Signor Marconi’s Magic Box by Gavin Weightman, HarperCollins, £15.99, ISBN 0007130058 Reviewed by Antony Anderson
IN JUNE 1903, shortly after the Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi had successfully demonstrated two-way transatlantic wireless communication, his chief technical expert, Ambrose Fleming, was lecturing at the Royal Institution in London. A ticker-tape machine had been set up to receive a Morse signal relayed from Poldhu in Cornwall, and Fleming was explaining how wireless waves could be tuned to avoid interference when the arc lamp in the projection lantern began to tick in a regular manner and the ticker-tape machine began to spew out a…
