Marconi Museum |
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visits: Sunday at 10 am
working days on reservation
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 info visits
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When Marconi was little more than a boy his parents, noticing his growing passion for physics and electricity, decided to introduce him to professor Augusto Righi. He taught Physics at Bologna university and was considered a great luminary in his field. Righi was born in Bologna in 1850, and had taught at the universities of Padova and Palermo before returning to teach in his home town, Bologna. He studied the fundamentals of electrology, electromagnetism and physical optics. A great theorist and researcher, he continued Hertz' experiments and thus contributed significantly to prove Maxwell's theory. The famous professor and the self-taught young man, both Bolognese and interested in the hertzian waves, seemed destined to meet and to become student and teacher, but this did not happen. Marconi visited professor Righi several times, both at the university and his summer house in Sabbiuno, near Pontecchio. He probably saw the equipment devised by Righi in his laboratory. Their relationship consisted of on the one side Marconi trying to explain his ideas and continuously asking Righi questions, and on the other side the professor replying and suggesting that Marconi should continue his education to gain a solid, basic knowledge. But Marconi did not follow his advice; instead he began to experiment on his own. Once he had completed his new system (which would later be called wireless telegraphy) he moved with his mother to London in order to patent his invention and develop its applications. When Marconi became famous, the two Bolognese scientists met on various public occasions and always declared their mutual respect. To the many people who considered Professor Righi the real inventor of wireless telegraphy, he replied that he had not been Marconi's teacher and that Marconi had carried out his research autonomously. At the same time he considered Marconi's scientific contribution nothing more than a «useful application». When Marconi was awarded the Nobel prize in 1909, Righi, who had been candidate for the prize for fifteen years without winning, could not deny his disappointment. During his speech at the Swedish Royal Academy, Marconi cited Righi together with Hertz and Branly as those scientists whose studies had inspired the beginning of his career. However he failed to dedicate any words of affection to them or recount any personal memories. Augusto Righi died in Bologna in 1920.
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«Mr. Marconi sends to Mr. Branly his regards over the Channel through the wireless telegraph, this nice achievement being partly the result of Mr. Branly's remarkable work.» With this telegram, sent from Dover on March 29th 1899, soon after the first wireless communication was made between France and England, the young Marconi paid homage to his illustrious colleague. Branly's contribution is briefly accounted for by Marconi ten years later, in his Nobel Lecture, where he explains to have used, in his early experiments, a Branly coherer as a detector, which he slightly modified to increase its stability. The crossbreed is interesting: the term “coherer” was coined by Lodge, Branly always rejected the concept, preferring “radioconductor”. Marconi, it seems, adopted Lodge's term/concept (quite diffused by then), but utilized Branly's apparatus. Branly was born in Amiens in 1844. He studied at the Sorbonne and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. For more than 50 years he was professor of Physics at the Catholic University in Paris, becoming a scientific celebrity, especially in France, where for a long time he was considered the true inventor of wireless. In 1890 he published the first results of his researches that showed that the electric spark had the power at a distance to change the conductivity of the powdered conductors: this is his discovery, hotly contested by Calzecchi Onesti, who also greatly underestimated the importance of power at a distance. Having devised his “radioconductor”, Branly continued his research on electrical conductivity, with little participation in the future developments of wireless telegraphy. He thought of himself, above all, as an experimenter, and even if in some instances he served as a consultant and collaborator, he was never seriously attracted to carrying out applied research, to the point that when in 1912 Marconi offered him a job as a technical consultant of his Company (by then well established), Branly kindly refused. With a degree also in medicine, as of 1896, for about twenty years, he practiced electrotherapy in his own laboratory. He became interested in the “psychic sciences” and telemechanics. In 1900 he was nominated Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and in 1911 became a member of the Academy of Sciences. He died in Paris in 1940, after having dedicated his entire life to scientific studies.
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© 2013 - Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi - Villa Griffone - via Celestini 1 - 40037 Pontecchio Marconi (BO) - C.F 80063250379