Guglielmo Marconis Later Years and Legacy

For the next two decades, Marconi continued refining his inventions, experimenting with shortwave broadcasts and testing transmission distances aboard his 700ton yacht, Elettra. He returned to Italy, became a supporter of Benito Mussolini and annulled his first marriage to an Irish artist with whom he had four children to wed an Italian noblewoman. In 1935 he toured Brazil and Europe defending Mussolinis invasion of Abyssinia. He died two years later of a heart attack in Rome. In his honor, radio stations in America, England and Italy broadcast several minutes of silence.