Believing in Something that Can't be Seen

© 2003 Boaz Rauchwerger

What was it about that period of history? How did so many incredible events take place in a relatively short time span? The years between 1876 and 1903 were amazing from the perspective of inventions that dramatically altered the future of mankind.

I present, as evidence, the following timeline of inventions: 1876 – the telephone; 1879 – the light bulb; 1896 – the automobile and radio; 1903 – the airplane.

This column focuses on one of those inventions, radio, and demonstrates how incredibly creative we all can be when we believe in something that can’t be seen. The story begins in an attic in Bologna, Italy, as 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi, creates a wireless transmitter and receiver. People thought what he did was magic. He was able to send signals through the air, even through barriers.

To discover his ability to tap into his creativity, we go back to Marconi’s childhood. Born in 1874 in Bologna, he inherited from his mother tenaciousness and perseverance. From his father he got a strong will and business skill. He was taught the English language and religious culture.

Although he attended school, Marconi was basically self-taught. By the age of eighteen, he had developed a great interest in physics and electricity. He studied the works of famous people who experimented with electromagnetic waves, including research by Scottish Clark Maxwell and the German Heinrich Hertz.

It was during the summer of 1894, when Marconi was twenty years old, that he decided to use the waves discovered by Heinrich Hertz to attempt communication. In the fall of that year, in a villa laboratory in a granary in Pontecchio near Bologna, Marconi worked night and day on his idea. He surrounded himself with rolls of copper wire, brass spheres, coils, Morse keys and electric bells. In essence, he had the makings of the first elementary radio sets.

One day, he enlisted a local farmer named Mignani to situate himself about a thousand feet away, on a hill at the end of the garden, with a receiver. Marconi placed his transmitter on the windowsill of the granary. He then clicked the three dots of the Morse code letter S. The signal traveled through space, reached its destination, and Magnani waved his handkerchief to indicate the successful reception.

Then Marconi wanted to see if he could send his signal between two invisible points. So he had Magnani take the receiver to the other side of the hill. He also took with him a gun, with which he could signal a successful reception. Marconi, from the granary window, then pushed the key three times to again designate the Morse code letter S. His answer came quickly, from the other side of the hill, in the form of a gunshot. The obstacle of the hill had been overcome by the electromagnetic waves. Marconi realized, in that April of 1895, that radio communications were now possible!

At that time he dedicated his life to seeing how far wireless could travel and then to running the huge business it created. It was in 1896 that Marconi received his first patent. When he presented it to the Italian government, the offer wasn’t even considered.

It was his mother that understood the importance of her son’s invention. She took her son to London and used her connections to introduce Marconi to William Preece, the chief electrical engineer of the British Post and Telephone Company, the most powerful communications system in the world at the time. Preece became an enthusiastic supporter.

Soon Queen Victoria was using wireless text messaging to arrange a cricket match. The British newspapers and magazines speculated about the potential for this amazing invention. They felt it could help distant families communicate with each other by wireless and that nations could be brought together by the Morse key.

In the next couple of years, Marconi continued to exhibit the power of wireless by sending signals to increasingly further distances. In 1898, he achieved a wireless connection between England and France, a distance of 32 miles. In that same year he traveled to the United States and exhibited the wireless by sending signals between two Navy ships. In 1901, after building radio transmitting stations in England and in Canada, Marconi sent electromagnetic waves across an ocean for the first time.

Although these achievements were amazing for the time, no one predicted that Marconi’s invention would lead to transmission of voice and the birth of broadcast. Eventhough he himself didn’t fully understand how his invention worked, Marconi was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics.

There is a wonderful line in a song that states: “Faith is believing something that cannot be seen.” Guglielmo Marconi, by sending a signal to a farmer he could not see behind the hill, was exhibiting faith in his own creativity.

How much faith do you have in your creativity? What kind of a strong, positive signal could you send to the world by believing in some important things that cannot be seen?

A Daily Affirmation of Creativity

I am a very creative person. I have faith and believe in some things that cannot be seen.