Italy on the Radio

It's hard to overstate the impact of the mastery of electricity on the human race.  And the fact that this force was able to fly around the world in very short order, revolutionize every facet of the economy and create the world we know today.  There were a few very important discoveries and inventions which I would consider truly monumental.  Telegraphs allowed near-instantaneous transmission of information.  The light bulb lit up the night, and decreased risk of fire by replacing gas and oil lamps. The radio then allowed for the transfer of information at the speed of light, while allowing for mobility, and decreasing the needed infrastructure.

Like any invention, there are many claimants to the technology.  Ernest Rutherford in particular is credited for inventing the first wireless transmitter and receiver.  But Guglielmo Marconi acted faster.  He was able to create a transmitter and receiver which could communicate over a few kilometers.  He patented his invention in Britain, and founded his own radio company fixing radio onto ships.  He would in a few short years broadcast a signal across the Atlantic ocean, from England to St. John's in Newfoundland, Canada in 1901.  That's just five years after he patented his 3 km radio.  He would later orchestrate an even further broadcast in the 1903 between Teddy Roosevelt on Cape Cod, and the King of England in western England.  It was because of the ability of the radio to transmit long distances that the Ionosphere was theorized, an example of practice driving theory.

Marconi's later life was perhaps a little distasteful for our modern values.  He was an Italian nationalist, and he enjoyed being celebrated as an Italian hero and a genius.  He fell right in to Mussolini's fascist regime as the President of Italy's Royal Academy.  He died in 1937, around when fascist violence was ramping up in Germany, but before the second World War broke out.  And around the world he was honored with a moment of radio silence.  And it's hard to guess how he might have been remembered had he survived into WWII.  Would he still be considered a celebrated engineer and scientist?  My guess would be in the affirmative, given how many scientists in the Nazi regime are celebrated, like Heisenberg and Von Braun.

It was so cool to look at all of the cool pieces of electrical equipment from a hundred years ago.  The designs have a certain antique charm that's hard to place.  They are hardly ornate, but there are certain aesthetic choices which tie together.  They are made with finished wood and brass metal objects.  The devices are often clean, symmetrical, and use very few wires to clutter up the device.  There is certainly a contrast to be made with the tools and objects of the Galileo Museum back in Florence, which are far more ornate, and no less beautiful.

The Marconi museum wasn't the only place I went today.  To the east of Bologna, in the middle of a farm there sits a massive dish, 32 m (100 ft) in diameter.  This dish is for the detection of radio waves originating in space.  And though the technology of the dish is dated by modern standards, it was built over 30 years ago in 1983, it's still in operation.

However, what I really appreciate about this place is how there is a superposition of high tech of space radio frequency telescopes, and the low tech of farming.  Ironically the farmers might just be using newer equipment.  According to the tour guide here the farmers and the science lab share the space well, but there was an incident where the farmers plowed over the fiber cable carrying Internet to the control building.  There are also a couple of other dishes, though they don't really look like a solid dish of anything.  They really are just an array of parabolic guilds with thin wire traversing the length of the array all the way across the parabolic arc.