Q: Tell me what you see as Marconi's gift. I mean, he inherited some part of
this, right? But what did he do?
SD: Marconi's gift was that he was a great entrepreneur, and he was a
great technological revisionist. There had been people since the 1870s trying
to demonstrate in the scientific lab that electromagnetic waves existed.
Marconi was not a theoretically trained scientist, he was not a university
person. He wanted to make the thing commercially viable and to make it pay.
And so the way he did that was he read and borrowed from the university-trained
scientists, but he tinkered, he revised, he tried and tried again until he got
a system that worked commercially in the field. And even though Marconi was an
immigrant to this country as an inventor--half Irish, half Italian--Americans
related to that fact, that he was a tinkerer who took something out of the lab
and made it work.
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