brother of Marconi's MD. It all got tidied away in the best Edwardian fashion, but you get the picture.
In the end, he gained a glass eye in a car crash and spent more time wandering the planet promoting fascism than he did tinkering with his wires. There are genuine heroes of wireless — Lodge, Heaviside, Fessenden, Hertz and many others — and while a few of them had colourful lives, nobody managed to be quite such a thundering cad as Marconi. According to a most entertaining pocket biography, in later life he preferred to be addressed as "His Excellency the Senator Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, president of the Royal Academy of Italy, Member of the Fascist Grand Council". You just don't get business cards like that these days. Even Ken Lay has a way to go — remember that, next time you're chewing the carpet at some piece of corporate cupidity.