Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [8]
She tutored Marconi or hired tutors for him and allowed him to concentrate on physics and electricity, at the expense of grammar, literature, history, and mathematics. She also taught him piano. He came to love Chopin, Beethoven, and Schubert and discovered he had a gift not just for reading music on sight but also for mentally transposing from one key to another. She taught him English and made sure he spoke it without flaw.
What schooling Marconi did have was episodic, occurring wherever the family happened to choose to spend its time, perhaps Florence or Livorno, an important Italian seaport known to the British as Leghorn. His first formal schooling began when he was twelve years old, when his parents sent him to Florence to the Istituto Cavallero, where his solitary upbringing now proved a liability. He was shy and had never learned the kind of tactics necessary for making and engaging friends that other children acquired in their first years in school. His daughter, Degna, wrote, “The expression on Guglielmo’s face, construed by his classmates as arising from a sense of superiority, was actually a cover for shyness and worry.”
At the istituto he discovered that while he had been busy learning English, his ability to speak Italian had degraded. One day the principal told him, “Your Italian is atrocious.” To underscore the point, or merely to humiliate the boy, he then ordered Marconi to recite a poem studied in class earlier that day. “And speak up!” the principal said.
Marconi made it through one line, when the class erupted in laughter. As Degna put it, “His classmates began baying like hounds on a fresh scent. They howled, slapped their thighs, and embarked on elaborate pantomimes.”
Years later one teacher would tell a reporter, “He always was a model of good behavior, but as to his brain—well, the least said, the soonest mended. I am afraid he got many severe smackings, but he took them like an angel. At that time he never could learn anything by heart. It was impossible, I used to think. I had never seen a child with so defective a memory.” His teachers referred to Marconi as “the little Englishman.”
Other schools and tutors followed, as did private lessons on electricity by one of Livorno’s leading professors. Here Marconi was introduced to a retired telegrapher, Nello Marchetti, who was losing his eyesight. The two got along well, and soon Marconi began reading to the older man. In turn, Marchetti taught him Morse code and techniques for sending messages by telegraph.
Many years later scientists would share Marconi’s wonder at why it was that he of all people should come to see something that the most august minds of his day had missed. Over the next century, of course, his idea would seem elementary and routine, but at the time it was startling, so much so that the sheer surprise of it would cause some to brand him a fraud and charlatan—worse, a foreign charlatan—and make his future path immeasurably more difficult.
To fully appreciate the novelty, one has to step back into that great swath of history that Degna later would call “The Great Hush.”
IN THE BEGINNING, IN THE INVISIBLE realm where electromagnetic energy traveled, there was emptiness. Such energy did exist, of course, and traveled in the form of waves launched from the sun or by lightning or any random spark, but these emanations rocketed past without meaning or purpose, at the speed of light. When men first encountered sparks, as when a lightning bolt incinerated their neighbors, they had no idea of their nature or cause, only that they arrived with a violence unlike anything else in the world. Historians often place humankind’s initial awareness of the distinct character of electrical phenomena in ancient Greece, with a gentleman named Thales, who discovered that by rubbing amber he could attract to it small bits of things, like beard hair and lint. The Greek word