Marconi Magic Box

Alessandro Giupponi’s docufilm Guglielmo Marconi “The Wizard of the Waves”, never shown publicly until now, though belonging to a typical documentary genre, owes its great originality  to many fictional scenes illustrating the highlights of Guglielmo Marconi’s youth through a documentation based on  eliminato notes the notebooks written by Guglielmo when he was very young, at the time of his first epic trials. His notebooks, recently discovered, are still unpublished and unknown to the majority.

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Thanks to the producer  Mrs Alessandra Infascelli and Istituto Luce, with the cooperation of the municipality of  of Sasso Marconi, the director Alessandro Giupponi has succeeded in creating a work that, thanks to the scientific advice of the Guglielmo Marconi Foundation and of Professor Gabriele Falciasecca, analyzes all the communication developments, thus becoming an important contribution to a deeper >reflection on the current status of research and on itspossible further developments.

The docu-film makes understandable how present are the technologies having as  reference point the huge Marconi’s genius in our daily lives and in the future.

The story starts from Guglielmo Marconi’s early years and his brilliant intuitions, and from his early and unusual experiments that would lead to really important discoveries: wireless telegraphy, radio, radar, television. All media without borders, as nowadays communication is, where the Global Village dreamt by Marshall McLuhan is not fiction anymore, but a genuine reality.

In the third millennium, the image of carrier pigeons is an image coming from afar: today our reality are the robots controlled by the Earth being sent to Mars, global networking, real time communication and multi-device, blogs, social networks, etc. Alessandro Giupponi’s work, through rigorous research, supported by the highest scientific authorities of the field, highlights all Marconi’s intuitions and makes us understand how the modern world cannot ignore the scientist from Bologna unappreciated for too long and today still guiltily forgotten.

The above-mentioned discovery of some of his youthful notebooks, with the notes of his first experiments, also offers a new reading of the young scientist’s character and training. Held at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, these documents cast light on the multifaceted Marconi’s personality, authenticating his international and cosmopolitan figure, particularly in relation to the most recent discoveries and technological applications in the most important fields of scientific research.  From this unique documentation, the director Alessandro Giupponi was able to draw an extraordinarily historically faithful portrait of Marconi’s evolutional path.

Role and Function of Guglielmo Marconi "The Wizard of the Waves”

Role and function of the docu-film Guglielmo Marconi "The Wizard of the Waves" is to give us a general framework - and a large number of application examples in the communications sector - of Guglielmo Marconi’s pioneering and brilliant achievements reached since the late Nineteenth century.

The docu-film – whose plot traces especially the unexplored part of the brilliant inventor’s youth - can be produced and broadcast as follow up of a structured discussion on (present and future) further communications developments and to represent a fundamental contribution to a debate on the current state of research, in Italy and the world, in the different fields of scientific, economic and social development. Moreover, watching the docu-film will serve to make the public understand how the technologies tested by the young Marconi in their first applications are now present in everyday life and in the future of everyone, emphasizing their impact in the management of the progressive development of contemporary communication tools. This objective, that is illustrating the present situation of the complex and structured communications world, will be more easily achieved by matching the screening of the film (both the full-length original and appropriately abridged versions following chronological and / or adhocratical criteria) with a public debate among some of the most qualified representatives of the communications world, such as scientists, sociologists, economists, languages experts, journalists, politicians, etc.  having already been consulted and involved in the production of the docu-film itself.  Therefore this Portal represents the first public forum to start this important transdisciplinary debate.

During the filmmaking, we proceeded to the activation and coordination of several and qualified collaborations and consulting with research institutions, universities, rural institutions, collectors and historians of " Marconi’s world" and, above all, with Italian and foreign researchers of the global communication world of the present and future, including young Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, creators of the famous search engine Google, which has now become a paradigm of the last decades of communication. In particular, the two bright young Americans - awarded in 2004 by Marconi International Foundation (Fondazione Internazionale Marconi) in Bologna - said:

We had not planned to create a search engine .. the 'toy' exploded in our hands up to become a world web giant (...) Also young Guglielmo Marconi, when he devoted himself to his first nocturnal experiments in order to make a bell ring without connecting wires, considering the bell was placed about 35 feet away from him in his attic-laboratory, he could not foresee the dream that he would achieve within next few decades (…) the world covered by an uninterrupted network able to make the information spread smoother and to improve the everyday life of mankind. (...)We were engaged in a project that was not aiming at creating an engine as Google has become (...)(besides luck) it is necessary a great passion when you are doing something (…)We have done nothing but develop one of Guglielmo Marconi’s ideas as he dreamt of a global communication. (..) nowadays in a few seconds you can get thousands of information on a topic and with the means provided by the Internet we can become all publishers and printers. (...) We are facing a great democratic revolution concerning the information and culture spread.

By Marconi Magic Box (2009)
Translated by Serena Bramucci
Supervision: Simona Melchiori