Guglielmo Marconi, 'Wires Without Wires'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') renders Marconi in profile—the signature Vanity Fair pose—dressed in a dark frock coat with striped trousers, one hand tucked behind his back, the other holding a top hat. The caption reads "Wires without wires" with the byline Jehu Junior, the magazine's standard pseudonym for its biographical notices. The caricature exaggerates Marconi's slight, angular frame and prominent nose while stopping well short of ethnic mockery unusual for the era—his Italian-Irish heritage drew little of the xenophobic distortion routinely aimed at Jewish or Asian subjects in late-Victorian illustrated press. The wit is entirely in the caption: the Italian inventor who had just demonstrated transatlantic wireless telegraphy is reduced, affectionately, to a logical paradox. Ward flatters more than he wounds.