Tour of the Marconi Museum near Bologna

The reason we chose to come to Bologna is to take a tour of the museum at the house where radio pioneer, Guglielmo Marconi spent his childhood and did his initial experiments with electricity and, most famously, increasing the distance of radio transmission. Villa Griffone is an imposing building.

And here's the view back towards the highway.

To get there we caught the Number 92 blue bus from Bologna, it was €7 return for both of us and the trip took about an hour (but it might be quicker with less traffic).

You can clearly see the house from the bus but there's trees before and after so I'd ask the bus driver to warn you as it approaches. The stop is about two stops past the centre of Borgonouo.

You need to book a tour to visit, it's just €5 per person but it's well worth while. Here's some photos which were highlights for me, but there's lots there besides this.

 Marconi improved on the distance that spark transmitters could be detected in several ways. On the left you can see the equipment with an antenna above and earth plate below.

We now know that these are much too small for the long wavelengths he was probably dealing with but anything was an improvement.

In particular, Marconi improved the "coherer" as detectors were known in those days, he added a little hammer that re-scrambled the metal filings in the tube that helped them to stay highly sensitive to electric fields.

A coherer, a tube of metal filings, used to detect radio frequency signals.

Here's a reproduction of Marconi equipment that would have been using on board a ship. 

A beautiful reproduction spark gap device.

This next one was new to me, it's a detector that uses magnetic hysteresis in iron to detect radio signals. To operate it an iron wire must be drawn through concentric coils, one has the antenna connected to it and the other goes to an amplifier for the detected signal.

There is a fully working spark gap transmitter and receiver setup too, imagine the interference this would cause!

And here is the receiver:

There's lots of interesting gear on show, while not part of the Marconi legacy, this was the first time I'd seen a feld hellschreiber machine in person. (A clever German device that sent a kind of fax of a line of text via simple on-off keying).

Here's an early Motorolla hand held transceiver with my phone next to it.

Interior of the Motorolla transceiver showing the compact valve construction.

This interesting display let us compare different types of rock for their semi-conductor abilities for use as a diode detector.

In one of the pine trees near the house, original antenna wire from a young Marconi was recently recovered.

Marconi's upstairs workshop with the kind of equipment he used. The museum has reproduced many of his instruments and actual working models of experiments for the display.

This is the original of the iron hysteresis detector built in a cigar box by the looks of it.

We were very lucky to have Marconi scholar Barbara Valotti as our guide. She has been researching early Marconi notebooks and helping to re-write the somewhat distorted history of the man who is often portrayed as a lone genius who had flashes of inspiration rather than a methodical self-taught scientist who experimented over many years to develop technologies that could be commercially exploited.

Although we came to Bologna to visit the Marconi Museum, I would add that we've found it a wonderful city to visit. The people are much more friendly than at the tourist locations elsewhere and despite my embarrassing lack of Italian everyone has been helpful and understanding.

I'd highly recommend a visit. My thanks to G4FTC who's web site tipped me off to this great attraction.