MARCONI | Jamesons and MacDonnells

Guglielmo Marconi

April 25, 2021—This day was born (in 1874) Guglielmo Marconi, in Bologna, Italy.  He has at least three connections to Inez Milholland, all of them via the Jamesons, the Irish whiskey family.

First, he was engaged to Inez for several months but his mother didn't like the idea. He was working on his ship-to-shore communications on a Cunard ship, as I recollect the Carpathia, and Inez was on her way to the Willard school in Berlin. She had to take some courses so she could qualify for entrace to Vassar, which at that time had specific rigorous requirements for admission. They were engaged after a shipboard romance, but it seems that Marconi's Irish mother, a member of the Jameson whiskey family, did not want to have an American whisk off with her son. He broke off the engagement on the basis that she was too young. They remained friends for the rest of her life.

Second, his Jameson mother was of crucial help to his company. He was interested in electricity and used the work of Heinrich Hertz to use electromagnetic or "radio" waves for communication. Marconi began building his own equipment and conducting experiments when he was twenty. In 1895, he moved his equipment outdoors and was able to transmit over a hill, at a distance of about a mile. Six years later, he sent and received a signal across the Atlantic Ocean. The two radio operators aboard the Titanic were Marconi employees, and the British Postmaster General said: "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi ... and his marvelous invention." Nikola Tesla was Marconi's chief competitor, in addition to the telegraph companies that relentlessly resisted Marconi's invention throughout his life. Tesla said he had been ready to transmit a signal over fifty miles in 1895, but a fire destroyed his work. Marconi's work was performed using seventeen components patented by Tesla, but Marconi's mother's connections with the Jameson whiskey empire helped him stay in business, as well as support from Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. Tesla's patents were overturned in favor of Marconi's in 1904, and Marconi received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1911. However, in 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's original patent. Lots of injustice to go round. Inez Milholland's father, John E. Milholland, was actively soliciting business from the British Postmaster General (as well as the U.S. Postmaster General, but that is another story entirely). Mr. Milholland was seeking to build and lease a pneumatic tube system that would deliver mail within London int he same way it transmitted sales slips within department stores.

Third, Inez married another Jameson relative, Eugen Boissevain. Eugen's father was a young Dutch reporter covering the Irish Horse Show, a trade fair, when he got sick. He was brought to the Dalkey home of the MacDonnells ("Sorrento Cottage," because the view of Bray was like the view at Sorrento) and young Emily Heloise MacDonnell fell in love with the young man she was looking after. She moved with him to Amsterdam and never really picked up the Dutch language—she spoke English with her children and their English governess, Polly. Three of the Boissevains' eleven children moved to the United States (Olga Emily, Robert and Eugen Boissevain). A fourth of the eleven children, Jan, lived in the United States for a while, married an American actress (Charlotte Ives) and finally settled in the South of France on the Cap d'Antibes. I visited her in 1959. When Eugen first met Inez at the restaurant of the Holland House in New York City, he was working for Guglielmo Marconi's company.