WHO WAS GUGLIELMO MARCONI?

11 May 2013

with thanks to Josephine Crabb

Actor Bill Moulford reprised the role of Guglielmo Marconi in Professor Jim Bennett’s sketch ‘Who was Guglielmo Marconi’ first performed on ‘Marconi Day’ at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.

The sketch sets out to explore three facets of the complex background of Marconi  who is credited with inventing wireless communication.

Professor Bennett a former director of the History of the Museum of Science in Oxford where the Marconi collection is exhibited explained that he wrote the sketch on Marconi because ‘Historians have to make a decision on the type of person they are writing about and this is difficult in a Musuem context’

Three aspects of Marconi’s personality were dramatized by Bill Moulford with a different accent for each characterization. Professor Bennett asked the audience to vote on whether they thought Marconi was a romantic Italian physicist; an Imperialist English businessman or a plausible Irish salesman.

The delighted audience voted in favour of Marconi being an Imperlialist English businessman which Professor Bennett thought might have been because Marconi at one time lived in Whyteladyes Lane where Marconi conducted his first wireless experiments with an aerial in a tree earthed by a pan handle to increase the signal strength and the broadcast could be heard 4 miles away in Maidenhead.