Marconi Wireless – Recipe from ‘Old Waldorf Bar Days’

Two dashes Orange Bitters 

One-third Italian Vermuth 

Two-thirds Apple-jack 

Frappe

Guglielmo Marconi was born in 1874 and passed away in 1937, so it makes sense that there’s a drink named after him, as he completely revolutionised the way we communicate, and I know this is a stretch, but with no Marconi there would be no Apple Phone.

Although he didn’t invent radio transmission, it was he that perfected it, something which quite rightly earnt him a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Unlike other inventors before him Marconi was a business man first and was not looking to invent wireless communication, rather to make it a commercial success. Born in Italy he was persuaded to leave and head to the UK to develop his ideas by a friend who thought it would be easier for him to raise backing. On his way through customs an officer discovered a suitcase full of ‘various apparatus’ and immediately contacted the admiralty, he had found his backers faster than even he could’ve imagined. Merely a few months later he was sending Morse code (Cooperstown 03-04-2018) across Salisbury plain in a demonstration for the British Government, six years later he was sending messages across the Atlantic, and the rest is history.

His luck didn’t end there though, although invited he wasn’t onboard the Titanic’s maiden journey he chose to sail on an earlier crossing as he had paperwork to work through and ‘preferred the stenographer onboard’, however it was his invention, recently developed for shipping that was later ascribed as to have been the sole reason 706 were saved from an icy end, as radio messages of distress from the Titanic bought vessels near which allowed for 706 persons not to meet an icy end.

The drink is a good one, simply a Manhattan with orange instead of Angostura bitters, and Applejack instead of whiskey. The Applejack adds fruit flavours to the drink which works, I do think this would be better using the Applejack instead of Cognac in a Saratoga (10-01-2018).