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a physicist and friend of Oliver Lodge. Crookes by this time was one of Britain’s most distinguished scientists, and one of its most controversial because of his interest in the paranormal. In the early 1870s he conducted a detailed investigation of Daniel Douglas Home, a medium who had held séances for Napoleon III, Tsar Alexander II, and other bright lights of the age, and was known for doing such extraordinary things as moving furniture and grabbing hot coals from fireplaces without injury (and in one case depositing said coals on the bald scalp of a séance participant, supposedly without causing harm). In the famous “Ashley House Levitation” of 1868, Home supposedly floated out one window of the séance room and back in through another. Crookes’s investigations led him to conclude that Home did have psychic powers; he claimed, in fact, to have witnessed Home levitate himself several times. This did not endear him to the men of established British science, and probably accounted for why no one paid much attention to his Fortnightly Review article in which he discussed Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves. “Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world—one which it is hard to conceive should contain no possibilities of transmitting and receiving intelligence,” he wrote. “Rays of light will not pierce through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a London fog. But the electrical vibrations of a yard or more in wave-length of which I have spoken will easily pierce such mediums, which to them will be transparent. Here, then, is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our present costly appliances.” The article went virtually unread, and even Lodge appeared not to have paid it any attention (Oppenheim, Other World, 14–15, 35, 344, 475; Jolly, Lodge, 102; d’Albe, Crookes, 341–42).

“Che orecchi”: Ibid., 8.

“an aggregate”: Ibid., 8.

Marconi grew up: For descriptions of Villa Griffone see Marconi, My Father, 6, 22, 24, 191.

“my electricity”: Ibid., 14.

“One of the enduring”: Paresce, “Personal Reflections,” 3.

“The expression on”: Marconi, My Father, 16.

“He always was”: Maskelyne Incident, 27.

“the Little Englishman”: Ibid.

Historians often: Isted, I, 48; Jonnes, Empires, 19.

As men developed: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 36–37. For a good grounding in all things electrical, see Bordeau, Volts to Hertz, and Jonnes, Empires.

Initially scientists: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 36; Jonnes, Empires, 22.

One researcher: Jonnes, Empires, 29.

In 1850: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 37. The year 1850 also witnessed one of the strangest attempts at wireless communication. A Frenchman allowed two snails to get to know one another, then shipped one snail off to New York, to a fellow countryman, to test the widely held belief that physical contact between snails set up within them an invisible connection that allowed them to communicate with each other regardless of distance. They placed the snails in metal bowls marked with letters of the alphabet, and claimed that when one snail was touched against a letter, the other snail, at the far side of the ocean, likewise touched that letter. Concluding that somehow signals had been transmitted from one snail to the other, the researchers proposed the existence of an etherlike realm that they called “escargotic fluid.” History is silent on the fate of the snails, though the nationality of the two researchers hints at one possible outcome (Baker, History, 21–22).

In 1880: Ibid., 37.

He came up with: Ibid., 8.

He called it: Massie and Underhill, Wireless Telegraphy, 41.

Lodge’s own statements: Aitken, Syntony, 116, 121; Hong, Wireless, 46.

“Whilst the issues”: Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 20.

“Giuseppe was punishing”: Marconi, My Father, 24.

The coherer “would act”: Hong, Wireless, 19.

“I did not lose”: Marconi, My Father, 26.

“he did lose his youth”: Ibid., 2624 Marconi saw no limits: Interview, Francesco Paresce, Munich, April 11, 2005.

“far too erratic”: Marconi, Nobel, 3.

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