The Irish engineer who financed Marconi's radio

In any list of well-known whisky brands, you're very likely to find Jameson, an Irish brand that originated in the late 18th century when John Jameson left his native Scotland and moved to Dublin, where he dedicated himself to distilling this spirit. His descendants continued the work with great success, to the point that the family business has survived to this day, although now under the control of the French multinational Pernod Ricard. In 1966, Jameson joined forces with other distillers in the country to form the Irish Distillers brand, and twenty-two years later, this company passed into French hands.

One of the most prominent members of the family was Henry Jameson Davis, who was more involved in finance and engineering than in distilling. His plans in the late 19th century involved the design and construction of mills for grinding cereals, as he had a close relationship with the corn merchants' guild. However, his life took a significant turn when, in 1894, his cousin, only twenty-two years old, visited him to ask for financial support for his inventions. The young man, who had come from Italy, was named Guglielmo Marconi and had many ideas in his head. The young Italian's specialty –the son of a landowner from Bologna and Jameson's aunt– was electromagnetic waves, but he needed investors to whom he could present his projects to obtain the necessary funding. Jameson's role was crucial, as he opened many doors for him and advised him on patenting the invention.

One of the first relevant figures to witness Marconi's demonstrations firsthand was William Preece, who at that time was the chief engineer of the British postal service, the General Post Office. The tests worked so well that Jameson convinced Marconi to set up a company together, which seemed much more interesting to him than ceding the patent or making an agreement with the postal company. The Irishman would be in charge of finding the necessary capital, while the Italian would provide the technological part. With this intention, in the summer of 1897, the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company was born, which three years later would change its name to become Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company. Jameson's connections had made it possible to raise 100,000 pounds sterling, the vast majority from Irish investors, a sufficient capital to start operating with solvency. They opened the first factory in a neighborhood in north London, and the position of technical director went to Marconi, while Jameson reserved the roles of general manager and head of finance. In reality, the Irishman handled all sorts of tasks, as the entire British world was very unknown to the Italian inventor. In 1899, they opened a subsidiary in the United States, American Marconi, which for a couple of decades was the country's undisputed leading company in the field of radio technology, until it was transformed into RCA (Radio Corporation of America) due to the wartime atmosphere of the time.

A key milestone of the project was achieved shortly before Christmas in 1901, when the radio signal broadcast from Cornwall, on the south coast of England, reached the receiving station in Newfoundland, in the easternmost part of Canada. Two years after this test, King Edward VII of England and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt were connected remotely, who, incidentally, was a close friend of Andrew Jameson, one of the prominent members of the whisky manufacturers' clan. Marconi was so integrated into his Irish environment that he ended up marrying Beatrice O’Brien, a native Irishwoman and the daughter of a local nobleman. The successes with the new technology that Marconi had made available to the world earned the Italian the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909, along with the German Carl Ferdinand Braun.

The tragedy of the Titanic became a good commercial argument to promote radio broadcasts, to the point that they had to expand production and moved out of London, to the county of Essex. At this point, with the company already very consolidated and with a much less critical role than in the beginning, Jameson decided to separate from the business and sell his shares. Far from the world of radio broadcasts, Jameson died on Christmas Day 1936, while Marconi, his inseparable cousin, would follow him only half a year later, in 1937.