Marconi’s radio made him a conflicted man. He claimed that radio would be “a herald of peace and civilization between nations.” At the same time, he aggressively peddled it to every military he could. He sold it to the British navy in 1901 and convinced the Belgian government to use it in the brutal colonization of the Congo. In the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, both sides used Marconi radios.
