Abstract
This chapter analyzes the topoi Marconi used when presenting the wireless to a technical audience. Marconi’s rhetoric promotes the wireless’s viability and necessity for members of the Royal Institution and the Royal Society of Arts, London. Before the wireless became the radio, Marconi prophesized its usefulness, linking it to cultural values. The wireless embodies certain industrial traits—speed, efficiency, profitability, evolution/advancement—and these technical presentations employ such values. At the time of Marconi’s presentations, the wireless was not yet a major commercial product. In order to have a successful product, the wireless had to be portrayed as possible and progressive. The wireless did not replace extant technologies, but it did expand the reach of communication and, therefore, mass communication. As an important mouthpiece for the wireless, Marconi offered his audiences not the physical product but the idea of a potential product to mark human advancement and bolster economic progress.
Think of…all the calling which goes on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole, not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wants to hear, and absolutely silent to all others. It would be like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland cultivated by heated imagination, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws. (McGrath 1902/1999, p. 32)
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Toscano, A.A. (2012). Marconi’s Representations of the Wireless. In: Marconi's Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3977-2_3
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