IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - January 2023 - 78

Meetings With One of the Fathers of Radar Through His Daughter, the Princess Elettra Marconi
THE INTERVIEW
In this most recent encounter, the daughter of the great
inventor retraced some fundamental steps of her father's
career, relived through her personal memories. From
''blind navigation, " to test the emerging radar technology,
to the first example of a ''mobile phone " for Pope Pius
XI; from the excitement of a phone call from her father in
the middle of the Pacific and later from Brazil, to her presence
at the first-ever television broadcast. All milestones
of a neverending exploration, driven by a global vision
and a forward-looking attitude.
Just to tell the story of the phone calls from father to
daughter, in the words of the Princess:
" There are two episodes that I like to remember.
The first, when my father and my mother journeyed
around the world and left me in Rome, in
this house with my grandparents, with my mother's
parents. Then,
when they were in
thePacificOcean,
they had left
America to go to
Hawaii, Japan, and
those places there.
Guglielmo Marconi,
my father,
organized a radio
system on board a
Japanese ship to be
able to talk to me
because he hadn't
heard my voice for
months and my
mother, of course,
missed mealot.In
fact, he got in
touch with the radio stations and the other ships3
knew everything that Marconi wanted to talk to
the child, to his daughter Elettra. In fact, suddenly
I heard on the phone, " Dad is on the
phone, " and I knew he was very far away, my
father's voice asking me how I was. Oh, what an
emotion! I was very excited, and then he put my
mother on the phone and she was crying because
of the emotion. It was a beautiful thing. I was little
but I remember it very well. This was in 1934.
Instead, another time, in 1935, they went to Brazil
and in Brazil, he was in San Paolo at the
palace of Francesco Matarazzo, the great man of
Brazil, especially in San Paolo, and he organized
the same thing. And I heard my father's voice
and my mother's voice on the radio. "
Recounting her father's experiments on the concept ofthe
radar, Princess Elettra tells how her father had understood that
the reflection of electromagnetic waves could be used to
detect obstacles that were otherwise undetectable. He was
concerned principally with navigation at sea. He had crossed
the Atlantic 87 times by ship and each time he traveled, it was
always by sea, which he loved. In fact, for many years he lived
on his yacht, " Elettra. " He therefore understood the dangers
that faced ship's officers, sailors, and crew, particularly in the
northern seas where there is often thick and impenetrable fog
that completely obscures visibility. These dangers inspired
Marconi to find a means to defend against these hidden
obstacles which he found in the use ofelectromagnetic waves,
thus arriving at a new invention, which at that time, represented
the radar.
Marconi, over and
above being an inventor
and entrepreneur, created
a new occupation
of radio infrastructure
operators and providers
of related services. The
so-called " Marconisti. " 4
Princess Elettra tells
Figure 2.
Mobile Phone used by Pope Pius XI.
how her father was
young but determined in
reaching his objectives,
to accomplish his ideas
and as a priority to save
human lives. He often
spoke with his wife of
the importance of the
radar, of the fog in the
northern seas, of often navigating blindly, a terrible situation
for any vessel. At the time, there were many collisions
between ships or shipwrecks on rocks. His thoughts were
always with the navigator.
At this point, Alfonso Farina told Princess Elettra of
how her father's vision of the radar had undergone
incredible and notable development. He cited the example
of the Italian involvement in the development of
radar for space applications in particular for the Mars
probes, where these developments have made it possible
to detect water under 1.5 Km of ice at the Martian south
3Actually, Marconi had created a series of radio relays between
mobile stations [10] in order to speak with his daughter. To allow
this, the orthogonality of the radiated signals was invoked during
the radio relay. Recently this aspect has been highlighted and mentioned
in [11].
78
4The " Marconisti " (named after Marconi) were responsible from the
early 19th century for the operation of radio instruments, telecommunications,
and all communication services of a ship and those
between airbases and aircraft. They were also responsible for services
such as emergency recovery, weather reports, navigation security,
and many more.
IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
JANUARY 2023

IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - January 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - January 2023