Guglielmo Marconi

Not one of his ten planets sits in a water sign and a single one sits in air. Earth takes five and fire four. Seven of the ten are fixed, which is the fact worth starting from. The Sun, Venus, Mars and Pluto spread across twenty degrees of Taurus. Jupiter was the only retrograde planet. The record says Marconi sent the first radio signal across the Atlantic in 1901, which physicists had said was impossible because the Earth curves, and that radio distress calls saved 700 people from the Titanic.

Seven fixed planets describes somebody who holds a position and does not move off it. The record's first fact is one idea pushed through an authoritative refusal: the physicists had a reason and the reason was the curvature of the planet, which is not a small objection to be told you are wrong about. Fixed is the mode that stays, and staying is what that sentence describes.

Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at just over half a degree, and the reading is quick reflexes, acting well in an emergency, and an instinct for the unconventional move. The record's second fact looks like the perfect landing place and is not, because he was not there. Distress calls from a sinking ship a decade later are a thing his equipment did in other people's hands, and a reading about personal reflexes describes a temperament rather than a technology. The record and the reading are about two different subjects that happen to share an inventor.

No water at all and one planet in air, in the man who sent a signal through the air and across an ocean, is a joke the reader will reach before this entry does. It is worth nothing. An element count is a tally of which signs ten planets occupy, and it has no relationship whatever to a physical medium. His Moon sits on the twenty eighth degree of Leo at noon with Virgo still possible, so it is left out. He died in Rome on 20 July 1937, at sixty three. Pluto stood square his natal Neptune at under a quarter of a degree that day and Mars sixty degrees from his natal Jupiter at a quarter. The Moon was gibbous and ninety one per cent lit.