Tuning-In to an Old Tail

Just before the turn of the 20th century, a young inventor named Signor Marconi bluffed, guessed, and welded his way into creating the world's first radio. He wasn't sure how it worked, but it did. In 1896, he displayed the future of Howard Stern and Clear Channel, creating an electric charge in one wooden box that rang a bell in another across a West London room.

It didn't take long for Marconi to figure out how to transmit signals much longer distances. Within a few years he was transmitting Morse code across the ocean and winning the acclaim of ship captains, scientific prize committees, and young damsels. Though Marconi wasn't the first to understand the underlying electromagnetic waves -- and he long thought that the waves traveled in some mysterious medium called the "ether" -- he deserves much of the credit for one of the most important inventions of modern times.

Radio helped hold America together during World War II and has kept millions of baseball fans and traffic-jam victims content for decades. Even today, as its influence pales besides television and the Internet, it still helps fuel America's political debates and provides the dominant developing-nation news source. Radio technology is also crucial to everything from wi-fi Internet access to air-traffic control.

Gavin Weightman, previously the author of a book about the 19th-century international trade in ice, has thus decided to wrap up a book about Marconi, adding to the growing library shelves of books about little-known inventors. In just the past year, major publishing houses have published biographies of Philo Farnsworth, Glenn Hammond Curtiss, J.C.R. Licklider, Rosalind Franklin, and others. Though these people were all important, more New Yorkers probably could identify the members of the Yankees' bullpen than any of them.

Making Mr. Weightman's task harder, his protagonist is a historically fungible inventor. Marconi was crafty, but other people trailed close behind and would surely have soon done everything Marconi did. The world would hardly differ if Marconi had never been born -- the same cannot be said of Edison, Einstein, or even Heinrich Hertz, the last of whom discovered electromagnetic waves, which is why a radio station is said, for example, to broadcast at 89.7 megahertz rather than 89.7 megamarconis.

Given its dispensable hero, "Signor Marconi's Magic Box" would appear to have three prime potential avenues of success: elucidating the underlying science, giving a feel to the early 1900s, or describing a fascinating personality.

Mr. Weightman does best with the science. The book starts with the wooden boxes in West London and then moves chronologically as the hero sends messages from a yacht off the Isle of Wight to Queen Victoria and then across the Atlantic. The Titanic sent out distress signals over radio as it sank, alerting nearby ships and saving many lives. The technology also was soon adapted for war. During the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese advantage in radio communication gave them as much of an edge at sea as unmanned drones gave the United States a century later.

Unwisely, Mr. Weightman describes each invention as though Marconi is simply an energetic mountain climber scaling another peak. Little insight is offered into his particular genius. Many of the chapters describing competitive inventors, or early adaptors, zip by with insufficient context or compelling explanation. Much of the book resembles a PowerPoint presentation.

As for describing an era, Mr. Weightman tries his hand at scene-setting in the introductions to nearly every chapter. Jack the Ripper and Lenin show up in the first two paragraphs of the first chapter, but they are just names thrown into the text and don't enlighten the story in any real way. In any event, Weightman inevitably drops the scene-setting and descriptions after a couple of paragraphs in each chapter and returns to more Marconi eclat.

Describing Marconi's character seems promising. The inventor came from interesting stock (his mother was from the whiskey-brewing Jameson family) and lived what Mr. Weightman calls "an extremely eventful life." He ended up as a fascist supporter, and when he died Mussolini was the first to visit his deathbed. Marconi also broke off two engagements and sullied a third marriage, but Weightman never really elucidates how or why. Marconi's first engagement, for example, ended under mysterious circumstances that the author never explains, except to say that they were mysterious.

In a way, the whole book suffers from the same flaw: Nothing really seems essential. The scene setting isn't essential; Marconi's personal life isn't essential; and it's not clear that Marconi is essential to history in the first place. The author ends the book with the sentence: "There is a sense in which Guglielmo Marconi was somehow always alone, mesmerized by his own magic, the workings of which he never really understood." It's a poignant line, both for the sake of Marconi and for the book. After all, if Marconi didn't really understand what he was doing, and there wasn't that much material about his personality in the first place, is it worth reading 300 pages about him?

If you have a particular yen for radios or early 20th century history, yes. Otherwise, it's probably better just to lie back on the couch and turn to your favorite station on the FM dial.