BIRTH
One night, a man went and woke his mother, and brought her to his secret attic. He wanted to show her something unique. An electric key was lying on a table. He pressed it. Instantly, in the next attic, at some distance, a bell sounded. There were no wires connected to the key, and electric impulse alone made the bell ring across the space. This had never happened before. A new age was born. The man of the moment was none other but Guglielmo Marchese Marconi, born on April 25, 1874 in Bologna, Italy.

FAMILY HISTORY
Guglielmo Marconi was born to Giuseppe and Annie Marconi on April 25, 1874. Giuseppe Marconi came from the Apennines, mountains between Florence and Bologna in Italy. As a young man, he moved to Bologna where in 1855, he married a local girl, who died a year later, giving birth to their son. Giuseppe, a widower with an infant son, was joined by his father, who bought the Villa Griffone at Pontecchio, 11 miles out of Bologna. Giuseppe managed the land while his father raised silk worms. His wife Annie Jameson, was born in Ireland in the 1840s. Her father, Andrew had migrated with his brothers from Scotland where they had established the famous Jameson Whiskey Distillery, in Dublin.

It was here whilst staying in Bologna that Annie fell in love with Giuseppe Marconi. Giuseppe was a foreigner, a widower with a small child and 17 years her senior. The conservative Jamesons were outraged. Despite being forbidden by her parents to marry, Giuseppe and Annie kept contact through smuggled letters and on April 16, 1864, they married in France and settled in Bologna, after Annie had come of age. In 1865, they had a son Alfonso, born at the Villa Griffone.

CHILDHOOD

EDUCATION
Annie then brought him to England for two years' elementary schooling, and later they moved to Florence, where she preferred to spend her winters. Marconi soon learned to become self-reliant, not by choice but by the combination of his parents' geographically separate lives and his education at the hands of a successive tutors. There was a scientific library nearby and little Marconi delved into the books to his heart’s content. He loved reading chemistry. He read almost all the books about steam engines and burrowed into electricity. He also read about Benjamin Franklin and his experiments with static electricity.

Marconi's schooling was intermittent, often interrupted and full of failures. Marconi was a reserved child, who had difficulty in making friends. He loved building scientific toys and gadgets, most often in isolation. He had made a miniature still that really distilled alcohol, built a roasting spit (skewer for holding meat over fire) out of his cousin Daisy's sewing machine, and an electric bell with metal wires and batteries. All his inventiveness apparently did not help elevate his school performance.

Though he was obedient, he also became introvert and spoke of "my electricity" before he was even 10 years old. Left to his own devices, he invented scientific toys and developed an aptitude for dismantling and re-assembling mechanical objects. The young Marconi often ran foul with his father who was strict with his children and was frustrated by the way Guglielmo seemed to waste away the hours in the attic. But such act hardly belied the future that had in store for this young boy,Marconi.

Sometimes, he used to climb the trees in front of his house and fall asleep on its branches. He enjoyed horse riding and swimming. He used to get embarrassed when people twitted him about his experiments. He would shut up his mouth and go off to fish … and think.

YOUNG EXPERIMENTER
Once, Marconi set up a strange device of zinc on the roof of the house. It was like a spear and was wired in such a way that when enough static electricity was collected, a bell would ring. This was perhaps the first step towards the invention of radio, for which the world recognized him.

Marconi’s parents, in fact, were startled by his keen interest in experiments and science. When Marconi was seven, he attended school in Florence, and it was there that he studied each winter. Marconi learned Physics under Professor Rosa.

While still a youngster, Marconi made some keen observations about the puzzling electric impulses, better known as Hertzian waves. He concluded that Hertzian waves and ordinary electric currents had distinctive characteristics. The waves produced by a spark were able to travel through a medium without wires, unlike alternating currents, which travel through a wire or some conductor. Marconi gave a good distinction through this comparison that : A bell may swing to and fro without producing a sound. Strike it with a hammer and it transmits sound waves in every direction. The spark is the hammer blow and the sound waves, the Hertzian oscillations.