Alfonso Marconi
Alfonso Marconi (1865 – 1936) was an Italian businessman and collector of stringed instruments, most famous for assisting his younger brother Guglielmo Marconi in his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission.[1]
Biography[edit]
Early life and education[edit]
Alfonso Marconi was born into the Italian nobility in 1865, the first son of Giuseppe Marconi (an Italian aristocratic landowner from Porretta Terme) and of his Irish/Scots wife, Annie Jameson (daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in County Wexford, Ireland, and granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons).[2] Alfonso was educated at Bedford School in England between 1876 and 1880, during his peripatetic childhood.[3]
Assistant to Guglielmo Marconi[edit]
Alfonso Marconi assisted his younger brother Guglielmo Marconi with his early experiments, and in the summer of 1895 Guglielmo moved his experimentation outdoors.[4] After increasing the length of transmitter and receiver antennas, arranging them vertically, and positioning an antenna so that it touched the ground, Guglielmo significantly increased the range he could achieve.[5]
Alfonso stood on one side of a hill near to the family home of Villa Griffone in Pontecchio, Italy, and fired a shot which was transmitted over the hill to Guglielmo: a distance of approximately 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi). Guglielmo concluded that, with additional funding and research, a device could become capable of spanning greater distances and would prove valuable both commercially and militarily.[6]
Later life[edit]
Alfonso Marconi was a director of the American International Marine Communication Company and an avid collector of stringed instruments.[7][8]
He died suddenly at a London hotel on the evening of Friday 24 April 1936 following a heart attack (his brother died following a heart attack in 1937)[9] and is buried with his mother on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.
References[edit]
- ^ Obituary, The Times, 27 April 1936, p.16
- ^ Marconi: the Irish connection, Michael Sexton, Four Courts Press, 2005
- ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 8 April 2014. Retrieved 4 November 2014.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ "Milestones:Marconi's Early Wireless Experiments, 1895 – GHN: IEEE Global History Network". Ieeeghn.org. 26 September 2003. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
- ^ Marconi, "Wireless Telegraphic Communication: Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1909." Nobel Lectures. Physics 1901–1921. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1967: 196–222. p. 206.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1909".
- ^ "Valuable violins". Herald Scotland.
- ^ "London's Sherlock Holmes Show, a Stradivarius at Auction and More". The Wall Street Journal. 17 October 2014.
- ^ The Times, 28 April 1936, p.1