Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [7]
His father, Giuseppe Marconi, was a prosperous farmer and businessman, somewhat dour, who had wanted his son to continue along his path. His mother, Anne Jameson, a daughter of the famous Irish whiskey empire, had a more impulsive and exploratory nature. Guglielmo was their second child, born on April 25, 1874. Family lore held that soon after his birth an elderly gardener exclaimed at the size of his ears—“Che orecchi grandi ha!”—essentially, “What big ears he has!”—and indeed his ears were larger than one might have expected, and remained one of his salient physical features. Annie took offense. She countered, “He will be able to hear the still, small voice of the air.” Family lore also held that along with her complexion and blue eyes, her willful nature was transferred to the boy and established within him a turbulence of warring traits. Years later his own daughter, Degna, would describe him as “an aggregate of opposites: patience and uncontrollable anger, courtesy and harshness, shyness and pleasure in adulation, devotion to purpose and”—this last for her a point of acute pain—“thoughtlessness toward many who loved him.”
Marconi grew up on the family’s estate, Villa Griffone, in Pontecchio, on the Reno River a dozen or so miles south of Bologna, where the land begins to rise to form the Apennines. Like many villas in Italy, this one was a large stone box of three stories fronted with stucco painted the color of autumn wheat. Twenty windows in three rows punctuated its front wall, each framed by heavy green shutters. Tubs planted with lemon trees stood on the terrace before the main door. A loggia was laced with paulownia that bloomed with clusters of mauve blossoms. To the south, at midday, the Apennines blued the horizon. As dusk arrived, they turned pink from the falling sun.
Electricity became a fascination for Marconi early in his childhood. In that time anyone of a scientific bent found the subject compelling, and nowhere was this more the case than in Bologna, long associated with advances in electrical research. Here a century earlier Luigi Galvani had done awful things to dead frogs, such as inserting brass hooks into their spinal cords and hanging them from an iron railing to observe how they twitched, in order to test his belief that their muscles contained an electrical fluid, “animal electricity.” It was in Bologna also that Galvani’s peer and adversary, Count Alessandro Volta, constructed his famous “pile” in which he stacked layers of silver, brine-soaked cloth, and zinc and thereby produced the first battery capable of producing a steady flow of current.
As a child, Marconi was possessive about electricity. He called it “my electricity.” His experiments became more and more involved and consumed increasing amounts of time. The talent he exhibited toward tinkering did not extend to academics, however, though one reason may have been his mother’s attitude toward education. “One of the enduring mysteries surrounding Marconi is his almost complete lack of any kind of formal schooling,” wrote his grandson, Francesco Paresce, a physicist in twenty-first-century Munich. “In my mind this had certainly something to do with Annie’s profound distaste for the Catholic Church ingrained in her by her Protestant Irish upbringing and probably confirmed by her association with the late nineteenth-century society of Bologna.” At the time the city was closely bonded to the Vatican. In a letter to her husband Annie sought assurances that Marconi would be allowed to learn “the good principles of my religion and that he not come into contact with the great superstition that is commonly taught to small children in Italy.” The city’s best schools were operated