The passages in italics contained between each day’s diary entry, describing the childhood and youth of the Italian-Irish inventor Guglielmo Marconi, leading up to the day of his extraodinary triumph at the Kingstown Regatta on July 20th, 1898, are all entirely historical and were researched from various biographies and articles on Marconi.

Marconi’s career as an inventor and businessman continued brilliantly, Cross-channel transmission was achieved in 1899; an article from McClure’s Magazine, authored by one Cleveland Moffatt and dated June 1899 is blazingly entitled: ‘Messages sent at will through space – telegraphing without wires across the English channel’. The article begins: ‘Mr Marconi began his endeavors at telegraphing without wires in 1895, when in the fields of his father’s estate at Bologna, Italy, he set up tin boxes, called “capacities,” on poles of varying heights, and connected them by insulated wires with the instruments he had then devised – a crude transmitter and receiver. Here was a young man of twenty hot on the track of a great discovery, for presently he is writing to Mr W. H. Preece, chief electrician of the British postal system, telling him about these tin boxes and how he has found out that “when these were placed on top of a pole two metres high, signals could be obtained at thirty metres from the transmitter”; and that “with the same boxes on poles four metres high signals were obtained at 100 metres and with the same boxes at a height of eight metres, other conditions being equal, nearly up to a mile and a half. Morse signals were easily obtained at 400 metres.” And so on, the gist of it being (and this is the chief point in Marconi’s present system) that the higher the pole (connected by wire with the transmitter), the greater was found to be the distance of transmission.’ In fact, as was later discovered, the height of the pole is not directly correlated to the distance of the transmission; rather, this distance increases because of the stronger currents and longer wavelengths resulting from a larger antenna’s greater electrical capacity. In December 1901, he received the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission, from Poldhu, Cornwall to Newfoundland, Canada, using a 400-foot kite-supported antenna. Over the coming years, Marconi was responsible for the equipping of all ships with radios, although unfortunately the ships’ radio operators went off duty at night; however, one chance operator still at work caught the last messages from the sinking Titanic in 1912 and his ship was able to rescue those survivors who had managed to get into lifeboats.

Before Marconi’s work, several other brilliant physicists and inventors had managed to detect waves at distances of a few yards, such as Edouard Branly, Heinrich Hertz, Alexander Popov and of course, Sir Oliver Lodge. The latter was, as described, a passionate believer in telepathy and communication with the dead, a member and sometime president of the British Society for Psychical Research; much later, after the sad death of his son Raymond in World War I, Lodge wrote Raymond, or Life and Death, a book which begins with an account of Raymond’s youth, continues with a description of the family’s successful attempts to contact him after his death through mediums, and ends with a discourse on Lodge’s philosophy about the Afterlife. The concerns of the British Psychical Society and the scientific study and analysis of séances in the Victorian era are faithfully represented; the brochure and Faraday’s article explaining table-turning as a result of unconscious movements on the part of the participants are true documents.

The Darwin family – and their house, and their granary, and their bicycle, and their telephone – are real people who resided in the house which now forms Darwin College; all these things are described in the delightful autobiography of Gwen Raverat née Darwin, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. Finally, many thanks are due to Mr Peter Kenyon, whose critical advice was useful in innumerable places, above all in ensuring that all travel described in the book, whether by carriage, train or steamer, could have occurred at the tail end of the nineteenth century exactly as described.