L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 2021 www.italoamericano.org 16 L'Italo-Americano LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE D ear Readers, April marks the 147th anniversary of the birth of the great Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. April also marks the month when Guglielmo Marconi, born in Bologna April 25, 1874, was hailed worldwide as a benefactor and hero to humanity. The supposedly "unsinkable" lux- ury liner Titanic sank April 14, 1912, and Marconi's inven- tion "ship to shore" radio helped save many lives. Of the 2,340 passengers and crew more than 1,500 perished. The survivors were picked up by the S.S. Carpathia, another ra- dio equipped ship which had heard the distress call. In 1906, David Sarnoff (who became Chairman of RCA in 1930) began working for the American Marconi Company and by 1919, he had become a top wireless expert. He preferred the term radio to "wireless teleg- raphy" because the signals which were sent out radiated in all directions. Sarnoff, at age 21, was appointed manager and op- erator of the American Mar- coni wireless station located in the Wanamaker Depart- ment Store in New York, then the most powerful commer- cial radio station in the world. On April 14, 1912, while he was listening idly to dots and dashes, he suddenly picked up on this shocking message: "S.S. Titanic ran into an ice- berg . Sinking fast." This message had come from the S.S. Olympic, which was nearby in the North At- lantic Ocean, 1,400 miles away from New York. David notified the New York newspapers of the grim tragedy. Within hours, the news spread across the coun- try. That same year, Con- gress passed a law which made it mandatory for all ships carrying passengers to install radio equipment. It also required ship owners to employ licensed persons to operate the radio equipment. Marconi's mother, An- nie Jameson, was born in 1843, one of four daughters of Andrew Jameson of County Wexford in Ireland, wealthy distiller of Jameson's Irish whiskey. The family lived in an old manor, which had parkland and a moat. Annie as a teenager wanted to perform in opera, and had been invited to sing at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Her father refused to let her go, the stage then re- garded as not suitable for well bred young ladies, but if was arranged that Annie could go to Bologna to study singing. There she could stay with business contacts of the Jamesons, a respectable Ital- ian family called de Renolis. A few years before Annie arrived to stay with them, their daughter Giulia had married a prosperous landowner allied Giuseppe Marconi. Giulia had given birth to her first child, a son named Luigi. Sadly, the young mother survived the birth of her child by only a few months. Giuseppe, now a lone parent, remained close to the de Renolis family. When Annie Jameson came to stay with the de Reno- lis, she was introduced to their bereaved son-in-law and little grandson Luigi. Giuseppe lived more at Pontecchio in the Villa Griffone than in Bologna, and Annie fell in love with that place and with him. She returned to Ire- land to ask her family for permission to marry her Italian sweetheart, but they refused. The grounds for re- jection were that he was much older than her (by about sev- enteen years), already had a son and he was a foreigner. Annie appeared to accept the decision. But kept in touch with Giuseppe, with letters smuggled between Ire- land and Italy, and vowed to run away to marry him when she reached the age of majority at twenty-one. This she did, meeting him on the northern coast of France, where they married on April 16, 1864. Their first child, Alfonso, was born a year later. Nine years later, in April 1874, Annie gave birth to a second son, Guglielmo. From an early age Guglielmo Marconi was famil- iar with Bologna's scienti- Advancing our Legacy: Italian Community Services CASA FUGAZI If you know of any senior of Italian descent in San Francisco needing assistance, please contact: ItalianCS.org | (415) 362-6423 | info@italiancs.com Italian Community Services continues to assist Bay Area Italian-American seniors and their families navigate and manage the resources needed to live healthy, independent and productive lives. Since Shelter-in-Place began in San Francisco, Italian Community Services has delivered over 240 meals, over 900 care packages and made over 2000 phone wellness checks for our seniors. fic heritage, and at Villa Griffone began his first exper- iments with the mysterious forces of electricity. Bologna had water-powered silk-weav- ing mills long before the In- dustrial Revolution trans- formed British industry in the late eighteenth century. Bolo- gna also had a distinguished history of scientific discovery, and was the home of eigh- teenth century pioneer of elec- trical forces Luigi Galvani. As a young boy, little Guglielmo was fascinated by electricity and liked to play with batteries. His father, Giuseppe, thought it was a waste of time, but his mother encouraged his experiments. Marconi was also fasci- nated by the work of American inventor Samuel Morse, who had developed the telegraph and Morse code and by Ben- jamin Franklin's invention of the lightening conductor. By 1896, at age 21, he had patented the first wireless tele- graph. Following the Titanic tragedy in 1912, Marconi developed improved crystal set technology and by 1921, a two tube radio with head set, that was soon re- placed with a loudspeaker so more than one person could listen. Marconi kept adding new ideas to his wireless radio and by 1933 installed the first radio station at the Vatican. ITALIAN TELEVISION KSCI CANALE 18. Presentano: Maria Cristina Heller e Franco Brescia Teleitalia in onda tutte le Domeniche alle ore 13 o 1:00pm Siamo collegati con i satelliti DISHNET e DIRECTV, SPECTRUM E TUTTI I CAVI DEL SUD CALIFORNIA Per Informazioni e Pubblicita` telefonate a (818) 260-9318 Cell: (818) 288-2518

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