From Publishers Weekly
Dapper, aristocratic Guglielmo Marconi doesn't fit the typical inventor stereotype: he lacked wild hair, wasn't absentminded, wore debonair-looking hats and frequently wooed women when traveling by ship. Yet Marconi's aptitude for technology led him to become the father of wireless telegraphy and radio. Born in 1874 to an Italian father and an Irish mother, Marconi was always fascinated by the nascent technology of electricity and, as a young man, was struck by the idea that he could transmit telegraph messages-then carried by cables-through the air. At a crowded London meeting hall in 1896, he made a dramatic public demonstration of his idea by sending a current from one innocuous-looking box to a receiver he carried around the hall with him, causing it to ring: "No messages were being sent at all-just an invisible electronic signal. But in 1896 that was sensational enough," writes documentary filmmaker and journalist Weightman. Like many other great inventions, wireless was being pursued at the same time by a number of different inventors, including some shameless charlatans-some of whom, like the delightfully crooked Abraham White, give Weightman's dry book some desperately needed spark-and a great deal of Weightman's text is about the juggling for position among the inventors and their respective companies around the turn of the century. Although Weightman has his hands on an extremely exciting subject, there is precious little life to his writing, and even exciting episodes, like the sending of an early type of wireless distress signal from the sinking Titanic, fail to engage. Photos.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Guglielmo Marconi invented the best radio equipment in the technology's infancy a century ago. He made a fortune, cruised among queens of England and kings of Italy, and died an acolyte of Mussolini. Weightman ably chronicles Marconi's life in the context of his urgency to perfect radio transmission and reception before rivals did. Marconi was born into comfortable circumstances, and his youthful passion for crafting devices to generate "Hertzian" waves was supported by his Irish mother and Italian father. Weightman delivers the technical information about Marconi's sending radio waves further than anyone else could at the time--he was the first to send signals across the Atlantic--then settles into the narrative of Marconi's patent battles and business operations, as well as his two marriages. Taciturn and careful, Marconi does not make for an effervescent biography; rather, the author's study is as stolid as its subject and does justice to Marconi's central place in the origination of wireless communication. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


USA Today
"Reader's with even a slight interest in history and technological innovation will find the book engaging."


Library Journal
"Highly recommended."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

On a Winter's Evening in the East End of London in 1896, an unassuming young Italian gave the first public demonstration of a device he had created in the attic of his family home near Bologna. It consisted of two wooden boxes, one of which could apparently transmit messages to the other "through the ether." Many in the audience suspected that they were witnessing a con man's trick. None could have guessed that Signor Guglielmo Marconi's magic box would be regarded as the most remarkable invention of the nineteenth century - and that he himself would become one of the most famous men in the world. For this was nothing less than the birth of the radio, even if no scientist in Europe or America, not even Marconi himself, could at first say how it worked. And no one knew how far these radio waves could travel, until 1903, when a message from President Theodore Roosevelt to the king of England flashed from Cape Cod to Cornwall clear across the Atlantic. Signor Marconi's Magic Box is a rich portrait of the man and his era - and a captivating tale of science and scientists, business and businessmen.

FROM THE CRITICS

Boston Globe - 9/9/03

The excitement of these early days of radio is wonderfully caught...excellent reading...often hard to put down.

Science News - 9/6/03

Weightman takes readers back to a time when people lived literally in the dark and examines how a young boy's fascination with electricity would change the world.

Curled Up With a Good Book - 9/5/03

A definitive reference on nineteenth-century inventors concerned with telegraphy...intriguing.

Technology & Society - 9/2/03

Interesting and well-written...gives an excellent feeling of this exciting period when the technologies that we take for granted were just getting off the ground.

USA Today