GUGLIELMO MARCONI WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY F BY RAYMOND FRANCIS YATES OLLOWING that "law of association" which psychologists tell us so much about, we cannot mention "wireless" without bringing to mind the name of Marconi. His name is affixed as permanently to this art as that of Bell is affixed to the telephone. Like most of the great technical arts, communication by wireless developed in successive stages of growth. James Clerk Maxwell, the great Scottish physicist, was responsible for the first stage of development. He planted the germ of radio in the mind of the scientific world. This was in 1862. By cold mathematics, Maxwell reasoned that there should be such things as electric waves, but it was not until 1887 that Professor Heinrich Hertz, a twenty-seven year old physicist of the University of Bonn, pulled these waves out of Nature's secret archives and played with them in his laboratory as a child might play with a new toy. This was the second phase of radio develop ment. Eight years later Marconi picked up the thread where Hertz and other experimenters had dropped it and commercialized radio through a series of brilliant experiments and epoch-making inventions which placed this new and powerful instrumentality at the disposal of civilization. The story of Marconi's life is as colorful as that of any of our other great inventors, proving again that invention is one of the most romantic departments of human endeavor. Marconi was the son of an Italian landed proprietor, and was born on his father's estate, Villa Griffone, near Bologna, on April 25, 1874. He is not a fullblooded Italian as many of his admirers believe. In fact his parentage might help to prove that hypothesis that genius resides in mixed bloods, for his mother was an Irish woman of gentle birth, being one of the famous Jamesons of Dublin, who were well-known whiskey distillers. Inventive talent and the capacity for inventive reasoning became evident in Marconi at the early age of five. He industriously gathered a quantity of berries from the garden of his father's estate, and, armed with a few simple kitchen utensils, he set out to manufacture a new kind of ink. His mother found him while he was making an effort to |