The Daily Alaska empire., 1937-07-20
RADIO WIZARD
 PASSES AWAY,
 HEART ATTACK
Guglielmo Marconi Work ing on Experiments Up to
 Time of Sudden Death

HUME, lIdly, July zu.-NIuSitciHio Marconi, wireless telegraph invent or, died unexpectedly early this morning as the result of heart para lysis at the age of 63.
 Up to yesterday he worked on experiments to adapt the micro wave to long distance transmission and also on television.
 Marconi Company officials said the experiments have reached such stage that work can be continued on them.
 The widow was at the bedside summoned from a seaside resort yesterday. The daughter, Elletra Elena, whose eighth birthday is to- day. remained at the resort.
 Premier Mussolini, when notified of Marconi's death, went immed- lately to the Marconi home and paid respects. He approached the bed which was lighted at the four cor ners by tall candles, paused, bent and kissed the dead mans forehead.
 The body was taken later to the historic Farnesina Palace and will lie in state until the afternoon of the burial day. Burial will be at Bo- logna where the first experiments on wireless were made.
 Telegraph Without Wires" The world shrugged skeptical shoulder and smiled tolerantly in 1895 when Guglielmo Marconi an- nounced laconically:
 T have discovered how to tele- graph without wires"
 Yet within a decade ocean liners were keeping touch with each other and with shore by means of Mar conigrams" and hundreds of lives had been saved by prompt response to the old distress signal of "PDQ."
 And just as the Bell telephone fol- lowed the Morse telegraph, so wire less transmission of the human voice within a few years became a reality.
 AS an aid to navigation of both the sea and air. as method of keeping explorers at the ends of the earth in touch with civilization and as a way of transmitting ap- peals for aid when angry elements have wiped out material methods of communication with stricken communities, the Marconi invention has become one of the great boons of civilization.
 Even Before MarcOni
 Marconi, like Morse with the cleo tric telegraph, turned laboratory discoveries of secluded scientists in- to practical use. The actual dis covery of radio, from purely scien- tific standpoint, goes back half a century before Marconi
 "Hertzian waves" were the im- mediate forerunners of the wireless transmission of code signals. They were named for Heinrich R. Hertz, a German physcist who, by exper- iments between 1885 and 1889 was the first to prove that electrical waves would radiate from any sys- tenn from which electrical oscil- lation was produced.
 Hertz thus gave life to a theory advanced by James c. Maxwell d831-1879) a famous British phys icist, who developed to remarkable degree ideas evolved by Lord Kel- win. The latter, in 1853, had proved that discharge from a condenser is oscillatory, a theory evolved in 1842 by Joseph Henry, a professor of Princeton University.
 Kicked on Music
 If the father of Marconi had had his way, the problem of applying these laboratory cogitations and discoveries to commercial purposes would have been left to some one else, and in Marconi the world would have had instead a probably mediocre and unsung musician.
 The father insisted that his son study music. Apparatus in the home attic which the youth had designed and made himself aroused the par |ental ire and he frequently threat |ened to pitch it all out the window, especially when the son proved anything but success as music student.
 Mother Helps But like many another budding genius, young Marconi had source of inspiration and practical help in his mother Born Annie Jameson, of an Irish family, she had gone to Italy against the wishes of her par ents to marry Giuseppe Marconi, a banker. She granted her sons wish to study physics and enrolled him with Prof. Vincenzo Rosa. She also helped him set up a workroom at the family villa in Pontecchio. (COntinued On Pace Three)