Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: The invention that sparked the radio revolution
Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: The invention that sparked the radio revolution
Gavin Weightman
The intriguing story of how wireless was invented by Guglielmo Marconi – and how it amused Queen Victoria, saved the lives of the Titanic survivors, tracked down criminals and began the radio revolution.Wireless was the most fabulous invention of the 19th century: the public thought it was magic, the popular newspapers regarded it as miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day (in Europe and America) could not understand how it worked. In 1897, when the first wireless station was established by Marconi in a few rooms of the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, nobody knew how far these invisible waves could travel through the ‘ether’, carrying Morse Coded messages decipherable at a receiving station. (The definitive answer was not discovered till the 1920s, by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry filling the airwaves with a cacaphony of sounds – most of it American.)Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.Marconi himself was the son of an Italian father and an Irish mother (from the Jameson whiskey family); he grew up in Italy and was fluent in Italian and English, but it was in England that his invention first caught on. Marconi was in his early twenties at the time (he died in 1937). With the ‘new telegraphy’ came the real prospect of replacing the network of telegraphic cables that criss-crossed land and sea at colossal expense. Initially it was the great ships that benefited from the new invention – including the Titanic, whose survivors owed their lives to the wireless.
Signor Marconi’s Magic Box
How an Amateur Inventor
Defied Scientists
and Began the Radio Revolution
GAVIN WEIGHTMAN
For my father
CONTENTS
Cover (#u6a168d89-b8ad-5065-b2ac-b53cec7b45cc)
Title Page (#u4ab88a8a-9cd5-542b-a492-8dcf2772d4f5)
Introduction (#u8c095e6d-7755-5790-9baf-ff870f8010ae)
1 In Darkest London (#u833818ca-b416-509e-82ef-576da931c7f4)
2 Silkworms and Whiskey (#ua07debe3-6932-561f-a1cc-2e53265fb56d)
3 Sparks in the Attic (#ubc4151fb-b51d-5d11-aa74-999082b6d36a)
4 In the Heart of the Empire (#u27f9429f-ae01-554f-bafe-609d7f1be1e8)
5 Dancing on the Ether (#u09312aa5-a46a-5345-91f7-9a9fae92bc69)
6 Beside the Seaside (#ub3b7c20c-8e17-580f-97a8-ad90e57c6b5e)
7 Texting Queen Victoria (#u483ff370-8275-55b4-8743-554273579717)
8 An American Investigates (#ucaedcabb-74dc-5541-b1d2-35b395189ca6)
9 The Romance of Morse Code (#u6a120756-b96e-5385-807c-2f284b42831a)
10 A New York Welcome (#uab177554-c817-5834-99c6-3b479045e527)
11 Atlantic Romance (#ufeb56ec4-29c1-5ea8-bbec-546bf40e07ec)
12 Adventure at Mullion Cove (#litres_trial_promo)
13 An American Forecast (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Kite-Flying in Newfoundland (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Spirits of the Ether (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Fishing in the Ether (#litres_trial_promo)
17 The End of the Affair (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Farewell the Pigeon Post (#litres_trial_promo)
19 The Power of Darkness (#litres_trial_promo)
20 The Hermit of Paignton (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The King’s Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)
22 The Thundering Professor (#litres_trial_promo)
23 A Real Colonel Sellers (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Defeat in the Yellow Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
25 A Wireless Rat (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Dazzling the Millions (#litres_trial_promo)
27 ‘Marky’ and his Motor (#litres_trial_promo)
28 On the American Frontier (#litres_trial_promo)
29 Marconi gets Married (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Wireless at War (#litres_trial_promo)
31 America’s Whispering Gallery (#litres_trial_promo)
32 A Voice on the Air (#litres_trial_promo)
33 The Bells of Budapest (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Wireless to the Rescue (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Dynamite for Marconi (#litres_trial_promo)
36 Le Match Dew-Crippen (#litres_trial_promo)
37 A Marriage on the Rocks (#litres_trial_promo)
38 Ice and the Ether (#litres_trial_promo)
39 ‘It’s a CQD, Old Man’ (#litres_trial_promo)
40 After the Titanic (#litres_trial_promo)
41 The Crash (#litres_trial_promo)
42 The Suspect Italian (#litres_trial_promo)
43 Eclipse of Marconi on the Eiffel Tower (#litres_trial_promo)
44 In Bed with Mussolini (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_032adcfe-58fb-5bad-aafe-18775c3d2fd2)
It was the most fabulous invention of the nineteenth century. The public and the popular newspapers regarded it as nothing short of miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day in Europe and America, whose discoveries had made it possible, could not understand how it worked. Wireless in its pioneer days had nothing to do with home entertainment: no speech or music was transmitted. But the tap, tap, tap of the telegraph key spelling out messages which had travelled mysteriously through the ‘ether’ was exciting enough in a world still mostly horse-drawn and coal-fired, a world without cinema or the motor-car, in which the telephone was still an expensive luxury and great cities like London and New York had only recently winced at the brightness of electric light.
The wider world first learned about the possibilities of wireless telegraphy, as the new invention was called, in 1897. In November that year the very first wireless station was established in the exclusive Royal Needles Hotel. This splendid clifftop Victorian pile took its name from the nearby pillars of eroded rock which jut into the sea on the western corner of the Isle of Wight, a short ferry-ride off the south coast of England. An odd assortment of wires strung out on posts tethered to the ground to secure them against the stiff sea breezes and the not infrequent gales was the only outward sign that mysterious signals were being sent to the steamers, packed with skylarking holidaymakers, which plied the coast. Guests at the Royal Needles were aware when the transmitter was in operation, for they could hear and sometimes see the crack of electrical sparks activated by a Morse code key pressed by one of the operators inside the hotel. The range of these signals was only a few miles. But the fact that it was possible at all to establish, by remote control, communication with a ship steaming along at a rate of knots, even when it was lost to view behind a cliff, was nothing short of astonishing. The wonders of science, it seemed, would never cease.
Only the year before, the newspapers had been full of accounts of the ‘new photography’ called X-rays, which could ‘see’ through solid objects. The public now had to take in the amazing possibilities presented by the ‘new telegraphy’. Like most powerful new inventions, wireless had the potential to bring both good and evil to the world: could it be used, perhaps, as a weapon? Might an electric wave aimed at a battleship blow up its explosive magazine as surely as any shell from a shore battery?
This ‘new telegraphy’ was not only mind-bending in its apparent defiance of contemporary scientific understanding; there appeared to be a very real prospect of it completely replacing the network of telegraphic cables which in the previous half-century had been strung out over land and laid across the ocean beds, at colossal expense. At the very least it meant that ships at sea, including the great liners which were then carrying millions of European immigrants to North America, need never be out of contact with each other and with New York, Liverpool and London. The big question was: how far could these invisible waves travel through the ‘ether’, carrying Morse-coded messages which were decipherable at a receiving station?
In 1897, nobody had the answer to that question. The great majority of physicists who worked on what were known as ‘Hertzian waves’ very much doubted that they could be used for communication over distances greater than a mile or two. Even that range, which had already been achieved, was causing some puzzlement, for it was not known through what medium the waves from a wireless transmitter really travelled. Did they go through hills, or over them? Did they bend around the curvature of the earth’s surface? As they were akin to light and travelled at the same speed, why did they not simply dissipate into the atmosphere, never to be retrieved and decoded on the ground?
Though there were some ingenious speculations about how wireless waves travelled long distances there was no definitive answer until the 1920s, by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry, fullng the airwaves with a cacophony of sound – much of it American. In the meantime, from 1897 until the cataclysm of the First World War, wireless telegraphy was woven into the social and economic fabric of the most sophisticated societies with astonishing speed.
This is the story of how one of the most extraordinary inventions in history came about. Taking the leading role in a cast of many brilliant and eccentric characters is Guglielmo Marconi himself, whose home-made magic box first brought the ‘new telegraphy’ to the notice of the general public. In his lifetime he enjoyed worldwide fame for the achievement of turning a boyhood fascination with electricity into an entirely new form of communication, and a huge industry. Marconi was one of the greatest amateur inventors of all time. It is remarkable testimony to the fragility of reputation that a man who could command such respect in his lifetime should now be relegated to comparative obscurity, and that the names of scores of his contemporaries who made radio work have no resonance at all for a generation addicted to the most modern form of wireless telegraphy: text messaging on a mobile phone. That Queen Victoria received text messages sent by wireless from the royal yacht to her home on the Isle of Wight more than a century ago will come as a surprise to those who imagine the technology of the mobile phone is almost brand new. The story begins way back in the days of dark streets, horse-drawn carriages, and the blood-curdling murders of Jack the Ripper.
1 (#ulink_9d3323f5-87f2-5c23-bf4a-790127fe119c)
In Darkest London (#ulink_9d3323f5-87f2-5c23-bf4a-790127fe119c)
On a winter’s evening in 1896 a brougham, a four-wheeled cab drawn by a single horse, left the fashionable stuccoed terraces of west London and headed eastwards along the dirt roads and cobbled streets of the capital, which glistened in the gaslight under a light rain. The passengers were a young man who had with him two large black boxes, and a gentleman in his sixties sporting a long grey beard, his thinning hair pasted to his head in a centre parting. Steam rose from the horse’s flanks in the dank air as the brougham rattled through the canyons of streets in the City and, leaving the Square Mile, came to the fitfully-lit roads of Whitechapel. This was the frontier of the notorious East End, where only a few years earlier Jack the Ripper had mutilated his victims and left them dead or dying in dark alleyways.
The cab turned onto Commercial Street, and the young man peered through the smoke-filled air for a sight of their destination. Finally they lurched off the main road and entered a courtyard fronting an elegant building that looked as if it might have stood there for hundreds of years. This was Toynbee Hall, which had in fact been completed just fifteen years previously. It was the inspiration of the remarkable Canon Barnett, vicar of the poverty-stricken parish of St Jude’s in Whitechapel, who had chosen to conduct his missionary work not in Africa but in that part of the capital William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had called ‘Darkest London’. Toynbee Hall, modelled on Oxford and Cambridge’s colleges, was a ‘settlement’ built with money subscribed by those ancient universities. Here some of the leading figures of the coming generation of politicians and civil servants were invited to live for months at a time, so they could learn about poverty and offer some culture and instruction to the poor. There was a large lecture theatre, in which many distinguished people had delivered their opinions on the great moral, political and scientific issues of the day. A few years later the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would attend lectures at Toynbee Hall.
The speaker this evening, Saturday, 12 December 1896, was not the young man who unloaded his black boxes from the cab: he and his apparatus were to be the star turn of the lecture which was to be given by his older companion. The two had met for the first time only that April, and the bearded Victorian gentleman had subsequently been so impressed by the young man’s invention that he had become his patron. Some private demonstrations of what the black boxes could achieve had been given on the rooftops of London and out on the open chalk lands of Salisbury Plain, where the British Army rehearsed cavalry charges close to the Neolithic monument of Stonehenge. But this evening at Toynbee Hall was to be the first exhibition of the magic boxes to a public audience. The lecture was entitled ‘Telegraphy without Wires’, a subject about which little was then known outside the science laboratory and the telegraph business itself.
Toynbee Hall was packed. The speaker, William Preece, had gained a reputation for delivering lucid and amusing public lectures on recent exciting scientific discoveries. On this evening he did not at first reveal who his accomplice was, but gave a little of the history as he knew it of methods of sending telegraph messages without a wire connection. As long ago as 1838 a German, Professor Steinbjel, one of half a dozen scientists who claimed to have invented the electric telegraph, had foreseen a time when it might be possible to do away with the cable altogether.
In fact, Preece continued, he himself had already achieved this. Just two years previously he had been astonished to discover that messages being sent on underground telegraph cables owned by the British Post Office could be picked up by the exchange of a telephone company in the City, which had its wires above ground. Somehow the electronic impulses in one wire had jumped across to another, creating, in effect, a form of ‘wireless’ communication. Some experiments had been carried out to see if this could be the basis of a new system of communication. Some limited success had been achieved, but that evening Preece had an important announcement to make about an entirely new form of wireless telegraphy. It was at this point, according to newspaper reports which appeared the following Monday, 14 December, that Preece introduced his audience to the young man who shared the platform with him. He was an Italian electrician named Guglielmo Marconi who, Preece explained, had come to him recently with his home-made equipment. This evening he and Signor Marconi would for the very first time demonstrate to a general audience the working of this system.
‘The apparatus was then exhibited,’ said the Daily Chronicle report. ‘What appeared to be just two ordinary boxes were stationed at each end of the room, the current was set in motion at one end and a bell was immediately rung in the other. To show there was no deception Mr Marconi held the receiver and carried it about, the bell ringing whenever the vibrations at the other box were set up.’ When Preece pressed a lever in the sending box there was the crack of an electric spark, and an instantaneous ringing in the receiver held by Marconi. The effect was achieved, the audience was told, by the transmission from the sending box of ‘electrostatic’ waves much the same as light. These were received by the other box, in which there was a device which, when activated, rang the bell. In other words, a signal was being sent around the lecture hall which was invisible, but as tangible in its effects as any telegraph impulse sent along a wire. And it followed Marconi wherever he went in the hall.
To any modern audience this device would look more like a mildly diverting toy than an invention at the very forefront of technology. No transmission of speech, or music, or anything now associated with radio was being demonstrated. No messages were being sent at all – just an invisible electronic signal. But in 1896 that was sensational enough. It was like some fantastic act at the music hall. In fact, those present might easily have dismissed the demonstration as the work of a magician and his assistant, for the young man had a suspiciously exotic Italian name, although he looked and talked like a smart Londoner about town. However, there could be no doubts about the credentials of the speaker: the sixty-two-year-old William Preece, shortly to become Sir William, was Chief Electrical Engineer of the single most powerful communications system in the world, the government-owned British Post Office.
Only a handful of people in London had heard of the twenty-two-year-old Guglielmo Marconi. He said a few words to the audience in his impeccable, slowly enunciated English when the demonstration was over. Without the authority given it by William Preece’s presence, the lecture would probably have had little impact, and the audience would have climbed back into their cabs and carriages muttering about the devious sleight of hand of foreigners. But Preece assured them that he had seen a number of demonstrations of this young man’s method of transmitting signals, and that it held out the very real prospect that, with some modifications, it would be able to send messages through the ether over distances of several miles. Marconi’s wireless waves could activate a Morse code printer, producing an instant and invisible means of conveying exactly the same kind of messages that were then being tapped in dots and dashes around the world on the global cable telegraph network.
How many in the audience that night realised that they were seeing history in the making, we do not know. Preece, however, appeared to be full of confidence about its potential. He pledged the Post Office’s support for the development of Marconi’s invention, and dismissed as irrelevant the claims made for an Indian, Professor Jagdish Chandra Bose,* (#ulink_16a7d2bc-49c6-545a-8251-18df33a1b3e5) as the true discoverer of wireless telegraphy. There was loud cheering when Preece told the audience that what had been demonstrated that evening would give Britain’s mariners ‘a new sense and a new friend’, and would make navigation infinitely easier and safer than it then was.
Preece flicked open the cover of his gold hunting-watch, and drew the lecture to a close. That evening he took young Marconi back across the city to a house rented in fashionable Westbourne Park before going on to his own home in Wimbledon, eight miles out of London.
Though they were very different in age and background, there was clearly an affinity between the two men. Both, in their different ways, had disliked formal education, but were fanatical workers when a subject interested them. Preece was dismissive of academics, who were always claiming superior knowledge of physics and the mysterious workings of electricity but produced nothing of practical value. Writing about his own childhood, he had said that boys always rebel against their fathers and learn only from their mothers. At least, that had been his experience, for he owed all his success to his Welsh mother. That night, after his first successful public demonstration of his magic boxes, it was Marconi’s mother who was there to greet the young man on his return home. Preece had become his patron, but his Irish mother Annie Jameson had championed him since childhood, giving him emotional support and encouragement, while his sterner Italian father had paid the bills for his son’s experiments. And it was his mother who, through the connections of her wealthy and influential family, had managed to arrange the fortuitous meeting between her son and the distinguished head of the British Post Office’s engineering operations.
William Preece was old enough to recall the invention of the safety match for lighting home fires in his native Wales, and had spent his working life experimenting with, adopting and adapting the new electronic technologies as they were revealed to the world. Twenty years earlier he had toured the United States and had met Thomas Edison, America’s most celebrated inventor, who served him raw ham, tea and – to his astonishment – iced water in summer.
As well as enjoying Edison’s chilled drinks, Preece had been one of the first to try out Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and had brought the equipment back to England, where it was an object of incredulous fascination. Could you actually recognise the voice of someone on the other end of the line, people wondered. When the telephone was still at the development stage, conversations sounded like a high-pitched exchange between the protagonists of a seaside Punch and Judy show. Preece had initially regarded Bell’s invention as no more than a ‘scientific toy’. Now he had his own phone number at the Post Office headquarters in St Martin’s-le-Grand, and the telephone was no longer a novelty. But there were new inventions to startle the public. In the very week that young Marconi had arrived in London early in 1896 he had read in the newspapers of an astonishing discovery. A Bavarian physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, had chanced upon a way of ‘photographing the invisible’ with mysterious rays produced by electricity passing through a vacuum. The ability to see through solid objects was the stuff of science fiction, yet Roentgen had produced a photographic image of the bone structure of a human hand. As he did not know what the electric waves were, he called them ‘X-rays’.
News of Roentgen’s amazing discovery had broken on 5 January 1896 in a Vienna newspaper, and had rapidly been telegraphed around the world. There was much chatter about the danger of X-rays to the modesty of women: wicked inventors might be able to see through their clothing. Scientific discovery was often frightening as well as exciting, and the penetrating powers of X-rays were the subject of much anxious debate, though nobody then knew about the dangers of radiation. The issue was privacy.
The publicity William Preece had afforded Marconi very quickly drew the attention of newspapers and magazines, and when news of his ‘Marconi waves’ began to spread the public were intrigued to know if they too might threaten the privacy and decency of English ladies. After all, his magic boxes sent and received invisible signals which could apparently travel much further than Roentgen’s X-rays. Young as he was, Marconi found himself called upon to provide extensive interviews. Just three months after the Toynbee Hall lecture, in March 1897, the Strand Magazine published an article by H.J.W. Dam with the tide ‘The New Telegraphy’. It was syndicated worldwide by the enterprising American magazine McClure’s.
Dam had been to see Marconi at his home in Westbourne Park in the hope of learning something about this young man whose discoveries were ‘more wonderful, more important and more revolutionary’ than Roentgen’s ‘new photography’. He found himself greeted by a most unusual character, who was ‘completely modest’ and made no claims at all as a scientist. This ‘tall, slender young man’, who looked at least thirty, had a ‘calm, serious manner and a grave precision of speech’ which gave the impression that he was much older than he was. Speaking in his ‘perfect’ English, he told the reporter that he had been for ten years an ‘ardent amateur student of electricity’.
In the calm, considered manner which was to be his hallmark whenever called upon to explain his discoveries to the public, Marconi told Dam how he had found to his surprise while experimenting with electric waves on his father’s country estate outside Bologna that he could generate signals which went through or over hills. He really had no idea how they got there, but he had proved over and again that a rise in the land three quarters of a mile across was no obstacle to the transmission and reception of these electronic signals. Marconi explained that he had begun by copying the laboratory equipment of the great German physicist Heinrich Hertz, and had adapted it so that he could send Morse messages. But whereas Hertz had sent his electro-magnetic waves only a few yards, Marconi had achieved much greater distances, and he was not sure if he had, by chance, discovered a previously unknown phenomenon: a new kind of ‘wave’.
The science Marconi was working with was not well understood. In 1865 the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that electro-magnetic forces travelled in waves. These were analogous to sound and light waves, but could not be detected by the human ear or eye. They travelled at the speed of light, but were invisible, because the eye could only detect certain wavelengths. Maxwell’s model was purely mathematical, and he left it to others to find a way of generating and measuring these waves. Hertz had been the first to achieve this, publishing his findings in 1888. He used a spark to generate the waves which he bounced back and forth in his laboratory. Crudely speaking, the size of the spark ‘gap’ determined the length of the waves, and Hertz had worked with fairly short waves. Marconi had experimented with a whole range of different spark transmitters, and had produced results which appeared to be substantially different from those of Hertz. In fact, because he believed his apparatus could produce waves that could reach parts impenetrable by those generated by Hertz, Marconi thought he might have chanced upon some new kind of electromagnetic signal. Dam asked: What is the difference between these and the Hertz waves?’
Marconi replied: ‘I don’t know. I am not a professional scientist, but I doubt if any scientist can tell you.’ He thought it might have something to do with the form of the wave. As to the nuts and bolts of his equipment, Marconi said apologetically that he could not say more because it was being patented, and was therefore top secret. What he could tell the astonished reporter was that his waves ‘penetrate everything and are not reflected or refracted’ even by solid stone walls or metal. He could even send them through an ‘ironclad’, a heavily reinforced battleship.
This last claim set up instant alarm in the reporter: its implications were far more serious than the possibility of X-rays compromising the modesty of ladies. ‘Could you not from this room explode a box of gunpowder placed across the street in that house yonder?’ Dam asked.
‘Yes,’ Marconi replied confidently. ‘If I could put two wires or two plates in the powder, I could set up an induced current which would cause a spark and explode it.’
‘At what distance have you exploded gunpowder by means of electric waves?’
‘A mile and a half.’
Could Marconi’s instruments ignite the explosive magazine of an ironclad and blow it up from a distance? Already the Royal Navy was concerned that if its ships carried wireless telegraphy equipment, the signals might blow up their own stores of powder. It could be a problem, Marconi conceded. Beams from electric lighthouses along the coast could destroy an unwary fleet in seconds. Warming to this notion, Dam wrote: ‘Of all the coast defences ever dreamed of, the idea of exploding ironclads by electric waves from the shore and over distances equal to modern cannon ranges is certainly the most terrible possibility yet conceived.’
Blowing up ships, however, had never been in Marconi’s mind. Quite the reverse. From boyhood, when his father had bought him a yacht which he sailed in the Bay of Genoa, he had loved the sea. Though he had no clear idea how his wireless waves would be used in practical terms, he did imagine that there was a real prospect of communications between ships and shore, and between ships on the open ocean, where there were no telegraph cables.
In London, Marconi and his mother could have enjoyed a glamorous social round: nightly balls, dinner parties, the opera, Ascot and all the trappings of the Season. Annie had many relatives in town, and always enjoyed her trips to England. But there was to be little time for frivolous socialising: Guglielmo had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and he was fearful that if he did not move fast someone else would overtake him in the exploitation of the new telegraphy. After all, he was only an amateur whose invention was homespun, devised after long hours working alone in the attic of the family country home in Italy.
* (#ulink_dd303670-ced3-503d-8f70-9d094a3b8991) In 1895 Professor Bose, of the Presidency College, Calcutta, had succeeded in ringing a bell and exploding a mine with electro-magnetic waves while working along the same lines as Marconi.
2 (#ulink_9041899e-f920-549a-9e4c-e98da4fdd5f5)
Silkworms and Whiskey (#ulink_9041899e-f920-549a-9e4c-e98da4fdd5f5)
The Villa Griffone is set in its own grounds of orchards, vineyards and fields in rolling countryside outside the village of Pontecchio, near Bologna. Bologna had water-powered silk-weaving mills long before the Industrial Revolution transformed British industry in the late eighteenth century. The city had a distinguished history of scientific discovery, and was the home of the eighteenth-century pioneer of electrical forces Luigi Galvani. Nearly all the advances in the study of electro-magnetism had been achieved by trial and error, in the absence of any useful theory. In fact theory had sometimes got in the way of understanding, as is often the case. Galvani, a Professor of Anatomy at the ancient University of Bologna, had come to the conclusion that frogs could produce electricity after the chance discovery that specimens he was dissecting reacted to an electrical current. His disciple, and later his opponent, Alessandro Volta showed that the frogs were merely acting as crude batteries, and went on to create the first means of storing electricity which could be tapped for a continuous source of current. The work of both men has been commemorated in the terms ‘galvanised’ and ‘voltage’.
From an early age Guglielmo Marconi was familiar with Bologna’s scientific heritage, and in the long summer days at the Villa Griffone he began his first experiments with the mysterious forces of electricity. Marconi’s heritage – and the pioneer days of wireless – arose from a most unlikely union between Irish whiskey and Italian silkworms. That his mother and father should have met at all was remarkable, that they should have fallen in love even more so, and that they married in the teeth of opposition from her family the most unlikely event of all. Theirs was a story of high romance, yet precious little of it is known apart from the reminiscences of Marconi’s mother, recorded much later by her granddaughter Degna.
Annie Jameson was born in 1843, one of four daughters of Andrew Jameson of County Wexford in Ireland, the well-known and wealthy distiller of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. The family lived in an old manor called Daphne Castle, which had parkland and a moat. Annie had one outstanding talent: singing. As a teenager she had wanted to perform in opera, and according to the family legend had been invited to sing at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Her father refused to let her go: the stage was not in those days regarded as a suitable place for well-bred young ladies. As compensation for the thwarting of her ambitions it was arranged that Annie should go to Bologna to study singing. There she could stay with business contacts of the Jamesons, a respectable Italian family called de Renolis, and could sing to her heart’s content without risk to her family’s reputation.
The de Renolis family had suffered a personal tragedy a few years before Annie arrived to stay with them. In 1855 their daughter Giulia had married a moderately prosperous landowner called Giuseppe Marconi. In the same year Giulia had given birth to her first child, a son, Luigi. Sadly, as happened so often at that time, the young mother survived the birth of her son by only a few months. Giuseppe, now a lone parent, remained close to the de Renolis family. He had moved to Bologna from the hill country of the Apennines, which run like a backbone through north central Italy. When his wife died he asked his father, who still lived in the mountain village where Giuseppe had been brought up, to join him in Bologna. The ageing Domenico Marconi agreed, sold up his mountain estate and moved to the city. But Bologna was too busy and confined for him, so he bought an estate at Pontecchio, eleven miles away. In the large, square, plain but handsome Villa Griffone he took to raising silkworms, and made some success of it, while his widower son Giuseppe husbanded the orchards and the fields in the rolling countryside.
When Annie Jameson came to stay with the Renolis she was introduced to their bereaved son-in-law and little grandson Luigi. Giuseppe lived more at the Villa Griffone than in Bologna, and Annie must have spent some time there too, for she fell in love with the place and with him. She returned to Ireland to ask her family for permission to marry her Italian sweetheart, but they flatly refused to consider it. According to her granddaughter Degna, the grounds for rejection were that he was much older than her (by about seventeen years), he already had a son, and to top it all he was a foreigner. Annie had to bow to the authority of her father, and appeared to accept the decision. But she kept in touch with Giuseppe, with letters somehow smuggled between Ireland and Italy, and vowed to run away to marry him when she reached the age of majority at twenty-one. This she did, meeting him in Boulogne-sur-Mer on the northern coast of France, where they married on 16 April 1864. As husband and wife they took stage coaches across France, over the Alps and back to Bologna and the Villa Griffone. Their first child, Alfonso, was born a year later. Nine years later, in April 1874, Annie gave birth in Bologna to a second son, Guglielmo. Both boys were baptised Roman Catholic, although their mother was Protestant.
Giuseppe had no family other than his in-laws. His father had died, and a brother who became a priest had been murdered by a thief. Annie, on the other hand, had three sisters, all of whom had married and had children. Annie did not lose touch with them despite her elopement. One of her sisters had married an English military man, General Prescott, who was posted to Livorno on the north-west coast of Italy. Annie often took Alfonso and Guglielmo to stay with her, where they enjoyed the company of the Prescotts’ four daughters and the small English community. The English girls were also often Guglielmo’s playmates at the Villa Griffone, and he spent so much time with them and with his mother that at times Italian became his second language.
Annie read the Bible to her sons as part of their English lessons, and appears to have had no interest in science. Of greater interest to Guglielmo than religious instruction was the library in the Villa Griffone, which contained a wide selection of books. It is not clear whether it was Guglielmo’s father or his grandfather who had collected works ranging from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War to the lectures of the brilliant English chemist Michael Faraday. Perhaps many of the scientific works were provided by or for the young Guglielmo himself; in any case, from the age of about ten Guglielmo began to work his way through this store of knowledge. He became especially interested in the wonderfully lucid lectures of Faraday, who had made some of the most significant discoveries about the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and had invented the first, tiny, electrical generator.
Born in 1791, the son of a blacksmith, Faraday had had no formal education, and began his working life as an apprentice to a bookbinder. He had attended a series of lectures given by the famous scientist Humphry Davy at London’s Royal Institution, made notes on them and sent them to Davy, asking for a job as a laboratory assistant. Davy took him on, and eventually Faraday was to succeed him as the most celebrated scientist in England, spending his life experimenting in a variety of fields, but most signify-cantly on the nature and applications of electricity. He died in 1867, just seven years before Guglielmo Marconi was born. Faraday undoubtedly provided the young Marconi with a heroic model: the scientist alone in his laboratory with wires and chemicals, painstakingly testing his theories. But the greatest hero to descend from the shelves of the Villa Griffone library was the American Benjamin Franklin. Among the many achievements of this extraordinary man, born in 1706, a printer, diplomat and amateur scientist who was at seventy the oldest signatory of the Declaration of Independence, was the invention of the lightning conductor.
In a celebrated experiment, Franklin had flown a kite in a thunderstorm to demonstrate that the electrical charge of lightning could be channelled along a wire to which the kite was tethered. This clearly impressed the young Guglielmo, for his daughter recalls him telling the story of how he and a friend rigged up a lightning conductor in the house they were staying in in Livorno, and prayed for a storm. When one came they were thrilled to discover that their toy worked: at every lightning flash, the electrical charge triggered a little mechanism which rang a bell in the house. A replica of young Guglielmo’s lightning alarm is among a wonderful collection of his early gadgets in the Villa Griffone, which is now a museum devoted to his extraordinary childhood inventiveness.
It was around the time of the lightning experiment, in 1887, when Marconi was thirteen years old, that the German scientist Heinrich Hertz made known his discovery of electro-magnetic waves, prompting the Irish mathematician George Fitzgerald to declare that humanity had ‘won the battle lost by the giants of old … and snatched the thunderbolt from Jove for himself’. This was a humbling statement for Fitzgerald to make, for only a few years earlier he had announced that he believed the artificial creation of electro-magnetic waves was not possible, thereby blunting the ambition of British scientists working along the same lines as Hertz.
Guglielmo did have some academic tutoring at an institute in Livorno and a college in Florence, but his serious work was carried out on his own at the Villa Griffone. He was privileged, for his father not only provided him with a library, but grudgingly subscribed to all the leading scientific journals of the day, which Guglielmo devoured. His boyhood notebooks, rediscovered in Rome only seven years ago, are testimony to his fanatical interest in electricity and all the latest theories and inventions. The scientific community was most excited at the time by the work of Hertz. His apparatus for proving the existence of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s imagined electro-magnetic waves and measuring their ‘length’ was quite crude. A spark was produced by jumping electricity across a gap between two metal balls charged by Leyden jar batteries. The spark generated electronic waves which travelled invisibly across Hertz’s laboratory to activate a ‘receiver’ made up of wires which produced a spark in response. His experiments inspired many other scientists to examine the properties of what became known as Hertzian waves.
In 1894 Heinrich Hertz died at the tragically young age of thirty-six. During an operation for cancer of the jaw he suffered blood poisoning, which killed him. The scientific magazines were filled with obituaries which gave accounts of the trail-blazing experiments he had conducted. When the young Marconi read these he at once conceived the idea of using the apparatus which Hertz had made to send telegraph messages. He did not know it at the time, but precisely the same idea had struck a number of scientists and inventors in England, America and Russia.
A neighbour of the Marconi family at Villa Griffone was the Italian Professor of Physics Augusto Righi, who had done his own work on Hertzian waves. Guglielmo was thus able to discuss his idea with a leading scientist. He received little or no encouragement, but quite probably he managed to get an idea of how to construct the kind of transmitter and receiver Hertz had used in his laboratory, and with the help of his mother he cleared out an area on the upper floor of the Villa Griffone which had been used by his grandfather for keeping silkworms. This home-made laboratory has been lovingly restored by the staff of the modern museum. The beautifully recreated models of his early equipment are testimony to Marconi’s skill, and his dedication to an ambition on which he spent nearly all his waking hours.
By the time Marconi was a teenager there was a widespread interest in electricity, which was reflected in the publication of a range of journals from which the enthusiastic amateur could learn about the very latest theories and discoveries made in Europe and America. The majority of these were in English, and Marconi’s easy command of the language ensured that there were few developments of which he was unaware.
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Sparks in the Attic (#ulink_6ec71791-4f8e-5968-9235-c57d9541cdbf)
Day after day through the hot summer months of 1895, Guglielmo Marconi climbed the stairs to his makeshift workshop in the attic of the Villa Griffone. He said very little to his family about what he was trying to achieve behind its closed door. Early on he learned to be cautious about making any predictions, and he was very conscious of his ageing father’s view that the whole thing was a waste of time. Being a scientist or an inventor was not, in Giuseppe Marconi’s opinion, a ‘career’, unless, like their neighbour Righi, you had a professorship.
From time to time Guglielmo would allow his English cousins to visit the attic, where he would show them the magic he could perform with crackling sparks which made a bell ring by a mysterious force. He himself could not really explain how these tricks worked. He achieved them by trial and error, making use of every bit of electrical equipment and every published experiment he could lay his hands on. For his electricity supply he could buy batteries. It was also a simple matter to get hold of a Morse key and a Morse printer, for these were mass-produced for the telegraph industry, and there were many models on the market.
Morse code was a set of dots and dashes which represented the letters of the alphabet. The sender pressed a lever on the key, making an electrical connection which in turn activated a circuit connected to a printer which recorded either a dot or a dash. Hold the lever down for a short time, and it was a dot; longer, and it was a dash. It was as simple as that. You could use a Morse key to turn a lightbulb on and off, sending out a visual signal. Ships flashed Morse messages to each other with powerful beams, but could only do this when they were in sight of each other. This was, in a sense, ‘wireless’ communication. So too were the smoke signals used by Native Americans, or jungle drums, or the simple messages sent across the sea from one island to another by striking a resonant shell with a stick. But to receive any of these messages, you had to be able to see or hear the signals. To send a message over a long distance a relay was needed. Europe had such a system in the early nineteenth century, with ‘telegraph’ stations positioned on hills. Large wooden arms were moved to relay semaphore signals from one hill to the next. The invention in the 1840s of the electric telegraph, with Morse keys and receivers connected by cables, revolutionised long-distance communication, and the old hilltop telegraph stations fell derelict.
The great potential of the ‘Hertzian’ waves that Marconi wanted to harness lay in the fact that you did not have to be able to see or hear them to receive them, and you needed no connecting cable to send a signal. How far they could travel through the air Marconi did not know, but that was not the first problem. If you could not hear or see them, how could you detect them? Marconi knew from reading electrical magazines that some ingenious solutions had been found. A French physicist, Edouard Branly, had shown in 1890 that metal filings when scattered in a test tube would not conduct electric current. However, if they were ‘hit’ by an electric charge the filings clung together, and a current could pass through the tube.
The English Professor Oliver Lodge showed in 1893 that the ‘Branly tube’ could act as a detector of Hertzian waves. When a spark was generated the invisible electro-magnetic force would, at a distance, cause metal filings to stick together. Lodge called his version of the Branly tube a ‘coherer’, and showed how it could act as a kind of electronic ‘valve’. If the coherer were put into a circuit with wires from each end, the coherer could turn a current on and off. When the filings lay scattered in the tube no current could pass through it. However, when an invisible Hertzian wave hit the tube, the filings instantly clogged together, allowing an electric current to pass through them and the circuit to be closed. It was like a tap that could be turned on or off from a distance. From a few yards away it was possible to send an invisible, inaudible signal from a ‘transmitter’, which produced Hertzian waves, to a ‘receiver’, which reacted to them, closing a circuit which might light a bulb or ring a bell.
That was more or less the state of the art when Marconi began his experiments in earnest. What he wanted to be able to do was to activate, at a distance, a Morse printer so that each time he pressed his sending key the signals would show up as dots and dashes on a tape. Batteries powered the printer, and the current from them had to flow through the coherer, which would be ‘on’ when the filings inside stuck together, and ‘off’ when they were scattered. It was relatively easy to ring a bell once, but then the metal filings in the coherer stayed stuck together, and the bell would continue to ring even after Marconi had raised the Morse lever and was no longer sending out Hertzian waves. To break the circuit and silence the bell the glass coherer had to be shaken so the metal filings lay scattered once again, and no current could pass through them.
The solution Marconi devised to this problem illustrated his craftsman’s genius. Firstly, he experimented for hours to find the best and most sensitive metal filings to put in the coherer. He then made the glass tube smaller and smaller. To do this he used thermometers, which he remoulded using a hand-bellows, heating the glass with a naked flame. He had to create a vacuum inside these miniaturised coherers to increase their efficiency, and tiny silver plugs were used at either end as terminals. Marconi estimated that to make one little coherer took him a thousand hours.
Once he had his super-sensitive mini-coherer working, Marconi devised a little hammer mechanism which was activated each time he raised the lever on his Morse key and cut off the Hertzian waves. The sharp rap the hammer gave to the tiny coherer loosened the metal filings, cutting off the current and silencing the bell. In the same way, it would turn a Morse printer on and off. Hold the key down for a short time, and you produced a dot. Raise the lever, and the printer stopped. Hold the key down again for longer, and you got a dash. It was incredibly slow, but it worked.
It had been relatively easy to make the transmitter. All that was needed was batteries to provide the current, a coil to bump up the charge, and two brass balls fixed so that there was a small gap between them. Press the Morse key and the current flowed; the electricity jumping between the brass balls created a crackling bluish-yellow spark which generated electro-magnetic waves. These waves travelled at the same speed as light – in fact they were a form of light – but the crest between the waves was much longer, and they could not therefore be seen. During thunderstorms lightning gives out Hertzian waves, which is why radios crackle in response to each flash.
Less than a year after the death of Hertz, Marconi had a working wireless system. But if it was to be of any real use, he had to discover if the sparks of his transmitter could send out waves that a receiver could pick up at a distance of more than a few yards. In the searing heat of the summer of 1895 he first took his boxes outside into the parched fields and neatly trimmed vineyards of the Villa Griffone to discover what the limits of his invention were.
There was nothing in any of the electrical magazines he had read which could help him. All he could do was try different arrangements of transmitter and receiver. Possibly recalling Benjamin Franklin’s experiment with the kite in a thunderstorm, Marconi had the idea that if he raised a wire in the air and put another in the earth, there might be extra power. He was thrilled to discover that this arrangement worked, and he found that the higher the wire, and the more powerful the spark, the further signals would travel. His brother Alfonso moved the receiver and transmitter further and further apart. When the distance reached about a mile, Alfonso was out of sight on the brow of a hill which rose gently behind the villa, and he or one of the farmhands who was helping had to fire a gun to confirm that a signal had got through. Marconi’s father, who had funded his son’s madcap experiments with disgruntled reluctance, was at last impressed enough to discuss how this intriguing invention might be turned into a commercial venture.
From the moment he developed his primitive, home-made wireless system, Marconi felt he was in a race against time. If he could achieve the results he had working in the attic and the grounds of the Villa Griffone, surely someone in a university or a telegraphy company would soon come up with the same thing, or something better. If Marconi failed to make his name and his fortune with this invention, he had nothing to fall back on. His father had wanted him to join the Italian navy, but Guglielmo, preoccupied with his experiments, had failed the examinations for entry to the naval college.
Now old Giuseppe accepted that his youngest son’s future, if he had one, was with the odd bits of wire and batteries strewn about the attic of the villa, and the strange-looking antennae erected in the grounds of the estate. But who would be interested in Guglielmo’s magic boxes? And would anyone invest in them, so that the family fortune would not dwindle away? The Italian ministry of posts? Or the navy, perhaps? According to Marconi family legend, approaches were made, but after a wait of several months they received a polite refusal. This is possible, although no records have been found of any contacts with the government. Perhaps the story was invented later to protect Marconi’s reputation as a staunch Italian patriot. As it was, Guglielmo and his mother were soon on their way to London, where there was a much greater chance that his invention might be taken up, with the help of Annie Marconi’s many wealthy and influential relatives.
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In the Heart of the Empire (#ulink_8b355954-63ff-5d21-beda-20987e7c644e)
London, the heart of the British Empire, was a huge metropolis in the last decade of the nineteenth century, with a population of more than six million. The smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys filled the air with the sooty haze that so attracted Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, who captured on canvas the strange light that hung about the Thames, the great railway stations and the Houses of Parliament. London had had a steam-driven underground railway since the 1860s, and the first of the new electric underground lines had been opened between the suburb of Stockwell and the City in 1890. But the open-topped buses, carriages and goods wagons were still horse-drawn, as were the trams which provided cheaper fares out to the new working-class suburbs. Though gas and petrol engines had been devised, and the first imported motor-car had made a brief appearance on the streets in 1894, the only familiar motorised road transport was steam-driven. These lumbering, steam-engine-like vehicles were kept to a speed limit of four miles per hour in the countryside, and two miles per hour in London and other towns, and were required to have a man walking twenty yards ahead of them; the stipulation that he carry a red flag, first made law in 1865, was dropped in 1878.
Most of the metropolis was still gas-lit, though electric light in one form or another had been around for a number of years. The first experimental electric street lights had been of the carbon arc variety: a fierce, crackling white glow was produced by passing a current through two carbon rods separated by a small gap. These had been used as early as 1878 to floodlight a football match in the northern town of Sheffield, an experiment that was abandoned when the players complained that they were blinded by the glare and could not see the ball. The little town of Godalming in Surrey, to the south of London, had been the first in the world to have public electric street lighting in 1881, but the electric supplier found it uneconomical, and Godalming returned to gas. The façades of one or two London theatres, such as the Gaiety, were brilliantly lit with arc lamps, which were described as like ‘half a dozen harvest moons shining at once in the Strand’.
The forerunner of the modern electric lightbulb had been invented simultaneously in the 1870s by Thomas Edison in the United States and Joseph Swan in England, and in 1879 they joined forces as ‘Ediswan’ and were turning them out in their thousands. But only large institutions and the grander private houses could afford to have a generator installed, whether it was steam-driven or water-powered – the first hydro-electric system was fitted by Edison in Cragside, the stately home of the English arms magnate William Armstrong, in 1880. There were no large power stations in Britain – nothing to compare with the massive turbines driven by Niagara Falls in the United States – and only a handful of people in London could flick a switch to turn on domestic lights. In fact, so unfamiliar were light switches that notices were sometimes placed next to them, warning that no attempt should be made to ignite them with a match.
It was in February 1896 that Guglielmo Marconi and his mother Annie left Bologna and travelled by steam train across Europe, then by ferry to England, arriving at Victoria station in London where the air was thick with the reek of coal-smoke and horse-dung. Henry Jameson-Davis, the son of one of Annie’s sisters, who had known Guglielmo as a boy, agreed to find them a place to stay, and was intrigued by his young cousin’s wireless equipment.
Jameson-Davis was an engineer himself, specialising in the design of windmills, and invited his friends to see Marconi’s invention. One of them, A.A. Campbell Swinton, knew William Preece, Chief Electrical Engineer at the Post Office, and agreed to give Marconi a letter of introduction. Dated 30 March 1896, the letter stated:
I am taking the liberty of sending to you with this note a young Italian of the name of Marconi, who has come over to this country with the idea of getting taken up a new system of telegraphy without wires, at which he has been working. It appears to be based upon the use of Hertzian waves, and Oliver Lodge’s coherer, but from what he tells me he appears to have got considerably beyond what I believe other people have done in this line. It has occurred to me that you might possibly be kind enough to see him and hear what he has to say and I also think that what he has done will very likely be of interest to you. Hoping that I am not troubling you too much …
In April Marconi wrote home to his father that he had had a meeting with a Mr Price – he got the name wrong – who had shown an interest in wireless. It is not clear exactly when Marconi demonstrated his working model to Preece. A description of Marconi’s arrival at the General Post Office building in St Martin’s-le-Grand in the City was given years later by a lad who was one of Preece’s assistants, P.R. Mullis. While Mullis was going to and fro unloading Preece’s brougham, he noticed Marconi examining a little scale model of an ingenious bag-catching device used by the Post Office which enabled trains to take on post without stopping. He recalled that Marconi had with him two large bags. Preece emerged, shook hands with Marconi and polished his gold-rimmed spectacles as the young man unloaded brass knobs, coils and tubes and set them out on the table. Mullis was sent to fetch a Morse key, some batteries and wire. When he returned, Preece looked at his gold pocket-watch, remarked that it was past midday, and told Mullis to take Marconi to the Post Office refreshment bar and to ‘see he gets a good dinner on my account’. They were to be back by 2 p.m.
When they returned from lunch, Preece watched as Marconi pressed the Morse key and rang a bell in his receiving apparatus. This greatly intrigued the Post Office chief, who had apparently never witnessed the use of electronic waves in this way. At the end of the day Marconi was invited back, and he and Preece made some adjustments to the equipment with the help of the Post Office workshop. By the end of July Preece felt confident enough to arrange for Marconi to demonstrate his wireless to senior officials of the Post Office. What impressed everyone most was the fact that the signals could be sent three hundred yards, then nearly a mile, and then even further, with that mysterious ability to go straight through stone walls.
Preece had been booked long before to speak on wireless telegraphy at Toynbee Hall in December, and had intended to give an account of his own work sending messages across the sea on the west coast of Scotland. But he now wondered if his system, which required huge lengths of parallel wires to cover quite short distances, was less promising than Marconi’s. If it did the same job, Marconi’s would certainly be quicker and cheaper to install. Preece decided to take the opportunity of the Toynbee Hall lecture to introduce his protégé to a wider audience, which is how the two of them came to travel to Whitechapel that December evening. It had been as recently as the summer of 1894 that Marconi first conceived the idea of the use of Hertzian waves for telegraphy, in just over two years he was being fêted by the Chief Electrical Engineer of the mighty British Post Office, and by the spring of 1897 he was being pursued by more than one investor interested in his patents.
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Dancing on the Ether (#ulink_e2f52a8d-493a-53f5-8b8e-e24cd5a0bda6)
In the springtime migrant birds moving north to their nesting grounds, yellow wagtails and peregrine falcons, cross the Bristol Channel between the northern coasts of the English counties of Devon and Dorset and the south coast of Glamorgan in Wales. They skim over Steepholm and Flatholm Islands, which lie in the middle of the Channel, and rise up over Lavernock Point, a low cliff facing south from the Welsh coast. A colourful host of pink and white flowers attracts the butterflies which dance in the coastal breezes. There are relics of old gun batteries here, which guarded the wide estuary of the Severn River. When William Preece was experimenting with his method of wireless telegraphy in 1892 he chose the three-mile span between Lavernock Point and Flatholm Island, and found that he could establish a link between the two. He had much less success when he tried to create a link to Steepholm Island, which lies more than five miles from Lavernock.
Flatholm to Lavernock seemed to Preece the ideal testing ground for Marconi’s novel wireless system, and in May 1897 he arranged for an experiment which would demonstrate the potential of his protégé’s equipment. Although Preece had publicly expressed great faith in Marconi’s invention, he was not at all sure that these magic boxes could send and receive signals over any great distance. By nature he was a risk-taker, but over his long career some embarrassing experiences had taught him caution. There was the time in 1877 when the young Alexander Graham Bell, not quite thirty years old, was invited to demonstrate his new invention, the telephone, to Queen Victoria at her summer home, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Beginning at 9.30 p.m., Bell, with the help of Preece, had created a link between the main house and a cottage in the grounds so that the Queen could speak to two aristocrats familiar to her. She listened also to a rendition of the song ‘Coming Through the Rye’ sung by an American journalist called Kate Field, who had been hired to write promotional articles about the telephone. The Queen was most impressed as calls and performances came in from Cowes, Southampton and London. The grand finale was to be ‘God Save the Queen’, played by a brass band in Southampton. This had been William Preece’s patriotic idea. But as Her Majesty waited for the burst of music, the line from Southampton went dead. By the time it was fixed the musicians had packed away their tubas and trumpets and gone home. Not wanting to disappoint everybody after such a successful day, Preece himself put his mouth to the microphone and hummed the national anthem down the line, putting as much oompah into his rendition as he could. After listening for a few moments, Queen Victoria is said to have remarked: ‘It is the national anthem, but it is not well played.’
Preece was aware that he might be in for another embarrassing experience in the cause of technological advance when he asked Marconi to send a signal from Flatholm to Lavernock. There was an element of rivalry in the experiment, for Preece regarded himself as an old hand at this business of telegraphing without wires, and wanted a demonstration of the merits of his own system alongside that of the young Italian. Despite his apparent enthusiasm for Marconi’s invention, Preece appears to have hedged his bets, and was not convinced that it would have more than a very limited value to the Post Office. It was still a novelty, and might turn out to be no more than that.
While Marconi assembled his transmitter on Flatholm Island and a receiving station on the cliff at Lavernock, Preece had already had lengths of wire put in place, running in parallel on either side of the Bristol Channel. When an electric charge was sent through one of these wires it would emit waves which were picked up by the other, and a charge was made to ‘jump’ across the space between, just like the ‘crossed lines’ that had caused problems with telephones and telegraphs in the City. By turning the current on and off, it was possible to send the dots and dashes of Morse code. Preece had used this ‘induction’ system as a temporary link between the Isle of Skye on the west coast of Scotland and the mainland when the telegraph cable snapped, and knew it worked across the Bristol Channel.
Preece presumably did not imagine he was about to witness anything of historic importance as he waited in the buffeting breezes for Marconi’s signals to come through to Lavernock Point. He was, after all, the head of a British government department which dominated cable telegraphy worldwide, and which could hardly be threatened by a young amateur scientist and his makeshift apparatus. Preece had invited a German Professor, Adolphus Slaby of the Technical High School at Charlottenburg, near Berlin, to witness the demonstration. Slaby had read about Marconi’s ability to send signals over quite long distances, although he himself had had much less success.
Lavernock Point is about sixty feet above sea level. Marconi had an aerial put up which rose a further sixty feet in the air, and was topped with a zinc cylinder connected to a receiver which had been set up to record signals in Morse code on a tickertape. Another wire went from the receiver down the cliff to the seashore. The transmitter, firing off a crackle of sparks, was three miles away on Flatholm Island. For two tense days nothing came through on the Lavernock receiver. In desperation, Marconi had the receiver taken down to the beach below the cliff, to see if that made any difference. Almost instantly it began to work.
While William Preece did not really grasp the significance of the occasion, an amazed Professor Slaby certainly did. ‘It will be for me an ineffaceable recollection,’ he said later. ‘Five of us stood round the apparatus in a wooden shed as a shelter from the gale, with eyes and ears directed towards the instruments with an attention which was almost painful, and waited for the hoisting of a flag which was the signal that all was ready. Instantaneously we heard the first tic tac, tic tac, and saw the Morse instrument print the signals which came to us silently and invisibly from the island rock, whose contour was scarcely visible to the naked eye – came to us dancing on that unknown and mysterious agent the ether!’ He wrote up an account of what he had witnessed for the American Century Magazine, which was published in April 1898.
In January, 1897, when the news of Marconi’s first successes ran through the newspapers, I myself was earnestly occupied with similar problems. I had not been able to telegraph more than one hundred metres through the air. It was at once clear to me that Marconi must have added something else – something new – to what was already known, whereby he had been able to attain to lengths measured by kilometres. Quickly making up my mind, I travelled to England, where the Bureau of Telegraphs was undertaking experiments on a large scale. Mr. Preece, the celebrated engineer-in-chief of the General Post-Office, in the most courteous and hospitable way, permitted me to take part in these; and in truth what I there saw was something quite new. Marconi had made a discovery. He was working with means the entire meaning of which no one before him had recognised. Only in that way can we explain the secret of his success.
Slaby hurried back to Germany with Marconi’s secret, and set to work replicating as best he could the brilliant success of the Bristol Channel experiment.
Having returned to my home, I went to work at once to repeat the experiments with my own instruments, with the use of Marconi’ s wires. Success was instant … Meantime the attention of the German Emperor had been drawn to the new form of telegraphy … For carrying out extensive experiments, the waters of the Havel River near Potsdam were put at my disposal, as well as the surrounding royal parks – an actual laboratory of nature under a laughing sky, in surroundings of paradise! The imperial family delight to sail and row on the lakes formed by the Havel; therefore a detachment of sailors is stationed there during the summer, and I was permitted to employ the crews as helpers.
And so it was that Marconi’s first benefactor, William Preece, had unwittingly enabled the nation which was for many years to be a bitter rival of Britain in the development of wireless telegraphy to indulge in a blatant piece of industrial espionage. With the backing of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to excel in all fields of technology, and demanded that scientists be given state backing, Professor Slaby joined forces with others to develop a Teutonic version of the Italian’s new and quite magical means of communication. Meanwhile, Preece established his own induction wireless link across the Bristol Channel, and remained sceptical about the potential of Marconi’s use of Hertzian waves.
However, the City of London was mightily impressed. The potential value of what Marconi had demonstrated out on Salisbury Plain and at Toynbee Hall, and now across the Bristol Channel, lay, as far as the City investor was concerned, almost entirely in the patent rights. If an exclusive legal claim to the mechanism in the magic boxes could be established, this patent could be sold around the world, bringing instant riches. As early as March 1896, barely a month after his arrival in London, Marconi was writing to his father at the Villa Griffone with details of offers that were being made to him by various members of the extensive family contacts of the Jamesons. There was a Mr Wynne, who was related to his cousins the Robertsons, offering £2400 if Marconi would allow him to set up a company in which he would be given half the shares. Then there was another cousin, Ernesto Burn, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, who told Marconi he had a friend who had been paid £10,000 by the British government with a stipend of £2000 a year for ‘a discovery useful to the army’.
While Marconi, staying in Bayswater with his mother, conducted a frantic round of meetings in an effort to find a backer for his invention, his father offered advice which reflected his hope that Guglielmo would cash in as fast as he could and return with his spoils to buy a property near the Villa Griffone. Some solace from home arrived in two barrels of Griffone wine, which Marconi arranged to have bottled. In his letters home he pleaded not for wine but for the funds to pay for patent rights not only in England but in Russia, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain, India and the United States. In January 1897 he had written to his father:
I met two American gendemen who are willing to acquire my patent rights for the United States of America … I understand they would give me £10,000 divided as follows: four thousand immediately and six thousand when the patent is granted by the American Government … I believe it may be better for me to accept one of these early offers … even in the case something goes wrong with the other applications I would still have made a considerable profit.
A sense of urgency, of being on the brink not only of international fame but of a fortune, runs through the letters to old Giuseppe, and was the driving force in Marconi’s life after his arrival in London. This conviction that they were onto something which could bring them all riches was evidently shared by his mother’s side of the family, and their willingness to gamble a small fortune on Marconi arose from the pressure to prevent others from profiting from his invention. There was, at the same time, an underlying anxiety about the validity of the young man’s claim to have devised a genuinely unique technology, for in a very real sense every piece of his ingeniously fashioned and beautifully crafted equipment was derived from the experimental work of others. Marconi himself was acutely aware of this, and it took the very best patent lawyers in London months to find a form of words which amounted to a convincing case that in assembling bits and pieces devised in laboratories in Germany, France, England and Italy – coils, spark gaps and ‘coherers’ – Guglielmo Marconi had arrived at a unique arrangement.
Marconi’s blood had run cold when in 1896 he met on Salisbury Plain a companionable young man, Captain Henry Jackson of the Royal Navy, who told him that he too had been experimenting with Hertzian waves, and had actually built and operated a wireless telegraphy system which had been given a trial run on a battleship, with some success. According to Captain Jackson, as Marconi listened he became crestfallen, and it was only when the naval officer assured him that this work was top secret, and there were no plans to apply for a patent, that he cheered up. William Preece, during his brief honeymoon with Marconi, would insist on basking in the reflected glory of having ‘discovered’ the Italian inventor, and continued to lecture to audiences around the country on the great value this new sort of wireless telegraphy might have for lightships and lighthouses. Preece’s promotion of Marconi infuriated one of the leading English scientists of the day, Professor Oliver Lodge of Liverpool University.
Preece and Lodge had a longstanding feud about the best way to erect lightning conductors – the Post Office had hundreds of them, to protect the telegraphy system from storms – and Lodge could not abide what he regarded as Preece’s ill-informed recounting of the miraculous Marconi invention. An undignified spat broke out on the pages of The Times. ‘It appears that many persons suppose that the method of signalling across space by means of Hertzian waves received by a Branly tube of filings is a new discovery made by Signor Marconi,’ Lodge wrote in a letter to The Times in June 1897. ‘It is well known to physicists, and perhaps the public may be willing to share the information, that I myself showed what was essentially the same plan of signalling in 1894. My apparatus acted vigorously across the college quadrangle, a distance of 60 yards, and I estimated that there would be a response up to a limit of half a mile.’
By that time Marconi had already demonstrated that the range of wireless waves was not as limited as Lodge claimed. Lodge protested that he did not mean that half a mile was the absolute limit, and commended Marconi for working hard ‘to develop the method into a commercial success’. In the same letter he continued: ‘For all this the full credit is due – I do not suppose that Signor Marconi himself claims any more – but much of the language indulged in during the last few months by writers of popular articles on the subject about “Marconi waves”, “important discoveries” and “brilliant novelties” has been more than usually absurd.’
While this storm was brewing between his bearded benefactor and the piqued professor, the Jameson family freed Marconi from Preece’s patronage. His father Giuseppe was persuaded to put up the £300 necessary to pay for legal expenses in procuring patents. Then his cousin, the engineer Henry Jameson-Davis, raised £100,000 in the City, mostly from corn merchants connected with the Jameson whiskey business. The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company was set up with this substantial investment, equivalent to more than £5 million in today’s money. It was a commercial venture, the sole purpose of which was to buy the patents and give Marconi the money he needed to continue his experiments. He got sixty thousand of the £1 shares, £15,000 for his patents and £25,000 to spend on research. It was a massive vote of confidence from his mother’s family and their business associates.
Henry Jameson-Davis was not acting in a sentimental fashion by raising this huge sum for his cousin. Jameson-Davis was the archetypal Victorian gendeman, a keen foxhunter who would be out with the hounds in Ireland and England as often as six times a week in the winter hunting season. He would not gamble family money on a twenty-three-year-old with an intriguing but largely untried gadget without good reason. He and the other investors hoped to make a fortune when in July 1897 the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company opened its offices at 28 Mark Lane in the City. By buying the patent rights as soon as they were awarded, the company put William Preece and the British Post Office out of the picture, and left Marconi to get on with the work of demonstrating what a valuable invention the newly formed company owned.
Marconi anticipated that Preece would not take kindly to being supplanted by a family concern, and on 21 July 1897 he wrote to him from the Villa Griffone explaining his position. All the governments of Europe, he said, wanted demonstrations of his equipment, his patents were being disputed by the likes of Professor Oliver Lodge in England and others in America, and he needed money to refine his equipment, take out new patents and fund more ambitious experiments. His letter concluded: ‘Hoping that you will continue in your benevolence towards me I beg to state that all your great kindness shall never be forgotten by me in all my life. I shall also do my best to keep the company on amicable terms with the British Government. I hope to be in London on Saturday. Believe me dear Sir, yours truly G. Marconi.’
Naturally enough, Preece replied that the patronage of the British Post Office could no longer be continued. He showed little concern over the loss of control of the new invention, evidently taking the view that it was not going to be of much practical use anyway.
Privately, Preece was pouring cold water on Marconi’s spark transmitter in confidential memoranda to the Post Office and the government, suggesting that really there was not much future in it, and in any case the patent was probably not secure, as Oliver Lodge had a prior claim to it. In his Toynbee Hall lecture Preece had said, to the cheers of the audience, that he would see to it that the Post Office would fund Marconi. But the promised £10,000 had not been forthcoming. With his family firm, Marconi now had the funds and the freedom to set up whatever experiments he wished. As he had become convinced that the most promising practical use of wireless was sending messages from ships to shore, he headed for the coast to test the range and flexibility of wireless telegraphy.
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Beside the Seaside (#ulink_27a0c099-a2e7-58fa-9675-42d66aa7d19a)
This was the heyday of the English seaside resort, before the new fashion for sunbathing drew the wealthy to the Mediterranean in the summer months. The luxury Blue Trains steamed down to the French Riviera only in winter, when the mild climate attracted the English aristocracy who developed the resorts of Nice and Cannes. Queen Victoria herself liked to stay in Hyères, near Toulon, but not beyond May, when the heat became unbearable and everyone returned north, the French to Honfleur and Deauville on the Normandy coast, and the English to their favoured grand hotels in Eastbourne, Bournemouth and other fashionable seaside towns.
The railways had opened up many resorts to day-trippers from London, and the south coast of England was becoming socially segregated as the ‘quality’ sought refuge from brash day-tripper resorts like Brighton in the more exclusive havens and coves. Aristocratic and royal families from all over Europe would spend time in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, a short ferry-ride from the coast. In August there was Cowes Regatta, a gathering of the wealthy and the upper crust who raced their huge yachts and enjoyed a splendid social round. Queen Victoria’s favourite retreat was Osborne House, close to Cowes, and she spent most summers here in her old age, enjoying the fresh sea air as she was wheeled around the extensive grounds in her bath-chair. On the white chalk clifftops of the island were grand hotels, those on the southern coast with a view across the Channel to France. Among them was the Royal Needles Hotel at Alum Bay, on the very western tip of the island.
It was in rented rooms at the Royal Needles that Marconi established the world’s first equipped and functioning wireless telegraphy station in November 1897. An aerial 120 feet high with a wire-netting antenna was erected in the grounds, without, it seems, giving rise to any complaints from other residents. In various rooms of the hotel were pieces of equipment for transmitting and receiving, and workshops where coils of wire were wound, wax was melted for insulation, and metals filed down for experimental versions of the receiver or coherer.
The location was chosen so that Marconi could test his equipment at sea and as a means of communication between ships and the shore. In the summer months, when the coast teemed with tourists and the horse-drawn bathing machines were trundled into the chilly waters of the Channel for women bathers to enjoy a discreet dip, coastal steamers ran regularly from the pier at Alum Bay to the resorts of Bournemouth and Swanage to the west. Marconi negotiated to fit wireless telegraphy equipment to two of these, the May Flower and the Solent, so that he could test the range and effectiveness of his station at the hotel. When he and his engineers were transmitting, guests were intrigued by the crackle and hiss of the sparks which generated the mysterious and invisible rays that activated the Morse code tickertape on the ships.
English hotels offered the young inventor comfort and fine food, a place where his mother and older brother Alphonso as well as the staff of engineers he was gathering around him could stay. Though Marconi and his mother had no time to enjoy the glamorous social life of London, they were able to find some relaxation on the breezy south coast of England. After Alum Bay another station was opened at the Madeira Hotel in Bournemouth, fifteen miles down the coast. Bournemouth had many distinguished visitors and residents in the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin had stayed there in the 1860s; the beautiful Emilie Charlotte le Breton, known by her stage name Lillie Langtry, lived in a house in Bournemouth provided by her lover, the Prince of Wales, in the 1880s; Robert Louis Stevenson had written The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Bournemouth while recovering from ill-health; and the artist Aubrey Beardsley had only recently left the resort after a period of convalescence when Marconi arrived.
The Bournemouth station first went into operation in January 1898, just before a blizzard blanketed the south coast in deep snow. Newspaper reporters had gathered in Bournemouth, where William Gladstone, the former Prime Minister and grand old man of British politics, was seriously ill. The weight of snow brought down the overhead telegraph wires, and communication with London was cut. It was characteristic of Marconi’s opportunism and instinct for publicity that he arranged for the newly opened station at the Madeira Hotel to send wireless messages to the Royal Needles Hotel, from where they could be forwarded to London by the telegraph links from the Isle of Wight, which were still open. In the event, Gladstone recovered sufficiently to return to his home, where he died in May 1898.
Marconi fell out with the management of the Madeira Hotel – it is not clear if the dispute was about money or the nuisance his wireless station caused to other guests – and moved his station to a house in Bournemouth, and then finally to the Haven Hotel, a former coaching inn in the adjoining resort of Poole. This became a home from home for him for many years, long after the station at the Royal Needles Hotel was closed down. After a day in which the Haven’s guests were entertained by the crackling of Marconi’s aerial, the inventor would often sit down at the piano after supper. Accompanied by his brother Alfonso on the violin and an engineer, Dr Erskine Murray, on cello, the trio would play popular classical pieces as the prevailing south-west wind rattled the hotel windows. Annie Marconi often stayed to look after her son, and those evenings in Poole were among the most delicious and poignant of her life. She was to see Guglielmo less and less as he pursued with steely determination his ambition to transmit wireless signals further and further across the sea. For the time being, however, the fame he had already achieved was a vindication of her faith in him, and indeed of the great risks she had taken in her own life.
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Texting Queen Victoria (#ulink_b8a16e52-a497-5ead-8d3c-95e1fdd9ade6)
On 8 August 1898 the airwaves crackled with one of the first text messages in history: ‘Very anxious to have cricket match between Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers. Please ask the Queen whether she would allow match to be played at Osborne. Crescent goes to Portsmouth, Monday.’ It was sent from the royal yacht Osborne, off the Isle of Wight, to a small receiving station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House. Queen Victoria’s reply was tapped back across the sea: ‘The Queen approves of the match between the Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers being played at Osborne.’
The Queen, then seventy-nine years old, had spent much of the summer at Osborne, and could not fail to notice that something intriguing was going on a few miles to the south at the Royal Needles Hotel. Guglielmo Marconi was not only becoming something of a local figure, he had won tremendous acclaim in the press for one of the first commercial tests of his wireless telegraphy, when the Dublin Daily Express had asked him if he could cover the Kingston Regatta in Dublin Bay that July. The newspaper had been impressed by some experiments one of Marconi’s engineers had carried out on a treacherous part of the Irish coast for the shipping underwriters Lloyd’s of London. To cover the Kingston Regatta Marconi fitted up a tug, the Flying Huntress, with his equipment, and followed the yacht races at sea, sending back the latest news and positions to a receiving station on shore which then cabled the up-to-the-minute accounts to the Express’s sister paper, the Evening Mail.
The Flying Huntress was an old puffer, and looked comical with its makeshift aerial mast and a roll of wire rabbit-netting rigged up to exchange signals with the shore station in the gardens of the Kingston habourmaster’s home. In contrast to the bizarre sight of ‘Marconi’s magic netting hanging from an impromptu mast’, the Dublin Daily Express reporter found the inventor himself captivating.
A tall, athletic figure, dark hair, steady grey blue eyes, a resolute mouth and an open forehead – such is the young Italian inventor. His manner is at once unassuming to a degree, and yet confident. He speaks freely and fully, and quite frankly defines the limits of his own as of all scientists’ knowledge as to the mysterious powers of electricity and ether. At his instrument his face shows a suppressed enthusiasm which is a delightful revelation of character. A youth of twenty-three who can, very literally, evoke spirits from the vasty deep and despatch them on the wings of the wind must naturally feel that he had done something very like picking the lock of Nature’s laboratory. Signor Marconi listens to the crack-crack of his instrument with some such wondering interest as Aladdin must have displayed on first hearing the voice of the Genius who had been called up by the friction of his lamp.
There was just as much fascination with the shore station, where Marconi’s ‘chief assistant’ George Kemp, a stocky little Englishman with a handlebar moustache, an indefatigable worker who knew his masts and his ropes from his time in the Navy, and who Marconi had met through Preece at the Post Office, was tracked down by another Daily Express journalist. The ‘old navy man’ gave a down-to-earth account of the state of the art: ‘The one thing to do if you expect to find out anything about electricity is to work,’ said he, ‘for you can do nothing with theories. Signor Marconi’s discoveries prove that the professors are all wrong, and now they will have to go and burn their books. Then they will write new ones, which, perhaps some time they will have to burn in their turn.’ Of Marconi, Kemp said: ‘He works in all weather, and I remember him having to make three attempts to get out past the Needles in a gale before he succeeded. He does not care for storms or rain, but keeps pegging away in the most persistent manner.’
Yet another reporter on board the Flying Huntress described Marconi standing by the instruments ‘with a certain simple dignity, a quiet pride in his own control of a powerful force, which suggested a great musician conducting the performance of a masterpiece of his own composing’. Though he had been determined not to be overawed by this wonderful invention, the reporter confessed to a thrill when he joined Marconi in a little cabin to send a message to the shore. Having witnessed this remarkable demonstration, a devilish impulse to play with wireless overcame him.
Is it the Irish characteristic, or is it the common impulse of human nature, that when we find ourselves in command of a great force, by means of which stupendous results can be produced for the benefit of mankind, our first desire is to play tricks with it? No sooner were we alive to the extraordinary fact that it was possible, without connecting wires, to communicate with a station which was miles away and quite invisible to us, than we began to send silly messages, such as to request the man in charge of the Kingston station to be sure to keep sober and not to take too many ‘whiskey-and-sodas’.
All the English newspapers reported Marconi’s triumph at the Kingston Regatta, and the glowing descriptions of this modest young inventor and his magical abilities impressed Queen Victoria and her eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales, known affectionately as ‘Bertie’.
The Prince of Wales spent much of his time with rich friends, and had been a guest of the Rothschilds, the banking millionaires, in Paris, where he had fallen and seriously injured his leg. In August he was to attend the Cowes Regatta on the royal yacht, and a request was made to Marconi to set up a wireless link between the Queen at Osborne and her son on the ship moored offshore. Marconi was only too happy to oblige: it was excellent publicity, and it was no concern of his if, for the time being, wireless was employed frivolously. In any case, as he later told an audience of professional engineers, it offered him ‘the opportunity to study and meditate upon new and interesting elements concerning the influence of hills on wireless communication’.
With an aerial fixed to the mast of the royal yacht and a station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House, the textmessaging service between the Queen and her son was successfully established. A great many of the guests and members of the royal family on the yacht and staying at Osborne House took the opportunity to make use of this entirely novel means of communication. The messages were received as Morse code printout, which was then decoded and written in longhand on official forms headed ‘Naval Telegraphs and Signals’. In this way a lady called Emily Ampthill at Osborne was able to ask a Miss Knollys on the royal yacht: ‘Could you come to tea with us some day (end)’, to which the reply came: ‘Very sorry cannot come to tea. Am leaving Cowes tonight (end)’. More than a hundred messages were sent, many of them from Queen Victoria showing concern for Bertie’s bad leg.
This was another triumph for Marconi. He wrote home to his father to tell him excitedly of his two weeks with the world’s most famous royal family, that Prince Edward had presented him with a fabulous tiepin, and that he was granted an audience with Queen Victoria. However, what excited him most was the discovery that he could keep in touch with a moving ship up to a distance of fourteen miles, his signals apparently penetrating the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. The newspapers loved it, none more so than a new popular publication which had gone on sale for the first time in 1896, the Daily Mail. A full-page illustration showed Marconi at his wireless set, watched by two fascinated ladies, with his signals careering off along a wavy dotted line to the aerial of the royal yacht.
As an inventor Marconi was exceptionally lucky. While others struggled to find financial backers, his contacts through his mother’s aristocratic Anglo-Irish family had given him security for at least a year or two, and the money to pay for equipment and assistants. During his brief period under William Preece’s patronage Marconi had ‘borrowed’ the old sailor George Kemp, who became his most loyal attendant. Now Kemp was on the Marconi Wireless Company payroll,* (#ulink_e4f4fbae-4cd5-5b57-b127-4196634fcd61) rigging up aerials on windswept coasts wherever they were needed, for all the world like a mariner who had found a new lease of life raising masts on land with which to catch not the wind, but electronic waves. Young as Marconi was, his dedication and single-mindedness, his gentlemanly demeanour, so different from the popular image of the ‘mad inventor’, and his continuous success inspired loyalty in his small workforce of engineers, most of whom had learned their trade in the business of telegraph cables.
Although a lot of ‘secret’ experimentation went on in the hotel laboratories on the Isle of Wight and at Poole on the south coast, Marconi was always willing to chance his luck and his reputation with very public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy. This above all endeared him to the new popular journals of the day, which had a hunger for exciting and novel discoveries, especially those which might have potential for driving forward the already wonderful advances in modern civilisation. The dapper figure of Signor Marconi, always smartly dressed, the modest Italian who spoke perfect English and who appeared to be able to work miracles with a few batteries and a baffling array of wires, was irresistible.
* (#ulink_28c24e05-e7d5-58fa-90f6-57a9f72caeea)Marconi’s name was added to the company name in February 1900. Very rapidly other Marconi companies were formed, including the Marconi International Marine Company and the American Marconi Company, both also in 1900.
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An American Investigates (#ulink_3b490b46-7ba4-575e-8a27-bfb7ff481090)
Wherever Marconi went in these heady early days of his fame he was sure to have along with him a writer commissioned by the American McClure’s magazine. Founded in 1894 by an Irish émigré, Samuel McClure, McClure’s was one of the first publications to make use of the new process of photo-engraving, which put the old woodcut engravers out of business, as photographs could now be reproduced at a fraction of the cost of hand-carved illustrations. McClure’s sold for fifteen cents on the news-stands, yet it could attract such eminent writers as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was the policy of the magazine to invite writers of fiction to cover news events, and McClure’s fascination with Marconi resulted in a series of wonderfully colourful descriptions of the young inventor at work.
Marconi had already made the headlines with his coverage of the Kingston Regatta and his link-up between Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales at the Isle of Wight, as well as one or two other well-publicised demonstrations of his invention. When McClure’s learned that the French government had asked him if he could send a wireless signal across the English Channel – at thirty-two miles by far the greatest distance attempted up to that time – in the spring of 1899, it decided that this had to be covered. Cleveland Moffett, a writer of fictional detective stories, and a fellow reporter, Robert McClure, brother of the magazine’s founder, were despatched to cover the historic event, and to reassure themselves and their readers that there was no trickery involved. Moffett joined Marconi on the French side, in the small town of Wimereux, close to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where thirty-five years before Annie Jameson had secretly married Giuseppe Marconi. He wrote:
At five o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, March 27th, everything being ready, Marconi pressed the sending-key for the first cross-channel message. There was nothing different in the transmission from the method grown familiar now through months at the Alum Bay and Poole stations. Transmitter and receiver were quite the same; and a seven-strand copper wire, well insulated and hung from the sprit of a mast 150 feet high, was used. The mast stood in the sand just at sea level, with no height of cliff or bank to give aid.
‘Brripp – brripp – brripp – brripp – brrrrrr,’ went the transmitter under Marconi’s hand. The sparks flashed, and a dozen eyes looked out anxiously upon the sea as it broke fiercely over Napoleon’s old fort that rose abandoned in the foreground. Would the message carry all the way to England? Thirty-two miles seemed a long way.
‘Brripp – brripp – brrrrr – brripp – brrrrr – brripp – brripp.’ So he went, deliberately, with a short message telling them over there that he was using a two-centimeter spark, and signing three V’s at the end.
Then he stopped, and the room was silent, with a straining of ears for some sound from the receiver. A moment’s pause, and then it came briskly, the usual clicking of dots and dashes as the tape rolled off its message. And there it was, short and commonplace enough, yet vastly important, since it was the first wireless message sent from England to the Continent: First ‘V,’ the call; then ‘M,’ meaning, Your message is perfect;’ then, ‘Same here 2 c m s. V V V,’ the last being an abbreviation for two centimeters and the conventional finishing signal.
And so, without more ado, the thing was done. The Frenchmen might stare and chatter as they pleased, here was something come into the world to stay. A pronounced success surely, and everybody said so as messages went back and forth, scores of messages, during the following hours and days, and all correct.
For a while the makeshift Wimereux station was besieged by dignitaries of various kinds eager to see this extraordinary invention in action. Among them was a British Army officer, Baden Baden-Powell, brother of Robert Baden-Powell, later the hero of Mafeking and the founder of the Boy Scouts. A particular interest of Baden-Powell was the use of man-lifting kites for reconnaissance in battle, and he was devising models of these which were being tested on Salisbury Plain. Marconi had found them useful for raising a temporary aerial when there was no time to set up a wooden mast, and it was not long before Baden-Powell’s patented man-lifting ‘Levitor’ kites were to prove vital in the development of wireless.
Although he himself was clearly convinced that Marconi was not a charlatan, Cleveland Moffett had been told to doublecheck that there was no sleight of hand going on with the cross-Channel demonstration. Deceit would not have been all that difficult: there were cables under the sea by which messages could have been passed secretly, or there might have been some prearranged set of messages which gave the impression that the sending had been successful. Electricity was exciting, but its properties and potential remained mysterious and magical, and the layman was always in danger of being duped. Moffett continued his account:
On Wednesday, Mr. Robert McClure and I, by the kindness of Mr. Marconi, were allowed to hold a cross-channel conversation, and, in the interests of our readers, satisfy ourselves that this wireless telegraphy marvel had really been accomplished. It was about three o’clock when I reached the Boulogne station [actually Wimereux, about three miles from Boulogne], Mr. Kemp called up the other side thus: ‘Moffett arrived. Wishes to send message. Is McClure ready?’
Immediately the receiver clicked off: ‘Yes, stand by,’ which meant that we must wait for the French officials to talk, since they had the right of way. And talk they did, for a good two hours, keeping the sparks flying and the ether agitated with their messages and inquiries. At last, about five o’clock, I was cheered by this service along the tape: ‘If Moffett is there, tell him McClure is ready.’ And straightway I handed Mr. Kemp a simple cipher message which I had prepared to test the accuracy of transmission. It ran thus:
MCCLURE, DOVER: Gniteerg morf Ecnarf ot Dnalgne hguorht eht rehte. MOFFETT.
Read on the printed page it is easy to see that this is merely, ‘Greeting from France to England through the ether,’ each word being spelled backward. For the receiving operator at Dover, however, it was as hopeless a tangle of letters as could have been desired. Therefore was I well pleased when the Boulogne receiver clicked me back the following:
MOFFETT, BOULOGNE: Your message received. It reads all right. Vive Marconi, MCCLURE.
Then I sent this:
MARCONI, DOVER: Hearty congratulations on success of first experiment in sending aerial messages across the English channel. Also best thanks on behalf of editors MCCLURE’S MAGAZINE for assistance in preparation of article, MOFFETT.
And got this reply:
MOFFETT, BOULOGNE: The accurate transmission of your messages is absolutely convincing. Good-by. MCCLURE.
Then we clicked back ‘Good-by,’ and the trial was over. We were satisfied; yes, more, we were delighted.
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The Romance of Morse Code (#ulink_ac2aad65-819f-513d-a9bb-a6c3e4f75717)
As a boy staying with his cousins in Livorno, Marconi had befriended an elderly blind man, a retired telegraph operator. Marconi would read aloud to him and in return he was taught the Morse code and the technique of tapping it out with a Morse key. This was a skill which had been acquired by thousands of young men, and some women, working in the telegraph business in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which of course required no specialist skills to operate, had not replaced the cable telegraph. Dots and dashes which spelled out letters and punctuation in all languages remained, in Marconi’s boyhood and for a very long time afterwards, universal. Morse messages could be sent much greater distances than any phone communication, and they could easily accommodate ciphers, which gave a degree of confidentiality.
It was quite by chance that Morse code proved to be ideally suited to Marconi’s primitive spark transmitters, which could only send messages in the form of long and short bursts of electromagnetic waves. In fact, had Morse code not been devised more than half a century before Marconi began to create his wireless system at the Villa Griffone, he would have had to invent something very like it. In all probability, he would not have had the idea of wireless telegraphy at all.
The man who gave his name to the code was Samuel Finley Breese Morse. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791 and studied at Yale University, where he took an interest in science. His ambition, however, was to be a great painter. He studied in Europe, and had some success with his landscapes and more dramatic canvases. In London he won prizes for his depiction of The Dying Hercules as well as for his sculpture. But in America he found it hard to earn a living. He had an unpaid academic post in New York, and got by painting portraits which fetched only about $15 each. On a trip back from Europe on the sailing packet Scully in 1837 he fell into conversation with fellow passengers about the uses of electricity, and conceived the idea of an electric telegraph. It was not an original idea, and Morse was not the man to turn it into a workable invention: he lacked the meticulous craftsmanship which was Marconi’s greatest talent. But it was his inspiration which led to the development of the telegraph code which would for ever after bear his name.
Morse’s original idea was to assign to hundreds of words a dedicated number, and to use electric current to activate a machine at a distance which would record a series of figures on paper. In September 1837 he set up a demonstration in a lecture theatre at New York University, with wires wound around the hall to give a distance of about a third of a mile. It was not a working system, but the prototype for something which with a bit of imagination might be made commercial. Morse and his brother Sidney were the publishers of the Journal of Commerce, which was read by, among others, the very inventive Vail family of Speedwell, New Jersey. Stephen Vail, the father, had turned a local blacksmith’s works into a thriving iron foundry which had built the steam engine for the SS Savannah, which in 1819 had become the first ship to cross the Atlantic powered by paddle-wheels as well as sail. His son Alfred had studied at New York University, and saw there by chance one of Morse’s telegraph demonstrations. He introduced himself, and with his father’s agreement subsequently offered to help develop the system.
Morse had no money, while the Vails had prospered from their steam engines and the casting of hundreds of miles of track for the railways which were beginning to spread out across America. An agreement was signed by which Alfred Vail and his brother George would share with Morse all the rights and rewards of a commercial telegraph system. The Vail brothers went to work on improving the technology, while Morse handled the publicity. A deadline was set for 1 January 1838, by which time Morse wanted to be able to offer the US government and businesses a workable system. It was a tall order: the only available electric cable was milliners’ copper wire, used to give a structure to the ‘skyscraper’ bonnets which were then fashionable. The Vails’ first batteries were made of cherry wood, with beeswax as insulation.
The local people in the Vails’ town of Speedwell thought Alfred and George had lost their minds as they worked long hours on what was regarded as a crazy venture. Meanwhile, Morse continued to compile his dictionary, assigning to each of five thousand words a specific number – England, for example, was ‘252’. However, devising a machine which could write ‘252’ proved too much for the Vails. They were close to despair when Alfred had the brainwave that a lever which had an up-and-down movement could more easily mark dots and dashes, and these, rather than whole numbers, could represent letters and numerals. Alfred and George had missed their deadline, but they had cracked the problem.
Alfred feverishly studied the letters of the alphabet, and found that ‘E’ was used more frequently than any other. He assigned it one dot. Other letters were then given their codes – ‘S’ became three dots, for example. It took until 1844 before the first commercial telegraphy system using what became known as ‘Morse code’ went into service in the United States. It was in truth Alfred Vail who devised it, but he allowed Samuel Morse to take the plaudits and enjoy the innumerable international honours which were showered upon him.
Operating Morse keys was an entirely new skill, as was the interpretation of the dots and dashes. With the invention of the telephone receiver a tape printer was no longer necessary, for the operator could simply listen to the urgent staccato of the Morse messages, translating them instantaneously from dots and dashes to letters and words. Very soon those with experience found they could recognise the styles of other individual Morse operators; some claimed they could tell the difference between the styles of men and women. Competitions were held to find the most skilful operators, and, ever attentive to the texture of contemporary life, McClure’s magazine sent a reporter to one such public demonstration held in New York at the turn of the century. It was a ‘fast sending competition’, held in a great hall in which ‘sets of shining telegraph instruments’ had been set up. Most of the audience were themselves telegraph operators, there to see which of the dozen young male contestants was adjudged the best. McClure’s described the scene:
One by one the contestants stepped to the test table, and manipulated the key. There was a tense stillness throughout the hall, broken when ‘time’ was called by a trill of metallic pulsations read by most of the audience as from a printed page. The text of the matter is of no concern, an excerpt from a great speech, a page of blank verse, or only the ‘conditions’ found at the top of a telegraph form. Speed and accuracy alone are vital. Forty, forty-five, fifty words a minute are rattled off, seven hundred and fifty motions of the wrist and still the limit is not reached. The contestants show the same evidences of strain that characterise the most strenuous physical contest – the dilating nostril, the quick or suspended breathing, the starting eye.
Presently a fair-haired young man takes the chair, self confidence and reserve force in every gesture. Away he goes, and his transmission is as swift and pure as a mountain stream … The audience, enthralled, forgets the speed, and hearkens only to the beauty of the sending. On and on fly the dots and dashes, and though it is clear that his pace is not up to that set by the leaders, nevertheless there is a finish – an indefinable quality of perfection in the performance that at the end brings the multitude to its feet in a spontaneous burst of applause; such an outburst as might have greeted a great piece of oratory or acting.
Marconi was at this time using exactly the same shining Morse keys as the contestants used for their New York sending competition. But he could not hope to match their speed, and certainly nobody would hearken to the beauty of his sending. Each dot and dash sent by wireless was created by a deafening spark – the operators soon took to wearing earplugs. At the receiving end, if the operator was using headphones, which was soon the regular practice, the noise of interference was also disturbing and uncomfortable. It was like listening intently to a station improperly tuned on the radio. There was no tuning in the modern sense of finding the exact point on the wave spectrum to receive a transmitter’s signal. And wireless telegraphy was painfully slow. When in 1897 Marconi returned briefly to Italy to fulfil his obligation to carry out his military service, he demonstrated his invention to the navy at La Spezia. On that occasion each Morse dot required the transmitting lever to be held down for five seconds, and each dash for fifteen seconds. The letter ‘H’ alone (dot, dash, dot, dot, dot) took more than half a minute to send. The messages relayed to and from the royal yacht Osborne were equally laborious.
Lack of speed was not, however, Marconi’s greatest concern. He needed to prove not only that his system worked, but that it could span distances which the leading scientists of the day insisted were unattainable. Unless he could send messages hundreds of miles, he could never compete with the cable telegraph, and wireless would have only a restricted value for ships at sea. The widely accepted view was that because the earth was round, a spark signal transmitted from any point on land would head off over the horizon, keep going until it reached the upper atmosphere and head out into space. There was no reason to believe that electro-magnetic waves would ‘hug’ the surface of land or sea. However high you raised your transmitting and receiving aerials, the signal could be picked up no further than the line of sight between the topmost points. Marconi, and those working with him, had no theory to contradict the received wisdom. All they could do was carry on blindly, in the hope of demonstrating that the theory was wrong.
The degree to which Marconi was able to inspire confidence in his assistants, most of whom were a good deal older than him – he was just twenty-five in 1899 – was remarkable. Quiet and modest though he was in his dealings with the press, Marconi evidently had a messianic quality in his workshops in the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight and the Haven Hotel in Poole. He led by example, often working into the night.
The detective writer turned wireless sleuth for McClure’s, Cleveland Moffett, visited both these stations in 1899, and chatted to Marconi and the engineers working with him. One of these was Dr Erskine Murray, based at the Haven Hotel, where he sometimes tuned up his cello to make up a trio with Marconi and his brother Alfonso. Moffett wrote:
… after a breezy ride across the Channel on the self-reliant side-wheeler ‘Lymington’, then an hour’s railway journey and a carriage jaunt of like duration over gorse-spread sand dunes, I found myself at the Poole Signal Station, really six miles beyond Poole, on a barren promontory. Here the installation is identical with that at the Needles, only on a larger scale, and here two operators are kept busy at experiments, under the direction of Mr. Marconi himself and Dr. Erskine-Murray, one of the company’s chief electricians. With the latter I spent two hours in profitable converse.
‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘this is a fine day for your work?’ The sun was shining and the air mild.
‘Not particularly,’ said he. ‘The fact is, our messages seem to carry best in fog and bad weather. This past winter we have sent through all kinds of gales and storms without a single breakdown.’
‘Don’t thunder-storms interfere with you, or electric disturbances?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘How about the earth’s curvature? I suppose that doesn’t amount to much just to the Needles?’
‘Doesn’t it though? Look across, and judge for yourself. It amounts to 100 feet at least. You can only see the head of the Needles lighthouse from here, and that must be 150 feet above the sea. And the big steamers pass there hulls and funnels down.’
‘Then the earth’s curvature makes no difference with your waves?’
‘It has made none up to twenty-five miles, which we have covered from a ship to shore; and in that distance the earth’s dip amounts to about 500 feet. If the curvature counted against us then, the messages would have passed some hundreds of feet over the receiving-station; but nothing of the sort happened. So we feel reasonably confident that these Hertzian waves follow around smoothly as the earth curves.’
‘And you can send messages through hills, can you not?’
‘Easily. We have done so repeatedly.’
‘And you can send in all kinds of weather?’
‘We can.’
‘Then,’ said I after some thought, ‘if neither land nor sea nor atmospheric conditions can stop you, I don’t see why you can’t send messages to any distance.’
‘So we can,’ said the electrician, ‘so we can, given a sufficient height of wire. It has become simply a question now of how high a mast you are willing to erect. If you double the height of your mast, you can send a message four times as far. If you treble the height of your mast, you can send a message nine times as far. In other words the law established by our experiments seems to be that the range of distance increases as the square of the mast’s height. To start with, you may assume that a wire suspended from an eighty-foot mast will send a message twenty miles. We are doing about that here.’
‘Then,’ said I, multiplying, ‘a mast 160 feet high would send a message eighty miles?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And a mast 320 feet high would send a message 320 miles;* (#ulink_d688222c-5c17-5eac-bb18-f2433b6b966d) a mast 640 feet high would send a message 1280 miles; and a mast 1280 feet high would send a message 5120 miles?’
‘That’s right. So you see if there were another Eiffel Tower in New York, it would be possible to send messages to Paris through the ether and get answers without ocean cables.’
‘Do you really think that would be possible?’
‘I see no reason to doubt it. What are a few thousand miles to this wonderful ether, which brings us our light every day from millions of miles?’
It was the universal belief among scientists at the time that light waves could not exist in a vacuum, but must travel through something, and so too with electro-magnetic waves. What that something was, nobody knew, but it was given the name ‘the ether’, and was conceived of as a very thin, colourless, odourless jelly, in which the whole of the universe was set. The most common way of explaining ‘wireless waves’ was with the analogy of throwing a stone into the still waters of a pond and watching the ripples spread out in ever larger circles. There was some popular confusion about the term ‘ether’, for it was also the name of a gas which was an early form of anaesthetic. When scientists referred to the ether it was sometimes imagined as a vapour, but really it made no differenece what it was. Marconi believed in its existence, and as far as he was concerned it had some special property which enabled the electro-magnetic waves he sent out to travel much further than they were supposed to.
After the triumph of his Channel transmissions, Marconi’s equipment was given a trial by the British Admiralty during naval manoeuvres in the summer of 1899, when the only rival method of long-distance communication was the carrier pigeon. At the same time the huge publicity afforded his experiments attracted the attention of the New York Herald’s flamboyant owner Gordon Bennett Jr, son of the famous newspaper proprietor of the same name who had built a reputation on being first with the news. Marconi, still surviving on the investment funds of his City backers and with precious little income, accepted an offer to cover for the Herald the America’s Cup yacht races, first held in 1851, which would take place in October 1899. When he set out for New York on the Cunard Line’s Aurania in September it was his first experience of the romance of the Atlantic liners which were to play such an important part in his life.
* (#ulink_82db4bba-0034-586c-ba5a-794006856952) There is an error in the original: this should read ‘640 miles’.
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A New York Welcome (#ulink_19cbd158-306c-5c28-bd46-59302a6dbd70)
In 1899 the night-time spectacle of New York as the great liners were steered on taut hawsers towards their moorings was breathtaking. The Statue of Liberty was floodlit, and the Brooklyn Bridge a blaze of light. While many homes were still lit by gas, the electricity which illuminated public buildings and stores had in just a decade or so turned New York into a dazzling wonder of the modern world. If Guglielmo Marconi was to find real rivals in the exploitation of his new invention it would surely be here, in a land apparently obsessed with electrical power. And yet he was greeted like a conquering hero by American newspapermen when the Auratiia docked in New York on 21 September. They all wanted to know who this young man was, and were struck by how much he differed from the inventive genius of their lively imaginations. In a report Marconi gave to the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company back in London he wrote that he had to ‘run the gauntlet’ of reporters and photographers as soon as he went down the gangway. ‘For some reason or other it seemed to come as a shock to the newspapers that I spoke English fluently, in fact “with quite a London accent” as one paper phrased it, and also that I appeared to be very young and did not in the slightest resemble the popular type associated with an inventor in those days in America, that is to say a rather wild haired and eccentrically costumed person.’ He did however for a while lose his legendary cool: half his luggage had by mistake been diverted to Boston. In its report of 22 September 1899 the New York Tribune, which noted that Marconi explained about his missing luggage in ‘good English’, commented: ‘He is a slight young man of light complexion and nervous temperament, and he is a bit absent-minded. He is evidently more concerned about his scientific studies and inventions than about conventionalities and dress. He has clear blue eyes, and his face is clean shaven, except for a small moustache.’ The Tribune man had clearly caught Marconi off his guard: it was rare for him to be described as anything but well dressed when he made his public appearances.
No sooner had Marconi and his engineers begun to establish a shore station for the coverage of the America’s Cup than his extraordinary celebrity was eclipsed by the return from the Far East of a real American conquering hero. In 1898 the United States had gone to war with Spain. Cuba was then still a Spanish colony, but was being torn apart by a nationalist rebellion which America supported. The United States also coveted the Spanish colonies in the Philippines. When the American battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbour the Spanish were ordered out of Cuba. Under the command of Admiral George Dewey, the American fleet had taken on the Spanish in the Philippines, and at the battle of Manila routed them without losing a single life. In September 1899 Admiral Dewey was on his way back to New York, where he would receive a tumultuous reception. The America’s Cup was delayed a few days so that the Governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt, could stage the most spectacular ‘welcome home’ ever witnessed in the United States.
When Dewey and his fleet steamed into New York the Brooklyn Bridge blazed ‘WELCOME DEWEY’ in lightbulb letters thirty-six feet high and 370 feet across. One thousand bulbs were used for the letter ‘W’ alone. On Manhattan a victory parade a mile and a half long was lined with wood and plaster statues leading to a Dewey Arch. A two-day holiday was declared, and fireworks cracked in the bright electric air for several nights. Not wanting to be upstaged, the New York Herald asked Marconi to throw his wireless equipment on a tug and go out to greet Dewey before he docked. Back in the 1830s James Gordon Bennett Sr had made his name by beating rivals to the European stories arriving on Atlantic ships. As the sailing packets and later the steam liners approached Staten Island, despatch boats were sent out to collect the news and carry it to the New York Herald office so that it could be published before the ships docked. Gordon Bennett Jr was the man who sent Henry Stanley to seek out Dr Livingstone in Africa, and Stanley’s celebrated formal greeting, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume,’ had entered the language. He was also the promoter of a company which was involved in laying the first telegraph cables across the Atlantic. Though the younger Bennett now spent most of his time on his lavish yacht in the Mediterranean, the Herald had not lost its competitive edge.
Admiral Dewey arrived in New York two days earlier than expected, and Marconi missed the chance to waylay him at sea. However, the Herald was not to be defeated, and was able to arrange for Marconi to take part in a parade of ships held in Admiral Dewey’s honour. Shore stations had already been set up on the Navesink Highlands along the New Jersey shoreline and atop a building on 34th Street in New York in preparation for the America’s Cup coverage, and Marconi and his engineers set up their equipment on two steamships, the Ponce and the Grande Duchesse. While they were still working frantically to make contact with the shore stations, the Herald had the Ponce cruise past Admiral Dewey’s flagship, and reported the great cheers that went up when the crowds on both decks were told that Marconi, the wireless genius, was aboard. At one point, according to an ecstatic Herald account, a young woman on a ship in the harbour picked up a microphone and called ‘Three cheers for Marconi!’, to which there was a roared response. Marconi himself, however, stayed at his station, and made no public appearance until he was sure his wireless equipment was working, leaving the captain of the Ponce to make his excuses by megaphone.
The Herald gave its Marconi wireless coverage a fanfare on Sunday, 1 October 1899, with illustrations of the young Italian’s equipment and glowing reports of the way in which he had turned a scientist’s dream into an accomplished fact. As he followed the fortunes of the competing yachts, the fabulously wealthy English tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock and the New York Yacht Club’s Columbia, the news was tapped back to the shore stations on the Navesink Highlands and 34th Street. From there it was sent to Europe and across North America by cable. Marconi worked at first on the Ponce, attracting a crowd of passengers who, according to Herald reports, were more interested in the inventor than in the progress of the races. There were good commercial reasons for the Herald to hire Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system, apart from the interest it would attract and the newspapers it would sell. As customers of the various land-line telegraph services, newspapers were always haggling over the cost of using cables for messages. If wireless worked, it would be a serious, and cheaper, rival.
From the day the races began on 3 October 1899 Marconi’s fame in the United States was assured. The unbelievable had been achieved. As the New York Times put it: “We at the latter edge of the nineteenth century have become supercilious with regard to the novelties in science; yet our languor may be stirred at the prospect of telegraphing through air and wood and stone without so much as a copper wire to carry the message. We are learning to launch our winged words.’ All the newspapers and popular magazines speculated on the future of wireless, the possibility of far-flung families being brought together, of peace descending upon the earth as nation talked to nation with a magic Morse key. And it would all be so much less expensive once the cable companies’ monopolies had been destroyed.
In New York Marconi demonstrated his equipment to the United States Navy, which at the time maintained a stock of carrier pigeons for long-distance communication. It went well, but despite enthusiastic reports by their observer on the Ponce, the naval authorities were not sure that wireless was worth the price Marconi’s company was asking, and chose to hedge their bets. Soon enough, they reasoned, American inventors would come up with their own version of wireless telegraphy. And in the middle of October, just as the America’s Cup was finishing, a notice appeared in a number of newspapers in New York to the effect that Marconi had infringed an American patent taken out as early as 1882 by a Professor at Tufts University in Boston, Amos Emerson Dolbear. This patent had been acquired by the Dolbear Electric Telephone Company of New Jersey in 1886, and then bought by a Lyman C. Larnard, who was now suing Marconi. Larnard wanted $100,000 for infringement of his patent, and for all Marconi’s demonstrations to be stopped. He told the newspapers that he had bought Dolbear’s patent in July 1899 expressly for the coverage of the America’s Cup, and that he had warned both the Herald and Marconi’s company that he would sue if they went ahead with their plans.
No notice was taken of this threat, for a brief look at the claim revealed that what Professor Dolbear had patented was the same effect of ‘induction’ that William Preece had used in England. Lyman C. Larnard had not grasped the difference between this and the use of Hertzian waves; but then, neither had anyone in the United States Navy, which would remain woefully ignorant of wireless technology for almost a decade.
There was for some years a confusion over the difference between the two methods of ‘wireless’ telegraphy: Marconi’s use of electromagnetic waves generated by a spark, and the alternative of ‘jumping’ currents between parallel wires as employed by Preece and others. Both worked, and both were genuinely ‘wireless’. But there were two very significant differences. The induction method was strictly limited in the distance it could cover, as William Preece had found to his cost. On a Sunday in 1898 he had commandeered the entire telephone networks down the west coast of England and the east coast of Ireland in an effort to send Morse signals across the Irish Sea. All he got was a babble of static; he wondered if he was picking up unintelligible messages from outer space.
In the United States Thomas Edison had had more success with induction, though over no significant distances. After a poverty-stricken childhood and youth Edison had, through his practical ingenuity, acquired considerable prestige and financial backing, and had set up a powerhouse for electrical experimentation at Menlo Park in New Jersey. While Marconi was still a boy playing with batteries and wires at the Villa Griffone, Edison was demonstrating his brilliantly simple system for sending and receiving telegraph signals from moving trains. All major railroads had running alongside them electric telegraph wires, providing communication between stops along the line. Edison’s device involved fitting to the tops of carriages a metal plate which could pick up signals which ‘jumped’ across the gap of more than twenty feet from the existing wires and transmitted them to a receiver inside the train. Edison had demonstrated this invention in October 1887, on a special train on a section of the Lehigh Valley railroad which ran from New York to Buffalo.
There were 230 distinguished guests aboard, members of the Electric Club and guests of the Consolidated Railway Telegraph Company. As the train flew along, reaching sixty miles an hour at times, four hundred messages were sent. One was relayed direct to London by transatlantic cable. Edison imagined that his invention would be a boon to newspaper reporters and businessmen. However, there was no demand for it: newsmen and businessmen preferred to be free from telegrams of all sorts while ‘on the wing’. Marconi’s magic boxes were soon to do away with such a leisurely attitude to life.
Edison’s induction method worked for a moving train. But it was never going to be any use to a ship at sea, as there were no fixed wires running alongside the liners as they criss-crossed the Atlantic, other than those sunk deep on the ocean bed. Marconi’s wireless, however, could be fitted to ships, and in fact to any moving object. Hertzian waves freed wireless to go wherever it was needed, and the means of sending and receiving messages could be packed up neatly in small boxes. That was the beauty of the Marconi system, and in many ways the world of the 1890s appeared to be awaiting his invention.
After a faltering beginning, steamships had conquered the Atlantic, first using the power of paddle-wheels as an aid to sails, then gradually exchanging funnels for masts. New and more efficient engines and the screw propeller cut the crossing times down to five or six days for the swiftest liners, which competed for the right to fly the Blue Riband, awarded to the ship which achieved the fastest crossing. For a very long time after the British government had awarded the Canadian Thomas Cunard the contract to carry mail across the Atlantic in 1838, his shipping line was the leader. Nearly all the large ships were built in Britain, in Belfast or on the Clyde estuary.
In the last twenty years of the century, competition became yet more intense. As they fought to attract the rapidly growing numbers of impoverished Europeans heading for a new life in America, and the wealthy Americans who were beginning to take tours of Europe, the shipping companies ordered larger and more luxurious liners. To have the biggest, fastest ship of the day was good for publicity, even if in other terms it did not make much economic sense. Such was the competition that a new ship was usually out of date within a year or so. Luxury was the keynote of the shipping lines’ advertising, which emphasised the romance of shipboard life, often with a wistful illustration of a pretty young lady chatting idly to a handsome officer. The brochures hinted at all kinds of fun – dancing on deck for the steerage passengers, chance meetings of eligible young things in first class. It was a complaint of those who took seafaring seriously that interior designers had taken over the art of shipbuilding, as the staterooms of first class became more and more luxurious.
America, which had had the fastest sailing ships in the early nineteenth century, fell behind in this shipbuilding spree, and the government decreed that only liners built in the United States could fly the Stars and Stripes. This had little effect, but it did produce the liner St Paul, which was launched from the Philadelphia shipyards in 1895, and was to provide the opulent setting for two of the most poignant episodes in Marconi’s life.
Once he had satisfied himself that wireless signals could be sent and received over distances which stretched beyond the horizon, and did not disappear into space as the scientists had predicted, Marconi began to dream of conquering the Atlantic. When he first sailed for New York on the Aurania it was out of touch with land for days on end. If another ship sailed within signalling distance in mid-ocean they could ‘speak’ to each other by means of the semaphore flags, but if they hit an iceberg, a common hazard in the North Atlantic in spring, or their engines failed, or they caught fire, they had no means of calling for assistance. Although the Cunard Line had an impeccable safety record, every year passenger and cargo ships disappeared, many leaving no survivors or clues to the fate that had befallen them. When Marconi sailed from New York on 9 November 1899, taking a suite of first-class cabins on the American Line’s St Paul, he laid plans to end the lonely isolation of ships at sea.
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Atlantic Romance (#ulink_ee9014a3-e2db-5716-8936-60e8878a11f9)
Within the exclusive social circle of first class on the St Paul, Marconi was a celebrity, the young inventor all New York had been talking about. But there were those in America who believed that Marconi’s fame and popularity were grounded in public ignorance of the new technology. The magazine Electrical World saw him off from New York with no more than grudging admiration for his gift for publicity: ‘If the visit of Marconi has resulted in no additions to our knowledge of wireless telegraphy, on the other hand, his managers have shown that they have nothing to learn from Yankeedom as to the art of commercial exploitation of an inventor and his inventions.’
Marconi did not, in fact, have any ‘managers’ orchestrating his publicity, nor did he need any. What had most impressed the newspapers was his refusal to make any claims for his system of wireless that he could not demonstrate publicly. Thomas Edison became one of his greatest admirers, and quipped that the Italian ‘delivered more than he promised’. He added that Marconi was the first inventor he had ever met who sported patent leather shoes. In his quiet way, Marconi was an accomplished self-publicist, and before he left New York on the St Paul he had devised a scheme which would make the headlines and astonish the first-class passengers on the liner. He arranged for a cable to be sent to the engineers manning the wireless station at the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, asking them to listen out for a signal from the St Paul as it approached the English Channel on the last leg of its voyage to Southampton.
Before he sailed, Marconi set up a wireless cabin on the liner, the first ever on an Atlantic voyage, and tested and tuned it in readiness for the last hours of the journey. The transmitter would have a limited range, of little more than fifty miles, and the St Paul would be near the end of its crossing before the Isle of Wight station could pick up its signals.
Before then, Marconi had time to enjoy the easy mid-Atlantic social life. Among the first-class passengers was a glamorous young American woman, Josephine Holman. A family friend of the Holmans’, Henry McClure of McClure’s, a cousin of the magazine’s founder, was also aboard, and he no doubt introduced Josephine to Marconi. By the time the St Paul was approaching the west coast of Ireland they were engaged. Neither of them was sure how their families would react to the news. Marconi’s fame did not necessarily mark him out as a fine ‘catch’ as far as the parents of marriageable young ladies were concerned. Despite his aristocratic associations through his mother’s family, he was fatally Italian, and therefore ‘foreign’; and his fortune was by no means assured. The wireless business, many reasoned, might turn out to be just a passing fad. And Marconi’s own family might not be keen for him to marry at such an uncertain time in his career, especially to an American woman they had never met. Josephine and Guglielmo decided to keep their engagement secret for the time being.
There was no certainty about when the St Paul would enter the English Channel, or when it would be within wireless range of the Isle of Wight. The Marconi engineers waiting at the Royal Needles Hotel were therefore on tenterhooks. In the same way that fishermen attach a bell to their line so that they will know if a fish is biting even if they have dozed off, the engineers had rigged up a system whereby a bell would wake them if their receiver was called up at night. Henry Jameson-Davis and Major Flood Page, the managing director of Marconi’s company, were at the hotel awaiting the St Paul’s signal. In a letter to The Times Major Flood Page gave a vivid description of the excitement of the occasion:
To make assurance doubly sure one of the assistants passed the night in the instrument room, but his night was not disturbed by the ringing of his bell, and we were all left to sleep in peace. Between six and seven a.m. I was down; everything was in order. The Needles resembled pillars of salt as one after the other they were lighted up by the brilliant sunrise. There was a thick haze over the sea, and it would have been possible for the liner to pass the Needles without our catching a sight of her. We chatted away pleasantly with the Haven [the station at the Haven Hotel, in Poole], Breakfast over, the sun was delicious as we paced on the lawn, but at sea the haze increased to fog; no ordinary signals could have been read from any ship passing the place at which we were.
The idea of failure never entered our minds. So far as we were concerned, we were ready, and we felt complete confidence that the ship would be all right with Mr Marconi himself on board. Yet, as may easily be imagined, we felt in a state of nervous tension. Waiting is ever tedious, but to wait for hours for the first liner that has ever approached these or any other shores with Marconi apparatus on board, and to wait from ten to eleven, when the steamer was expected, onto twelve, to one to two – it was not anxiety, it was certainly not doubt, not lack of confidence, but it was waiting. We sent our signals over and over again, when, in the most natural and ordinary way, our bell rang. It was 4.45 p.m. ‘Is that you St Paul?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘Sixty-six nautical miles away.’ Need I confess that delight, joy, satisfaction swept away all nervous tension, and in a few minutes we were transcribing, as if it were our daily occupation, four cablegrams for New York, and many telegrams for many parts of England and France, which had been sent fifty, forty-five, forty miles by ‘wireless’ to be despatched from the Totland Bay Post Office.
While the rustic Totland Bay post office was handling an unusually heavy load of telegraph messages, including one giving instructions for the menu at a forthcoming dinner party in London, on board the St Paul as it steamed towards Southampton there was a good deal of fun and games. The operator at the Royal Needles Hotel tapped out a few bits of news, including the latest from South Africa, where the British were engaged in an embarrassingly costly war with the Boers, who had besieged Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. With the permission of the ship’s commander, Captain Jamison, the on-board printers, accustomed to turning out menus and general notices, produced a small newssheet under the banner The Transatlantic Times,
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Gavin Weightman
The intriguing story of how wireless was invented by Guglielmo Marconi – and how it amused Queen Victoria, saved the lives of the Titanic survivors, tracked down criminals and began the radio revolution.Wireless was the most fabulous invention of the 19th century: the public thought it was magic, the popular newspapers regarded it as miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day (in Europe and America) could not understand how it worked. In 1897, when the first wireless station was established by Marconi in a few rooms of the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, nobody knew how far these invisible waves could travel through the ‘ether’, carrying Morse Coded messages decipherable at a receiving station. (The definitive answer was not discovered till the 1920s, by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry filling the airwaves with a cacaphony of sounds – most of it American.)Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.Marconi himself was the son of an Italian father and an Irish mother (from the Jameson whiskey family); he grew up in Italy and was fluent in Italian and English, but it was in England that his invention first caught on. Marconi was in his early twenties at the time (he died in 1937). With the ‘new telegraphy’ came the real prospect of replacing the network of telegraphic cables that criss-crossed land and sea at colossal expense. Initially it was the great ships that benefited from the new invention – including the Titanic, whose survivors owed their lives to the wireless.
Signor Marconi’s Magic Box
How an Amateur Inventor
Defied Scientists
and Began the Radio Revolution
GAVIN WEIGHTMAN
For my father
CONTENTS
Cover (#u6a168d89-b8ad-5065-b2ac-b53cec7b45cc)
Title Page (#u4ab88a8a-9cd5-542b-a492-8dcf2772d4f5)
Introduction (#u8c095e6d-7755-5790-9baf-ff870f8010ae)
1 In Darkest London (#u833818ca-b416-509e-82ef-576da931c7f4)
2 Silkworms and Whiskey (#ua07debe3-6932-561f-a1cc-2e53265fb56d)
3 Sparks in the Attic (#ubc4151fb-b51d-5d11-aa74-999082b6d36a)
4 In the Heart of the Empire (#u27f9429f-ae01-554f-bafe-609d7f1be1e8)
5 Dancing on the Ether (#u09312aa5-a46a-5345-91f7-9a9fae92bc69)
6 Beside the Seaside (#ub3b7c20c-8e17-580f-97a8-ad90e57c6b5e)
7 Texting Queen Victoria (#u483ff370-8275-55b4-8743-554273579717)
8 An American Investigates (#ucaedcabb-74dc-5541-b1d2-35b395189ca6)
9 The Romance of Morse Code (#u6a120756-b96e-5385-807c-2f284b42831a)
10 A New York Welcome (#uab177554-c817-5834-99c6-3b479045e527)
11 Atlantic Romance (#ufeb56ec4-29c1-5ea8-bbec-546bf40e07ec)
12 Adventure at Mullion Cove (#litres_trial_promo)
13 An American Forecast (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Kite-Flying in Newfoundland (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Spirits of the Ether (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Fishing in the Ether (#litres_trial_promo)
17 The End of the Affair (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Farewell the Pigeon Post (#litres_trial_promo)
19 The Power of Darkness (#litres_trial_promo)
20 The Hermit of Paignton (#litres_trial_promo)
21 The King’s Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)
22 The Thundering Professor (#litres_trial_promo)
23 A Real Colonel Sellers (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Defeat in the Yellow Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
25 A Wireless Rat (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Dazzling the Millions (#litres_trial_promo)
27 ‘Marky’ and his Motor (#litres_trial_promo)
28 On the American Frontier (#litres_trial_promo)
29 Marconi gets Married (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Wireless at War (#litres_trial_promo)
31 America’s Whispering Gallery (#litres_trial_promo)
32 A Voice on the Air (#litres_trial_promo)
33 The Bells of Budapest (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Wireless to the Rescue (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Dynamite for Marconi (#litres_trial_promo)
36 Le Match Dew-Crippen (#litres_trial_promo)
37 A Marriage on the Rocks (#litres_trial_promo)
38 Ice and the Ether (#litres_trial_promo)
39 ‘It’s a CQD, Old Man’ (#litres_trial_promo)
40 After the Titanic (#litres_trial_promo)
41 The Crash (#litres_trial_promo)
42 The Suspect Italian (#litres_trial_promo)
43 Eclipse of Marconi on the Eiffel Tower (#litres_trial_promo)
44 In Bed with Mussolini (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_032adcfe-58fb-5bad-aafe-18775c3d2fd2)
It was the most fabulous invention of the nineteenth century. The public and the popular newspapers regarded it as nothing short of miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day in Europe and America, whose discoveries had made it possible, could not understand how it worked. Wireless in its pioneer days had nothing to do with home entertainment: no speech or music was transmitted. But the tap, tap, tap of the telegraph key spelling out messages which had travelled mysteriously through the ‘ether’ was exciting enough in a world still mostly horse-drawn and coal-fired, a world without cinema or the motor-car, in which the telephone was still an expensive luxury and great cities like London and New York had only recently winced at the brightness of electric light.
The wider world first learned about the possibilities of wireless telegraphy, as the new invention was called, in 1897. In November that year the very first wireless station was established in the exclusive Royal Needles Hotel. This splendid clifftop Victorian pile took its name from the nearby pillars of eroded rock which jut into the sea on the western corner of the Isle of Wight, a short ferry-ride off the south coast of England. An odd assortment of wires strung out on posts tethered to the ground to secure them against the stiff sea breezes and the not infrequent gales was the only outward sign that mysterious signals were being sent to the steamers, packed with skylarking holidaymakers, which plied the coast. Guests at the Royal Needles were aware when the transmitter was in operation, for they could hear and sometimes see the crack of electrical sparks activated by a Morse code key pressed by one of the operators inside the hotel. The range of these signals was only a few miles. But the fact that it was possible at all to establish, by remote control, communication with a ship steaming along at a rate of knots, even when it was lost to view behind a cliff, was nothing short of astonishing. The wonders of science, it seemed, would never cease.
Only the year before, the newspapers had been full of accounts of the ‘new photography’ called X-rays, which could ‘see’ through solid objects. The public now had to take in the amazing possibilities presented by the ‘new telegraphy’. Like most powerful new inventions, wireless had the potential to bring both good and evil to the world: could it be used, perhaps, as a weapon? Might an electric wave aimed at a battleship blow up its explosive magazine as surely as any shell from a shore battery?
This ‘new telegraphy’ was not only mind-bending in its apparent defiance of contemporary scientific understanding; there appeared to be a very real prospect of it completely replacing the network of telegraphic cables which in the previous half-century had been strung out over land and laid across the ocean beds, at colossal expense. At the very least it meant that ships at sea, including the great liners which were then carrying millions of European immigrants to North America, need never be out of contact with each other and with New York, Liverpool and London. The big question was: how far could these invisible waves travel through the ‘ether’, carrying Morse-coded messages which were decipherable at a receiving station?
In 1897, nobody had the answer to that question. The great majority of physicists who worked on what were known as ‘Hertzian waves’ very much doubted that they could be used for communication over distances greater than a mile or two. Even that range, which had already been achieved, was causing some puzzlement, for it was not known through what medium the waves from a wireless transmitter really travelled. Did they go through hills, or over them? Did they bend around the curvature of the earth’s surface? As they were akin to light and travelled at the same speed, why did they not simply dissipate into the atmosphere, never to be retrieved and decoded on the ground?
Though there were some ingenious speculations about how wireless waves travelled long distances there was no definitive answer until the 1920s, by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry, fullng the airwaves with a cacophony of sound – much of it American. In the meantime, from 1897 until the cataclysm of the First World War, wireless telegraphy was woven into the social and economic fabric of the most sophisticated societies with astonishing speed.
This is the story of how one of the most extraordinary inventions in history came about. Taking the leading role in a cast of many brilliant and eccentric characters is Guglielmo Marconi himself, whose home-made magic box first brought the ‘new telegraphy’ to the notice of the general public. In his lifetime he enjoyed worldwide fame for the achievement of turning a boyhood fascination with electricity into an entirely new form of communication, and a huge industry. Marconi was one of the greatest amateur inventors of all time. It is remarkable testimony to the fragility of reputation that a man who could command such respect in his lifetime should now be relegated to comparative obscurity, and that the names of scores of his contemporaries who made radio work have no resonance at all for a generation addicted to the most modern form of wireless telegraphy: text messaging on a mobile phone. That Queen Victoria received text messages sent by wireless from the royal yacht to her home on the Isle of Wight more than a century ago will come as a surprise to those who imagine the technology of the mobile phone is almost brand new. The story begins way back in the days of dark streets, horse-drawn carriages, and the blood-curdling murders of Jack the Ripper.
1 (#ulink_9d3323f5-87f2-5c23-bf4a-790127fe119c)
In Darkest London (#ulink_9d3323f5-87f2-5c23-bf4a-790127fe119c)
On a winter’s evening in 1896 a brougham, a four-wheeled cab drawn by a single horse, left the fashionable stuccoed terraces of west London and headed eastwards along the dirt roads and cobbled streets of the capital, which glistened in the gaslight under a light rain. The passengers were a young man who had with him two large black boxes, and a gentleman in his sixties sporting a long grey beard, his thinning hair pasted to his head in a centre parting. Steam rose from the horse’s flanks in the dank air as the brougham rattled through the canyons of streets in the City and, leaving the Square Mile, came to the fitfully-lit roads of Whitechapel. This was the frontier of the notorious East End, where only a few years earlier Jack the Ripper had mutilated his victims and left them dead or dying in dark alleyways.
The cab turned onto Commercial Street, and the young man peered through the smoke-filled air for a sight of their destination. Finally they lurched off the main road and entered a courtyard fronting an elegant building that looked as if it might have stood there for hundreds of years. This was Toynbee Hall, which had in fact been completed just fifteen years previously. It was the inspiration of the remarkable Canon Barnett, vicar of the poverty-stricken parish of St Jude’s in Whitechapel, who had chosen to conduct his missionary work not in Africa but in that part of the capital William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had called ‘Darkest London’. Toynbee Hall, modelled on Oxford and Cambridge’s colleges, was a ‘settlement’ built with money subscribed by those ancient universities. Here some of the leading figures of the coming generation of politicians and civil servants were invited to live for months at a time, so they could learn about poverty and offer some culture and instruction to the poor. There was a large lecture theatre, in which many distinguished people had delivered their opinions on the great moral, political and scientific issues of the day. A few years later the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would attend lectures at Toynbee Hall.
The speaker this evening, Saturday, 12 December 1896, was not the young man who unloaded his black boxes from the cab: he and his apparatus were to be the star turn of the lecture which was to be given by his older companion. The two had met for the first time only that April, and the bearded Victorian gentleman had subsequently been so impressed by the young man’s invention that he had become his patron. Some private demonstrations of what the black boxes could achieve had been given on the rooftops of London and out on the open chalk lands of Salisbury Plain, where the British Army rehearsed cavalry charges close to the Neolithic monument of Stonehenge. But this evening at Toynbee Hall was to be the first exhibition of the magic boxes to a public audience. The lecture was entitled ‘Telegraphy without Wires’, a subject about which little was then known outside the science laboratory and the telegraph business itself.
Toynbee Hall was packed. The speaker, William Preece, had gained a reputation for delivering lucid and amusing public lectures on recent exciting scientific discoveries. On this evening he did not at first reveal who his accomplice was, but gave a little of the history as he knew it of methods of sending telegraph messages without a wire connection. As long ago as 1838 a German, Professor Steinbjel, one of half a dozen scientists who claimed to have invented the electric telegraph, had foreseen a time when it might be possible to do away with the cable altogether.
In fact, Preece continued, he himself had already achieved this. Just two years previously he had been astonished to discover that messages being sent on underground telegraph cables owned by the British Post Office could be picked up by the exchange of a telephone company in the City, which had its wires above ground. Somehow the electronic impulses in one wire had jumped across to another, creating, in effect, a form of ‘wireless’ communication. Some experiments had been carried out to see if this could be the basis of a new system of communication. Some limited success had been achieved, but that evening Preece had an important announcement to make about an entirely new form of wireless telegraphy. It was at this point, according to newspaper reports which appeared the following Monday, 14 December, that Preece introduced his audience to the young man who shared the platform with him. He was an Italian electrician named Guglielmo Marconi who, Preece explained, had come to him recently with his home-made equipment. This evening he and Signor Marconi would for the very first time demonstrate to a general audience the working of this system.
‘The apparatus was then exhibited,’ said the Daily Chronicle report. ‘What appeared to be just two ordinary boxes were stationed at each end of the room, the current was set in motion at one end and a bell was immediately rung in the other. To show there was no deception Mr Marconi held the receiver and carried it about, the bell ringing whenever the vibrations at the other box were set up.’ When Preece pressed a lever in the sending box there was the crack of an electric spark, and an instantaneous ringing in the receiver held by Marconi. The effect was achieved, the audience was told, by the transmission from the sending box of ‘electrostatic’ waves much the same as light. These were received by the other box, in which there was a device which, when activated, rang the bell. In other words, a signal was being sent around the lecture hall which was invisible, but as tangible in its effects as any telegraph impulse sent along a wire. And it followed Marconi wherever he went in the hall.
To any modern audience this device would look more like a mildly diverting toy than an invention at the very forefront of technology. No transmission of speech, or music, or anything now associated with radio was being demonstrated. No messages were being sent at all – just an invisible electronic signal. But in 1896 that was sensational enough. It was like some fantastic act at the music hall. In fact, those present might easily have dismissed the demonstration as the work of a magician and his assistant, for the young man had a suspiciously exotic Italian name, although he looked and talked like a smart Londoner about town. However, there could be no doubts about the credentials of the speaker: the sixty-two-year-old William Preece, shortly to become Sir William, was Chief Electrical Engineer of the single most powerful communications system in the world, the government-owned British Post Office.
Only a handful of people in London had heard of the twenty-two-year-old Guglielmo Marconi. He said a few words to the audience in his impeccable, slowly enunciated English when the demonstration was over. Without the authority given it by William Preece’s presence, the lecture would probably have had little impact, and the audience would have climbed back into their cabs and carriages muttering about the devious sleight of hand of foreigners. But Preece assured them that he had seen a number of demonstrations of this young man’s method of transmitting signals, and that it held out the very real prospect that, with some modifications, it would be able to send messages through the ether over distances of several miles. Marconi’s wireless waves could activate a Morse code printer, producing an instant and invisible means of conveying exactly the same kind of messages that were then being tapped in dots and dashes around the world on the global cable telegraph network.
How many in the audience that night realised that they were seeing history in the making, we do not know. Preece, however, appeared to be full of confidence about its potential. He pledged the Post Office’s support for the development of Marconi’s invention, and dismissed as irrelevant the claims made for an Indian, Professor Jagdish Chandra Bose,* (#ulink_16a7d2bc-49c6-545a-8251-18df33a1b3e5) as the true discoverer of wireless telegraphy. There was loud cheering when Preece told the audience that what had been demonstrated that evening would give Britain’s mariners ‘a new sense and a new friend’, and would make navigation infinitely easier and safer than it then was.
Preece flicked open the cover of his gold hunting-watch, and drew the lecture to a close. That evening he took young Marconi back across the city to a house rented in fashionable Westbourne Park before going on to his own home in Wimbledon, eight miles out of London.
Though they were very different in age and background, there was clearly an affinity between the two men. Both, in their different ways, had disliked formal education, but were fanatical workers when a subject interested them. Preece was dismissive of academics, who were always claiming superior knowledge of physics and the mysterious workings of electricity but produced nothing of practical value. Writing about his own childhood, he had said that boys always rebel against their fathers and learn only from their mothers. At least, that had been his experience, for he owed all his success to his Welsh mother. That night, after his first successful public demonstration of his magic boxes, it was Marconi’s mother who was there to greet the young man on his return home. Preece had become his patron, but his Irish mother Annie Jameson had championed him since childhood, giving him emotional support and encouragement, while his sterner Italian father had paid the bills for his son’s experiments. And it was his mother who, through the connections of her wealthy and influential family, had managed to arrange the fortuitous meeting between her son and the distinguished head of the British Post Office’s engineering operations.
William Preece was old enough to recall the invention of the safety match for lighting home fires in his native Wales, and had spent his working life experimenting with, adopting and adapting the new electronic technologies as they were revealed to the world. Twenty years earlier he had toured the United States and had met Thomas Edison, America’s most celebrated inventor, who served him raw ham, tea and – to his astonishment – iced water in summer.
As well as enjoying Edison’s chilled drinks, Preece had been one of the first to try out Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and had brought the equipment back to England, where it was an object of incredulous fascination. Could you actually recognise the voice of someone on the other end of the line, people wondered. When the telephone was still at the development stage, conversations sounded like a high-pitched exchange between the protagonists of a seaside Punch and Judy show. Preece had initially regarded Bell’s invention as no more than a ‘scientific toy’. Now he had his own phone number at the Post Office headquarters in St Martin’s-le-Grand, and the telephone was no longer a novelty. But there were new inventions to startle the public. In the very week that young Marconi had arrived in London early in 1896 he had read in the newspapers of an astonishing discovery. A Bavarian physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, had chanced upon a way of ‘photographing the invisible’ with mysterious rays produced by electricity passing through a vacuum. The ability to see through solid objects was the stuff of science fiction, yet Roentgen had produced a photographic image of the bone structure of a human hand. As he did not know what the electric waves were, he called them ‘X-rays’.
News of Roentgen’s amazing discovery had broken on 5 January 1896 in a Vienna newspaper, and had rapidly been telegraphed around the world. There was much chatter about the danger of X-rays to the modesty of women: wicked inventors might be able to see through their clothing. Scientific discovery was often frightening as well as exciting, and the penetrating powers of X-rays were the subject of much anxious debate, though nobody then knew about the dangers of radiation. The issue was privacy.
The publicity William Preece had afforded Marconi very quickly drew the attention of newspapers and magazines, and when news of his ‘Marconi waves’ began to spread the public were intrigued to know if they too might threaten the privacy and decency of English ladies. After all, his magic boxes sent and received invisible signals which could apparently travel much further than Roentgen’s X-rays. Young as he was, Marconi found himself called upon to provide extensive interviews. Just three months after the Toynbee Hall lecture, in March 1897, the Strand Magazine published an article by H.J.W. Dam with the tide ‘The New Telegraphy’. It was syndicated worldwide by the enterprising American magazine McClure’s.
Dam had been to see Marconi at his home in Westbourne Park in the hope of learning something about this young man whose discoveries were ‘more wonderful, more important and more revolutionary’ than Roentgen’s ‘new photography’. He found himself greeted by a most unusual character, who was ‘completely modest’ and made no claims at all as a scientist. This ‘tall, slender young man’, who looked at least thirty, had a ‘calm, serious manner and a grave precision of speech’ which gave the impression that he was much older than he was. Speaking in his ‘perfect’ English, he told the reporter that he had been for ten years an ‘ardent amateur student of electricity’.
In the calm, considered manner which was to be his hallmark whenever called upon to explain his discoveries to the public, Marconi told Dam how he had found to his surprise while experimenting with electric waves on his father’s country estate outside Bologna that he could generate signals which went through or over hills. He really had no idea how they got there, but he had proved over and again that a rise in the land three quarters of a mile across was no obstacle to the transmission and reception of these electronic signals. Marconi explained that he had begun by copying the laboratory equipment of the great German physicist Heinrich Hertz, and had adapted it so that he could send Morse messages. But whereas Hertz had sent his electro-magnetic waves only a few yards, Marconi had achieved much greater distances, and he was not sure if he had, by chance, discovered a previously unknown phenomenon: a new kind of ‘wave’.
The science Marconi was working with was not well understood. In 1865 the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that electro-magnetic forces travelled in waves. These were analogous to sound and light waves, but could not be detected by the human ear or eye. They travelled at the speed of light, but were invisible, because the eye could only detect certain wavelengths. Maxwell’s model was purely mathematical, and he left it to others to find a way of generating and measuring these waves. Hertz had been the first to achieve this, publishing his findings in 1888. He used a spark to generate the waves which he bounced back and forth in his laboratory. Crudely speaking, the size of the spark ‘gap’ determined the length of the waves, and Hertz had worked with fairly short waves. Marconi had experimented with a whole range of different spark transmitters, and had produced results which appeared to be substantially different from those of Hertz. In fact, because he believed his apparatus could produce waves that could reach parts impenetrable by those generated by Hertz, Marconi thought he might have chanced upon some new kind of electromagnetic signal. Dam asked: What is the difference between these and the Hertz waves?’
Marconi replied: ‘I don’t know. I am not a professional scientist, but I doubt if any scientist can tell you.’ He thought it might have something to do with the form of the wave. As to the nuts and bolts of his equipment, Marconi said apologetically that he could not say more because it was being patented, and was therefore top secret. What he could tell the astonished reporter was that his waves ‘penetrate everything and are not reflected or refracted’ even by solid stone walls or metal. He could even send them through an ‘ironclad’, a heavily reinforced battleship.
This last claim set up instant alarm in the reporter: its implications were far more serious than the possibility of X-rays compromising the modesty of ladies. ‘Could you not from this room explode a box of gunpowder placed across the street in that house yonder?’ Dam asked.
‘Yes,’ Marconi replied confidently. ‘If I could put two wires or two plates in the powder, I could set up an induced current which would cause a spark and explode it.’
‘At what distance have you exploded gunpowder by means of electric waves?’
‘A mile and a half.’
Could Marconi’s instruments ignite the explosive magazine of an ironclad and blow it up from a distance? Already the Royal Navy was concerned that if its ships carried wireless telegraphy equipment, the signals might blow up their own stores of powder. It could be a problem, Marconi conceded. Beams from electric lighthouses along the coast could destroy an unwary fleet in seconds. Warming to this notion, Dam wrote: ‘Of all the coast defences ever dreamed of, the idea of exploding ironclads by electric waves from the shore and over distances equal to modern cannon ranges is certainly the most terrible possibility yet conceived.’
Blowing up ships, however, had never been in Marconi’s mind. Quite the reverse. From boyhood, when his father had bought him a yacht which he sailed in the Bay of Genoa, he had loved the sea. Though he had no clear idea how his wireless waves would be used in practical terms, he did imagine that there was a real prospect of communications between ships and shore, and between ships on the open ocean, where there were no telegraph cables.
In London, Marconi and his mother could have enjoyed a glamorous social round: nightly balls, dinner parties, the opera, Ascot and all the trappings of the Season. Annie had many relatives in town, and always enjoyed her trips to England. But there was to be little time for frivolous socialising: Guglielmo had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and he was fearful that if he did not move fast someone else would overtake him in the exploitation of the new telegraphy. After all, he was only an amateur whose invention was homespun, devised after long hours working alone in the attic of the family country home in Italy.
* (#ulink_dd303670-ced3-503d-8f70-9d094a3b8991) In 1895 Professor Bose, of the Presidency College, Calcutta, had succeeded in ringing a bell and exploding a mine with electro-magnetic waves while working along the same lines as Marconi.
2 (#ulink_9041899e-f920-549a-9e4c-e98da4fdd5f5)
Silkworms and Whiskey (#ulink_9041899e-f920-549a-9e4c-e98da4fdd5f5)
The Villa Griffone is set in its own grounds of orchards, vineyards and fields in rolling countryside outside the village of Pontecchio, near Bologna. Bologna had water-powered silk-weaving mills long before the Industrial Revolution transformed British industry in the late eighteenth century. The city had a distinguished history of scientific discovery, and was the home of the eighteenth-century pioneer of electrical forces Luigi Galvani. Nearly all the advances in the study of electro-magnetism had been achieved by trial and error, in the absence of any useful theory. In fact theory had sometimes got in the way of understanding, as is often the case. Galvani, a Professor of Anatomy at the ancient University of Bologna, had come to the conclusion that frogs could produce electricity after the chance discovery that specimens he was dissecting reacted to an electrical current. His disciple, and later his opponent, Alessandro Volta showed that the frogs were merely acting as crude batteries, and went on to create the first means of storing electricity which could be tapped for a continuous source of current. The work of both men has been commemorated in the terms ‘galvanised’ and ‘voltage’.
From an early age Guglielmo Marconi was familiar with Bologna’s scientific heritage, and in the long summer days at the Villa Griffone he began his first experiments with the mysterious forces of electricity. Marconi’s heritage – and the pioneer days of wireless – arose from a most unlikely union between Irish whiskey and Italian silkworms. That his mother and father should have met at all was remarkable, that they should have fallen in love even more so, and that they married in the teeth of opposition from her family the most unlikely event of all. Theirs was a story of high romance, yet precious little of it is known apart from the reminiscences of Marconi’s mother, recorded much later by her granddaughter Degna.
Annie Jameson was born in 1843, one of four daughters of Andrew Jameson of County Wexford in Ireland, the well-known and wealthy distiller of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. The family lived in an old manor called Daphne Castle, which had parkland and a moat. Annie had one outstanding talent: singing. As a teenager she had wanted to perform in opera, and according to the family legend had been invited to sing at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Her father refused to let her go: the stage was not in those days regarded as a suitable place for well-bred young ladies. As compensation for the thwarting of her ambitions it was arranged that Annie should go to Bologna to study singing. There she could stay with business contacts of the Jamesons, a respectable Italian family called de Renolis, and could sing to her heart’s content without risk to her family’s reputation.
The de Renolis family had suffered a personal tragedy a few years before Annie arrived to stay with them. In 1855 their daughter Giulia had married a moderately prosperous landowner called Giuseppe Marconi. In the same year Giulia had given birth to her first child, a son, Luigi. Sadly, as happened so often at that time, the young mother survived the birth of her son by only a few months. Giuseppe, now a lone parent, remained close to the de Renolis family. He had moved to Bologna from the hill country of the Apennines, which run like a backbone through north central Italy. When his wife died he asked his father, who still lived in the mountain village where Giuseppe had been brought up, to join him in Bologna. The ageing Domenico Marconi agreed, sold up his mountain estate and moved to the city. But Bologna was too busy and confined for him, so he bought an estate at Pontecchio, eleven miles away. In the large, square, plain but handsome Villa Griffone he took to raising silkworms, and made some success of it, while his widower son Giuseppe husbanded the orchards and the fields in the rolling countryside.
When Annie Jameson came to stay with the Renolis she was introduced to their bereaved son-in-law and little grandson Luigi. Giuseppe lived more at the Villa Griffone than in Bologna, and Annie must have spent some time there too, for she fell in love with the place and with him. She returned to Ireland to ask her family for permission to marry her Italian sweetheart, but they flatly refused to consider it. According to her granddaughter Degna, the grounds for rejection were that he was much older than her (by about seventeen years), he already had a son, and to top it all he was a foreigner. Annie had to bow to the authority of her father, and appeared to accept the decision. But she kept in touch with Giuseppe, with letters somehow smuggled between Ireland and Italy, and vowed to run away to marry him when she reached the age of majority at twenty-one. This she did, meeting him in Boulogne-sur-Mer on the northern coast of France, where they married on 16 April 1864. As husband and wife they took stage coaches across France, over the Alps and back to Bologna and the Villa Griffone. Their first child, Alfonso, was born a year later. Nine years later, in April 1874, Annie gave birth in Bologna to a second son, Guglielmo. Both boys were baptised Roman Catholic, although their mother was Protestant.
Giuseppe had no family other than his in-laws. His father had died, and a brother who became a priest had been murdered by a thief. Annie, on the other hand, had three sisters, all of whom had married and had children. Annie did not lose touch with them despite her elopement. One of her sisters had married an English military man, General Prescott, who was posted to Livorno on the north-west coast of Italy. Annie often took Alfonso and Guglielmo to stay with her, where they enjoyed the company of the Prescotts’ four daughters and the small English community. The English girls were also often Guglielmo’s playmates at the Villa Griffone, and he spent so much time with them and with his mother that at times Italian became his second language.
Annie read the Bible to her sons as part of their English lessons, and appears to have had no interest in science. Of greater interest to Guglielmo than religious instruction was the library in the Villa Griffone, which contained a wide selection of books. It is not clear whether it was Guglielmo’s father or his grandfather who had collected works ranging from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War to the lectures of the brilliant English chemist Michael Faraday. Perhaps many of the scientific works were provided by or for the young Guglielmo himself; in any case, from the age of about ten Guglielmo began to work his way through this store of knowledge. He became especially interested in the wonderfully lucid lectures of Faraday, who had made some of the most significant discoveries about the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and had invented the first, tiny, electrical generator.
Born in 1791, the son of a blacksmith, Faraday had had no formal education, and began his working life as an apprentice to a bookbinder. He had attended a series of lectures given by the famous scientist Humphry Davy at London’s Royal Institution, made notes on them and sent them to Davy, asking for a job as a laboratory assistant. Davy took him on, and eventually Faraday was to succeed him as the most celebrated scientist in England, spending his life experimenting in a variety of fields, but most signify-cantly on the nature and applications of electricity. He died in 1867, just seven years before Guglielmo Marconi was born. Faraday undoubtedly provided the young Marconi with a heroic model: the scientist alone in his laboratory with wires and chemicals, painstakingly testing his theories. But the greatest hero to descend from the shelves of the Villa Griffone library was the American Benjamin Franklin. Among the many achievements of this extraordinary man, born in 1706, a printer, diplomat and amateur scientist who was at seventy the oldest signatory of the Declaration of Independence, was the invention of the lightning conductor.
In a celebrated experiment, Franklin had flown a kite in a thunderstorm to demonstrate that the electrical charge of lightning could be channelled along a wire to which the kite was tethered. This clearly impressed the young Guglielmo, for his daughter recalls him telling the story of how he and a friend rigged up a lightning conductor in the house they were staying in in Livorno, and prayed for a storm. When one came they were thrilled to discover that their toy worked: at every lightning flash, the electrical charge triggered a little mechanism which rang a bell in the house. A replica of young Guglielmo’s lightning alarm is among a wonderful collection of his early gadgets in the Villa Griffone, which is now a museum devoted to his extraordinary childhood inventiveness.
It was around the time of the lightning experiment, in 1887, when Marconi was thirteen years old, that the German scientist Heinrich Hertz made known his discovery of electro-magnetic waves, prompting the Irish mathematician George Fitzgerald to declare that humanity had ‘won the battle lost by the giants of old … and snatched the thunderbolt from Jove for himself’. This was a humbling statement for Fitzgerald to make, for only a few years earlier he had announced that he believed the artificial creation of electro-magnetic waves was not possible, thereby blunting the ambition of British scientists working along the same lines as Hertz.
Guglielmo did have some academic tutoring at an institute in Livorno and a college in Florence, but his serious work was carried out on his own at the Villa Griffone. He was privileged, for his father not only provided him with a library, but grudgingly subscribed to all the leading scientific journals of the day, which Guglielmo devoured. His boyhood notebooks, rediscovered in Rome only seven years ago, are testimony to his fanatical interest in electricity and all the latest theories and inventions. The scientific community was most excited at the time by the work of Hertz. His apparatus for proving the existence of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s imagined electro-magnetic waves and measuring their ‘length’ was quite crude. A spark was produced by jumping electricity across a gap between two metal balls charged by Leyden jar batteries. The spark generated electronic waves which travelled invisibly across Hertz’s laboratory to activate a ‘receiver’ made up of wires which produced a spark in response. His experiments inspired many other scientists to examine the properties of what became known as Hertzian waves.
In 1894 Heinrich Hertz died at the tragically young age of thirty-six. During an operation for cancer of the jaw he suffered blood poisoning, which killed him. The scientific magazines were filled with obituaries which gave accounts of the trail-blazing experiments he had conducted. When the young Marconi read these he at once conceived the idea of using the apparatus which Hertz had made to send telegraph messages. He did not know it at the time, but precisely the same idea had struck a number of scientists and inventors in England, America and Russia.
A neighbour of the Marconi family at Villa Griffone was the Italian Professor of Physics Augusto Righi, who had done his own work on Hertzian waves. Guglielmo was thus able to discuss his idea with a leading scientist. He received little or no encouragement, but quite probably he managed to get an idea of how to construct the kind of transmitter and receiver Hertz had used in his laboratory, and with the help of his mother he cleared out an area on the upper floor of the Villa Griffone which had been used by his grandfather for keeping silkworms. This home-made laboratory has been lovingly restored by the staff of the modern museum. The beautifully recreated models of his early equipment are testimony to Marconi’s skill, and his dedication to an ambition on which he spent nearly all his waking hours.
By the time Marconi was a teenager there was a widespread interest in electricity, which was reflected in the publication of a range of journals from which the enthusiastic amateur could learn about the very latest theories and discoveries made in Europe and America. The majority of these were in English, and Marconi’s easy command of the language ensured that there were few developments of which he was unaware.
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Sparks in the Attic (#ulink_6ec71791-4f8e-5968-9235-c57d9541cdbf)
Day after day through the hot summer months of 1895, Guglielmo Marconi climbed the stairs to his makeshift workshop in the attic of the Villa Griffone. He said very little to his family about what he was trying to achieve behind its closed door. Early on he learned to be cautious about making any predictions, and he was very conscious of his ageing father’s view that the whole thing was a waste of time. Being a scientist or an inventor was not, in Giuseppe Marconi’s opinion, a ‘career’, unless, like their neighbour Righi, you had a professorship.
From time to time Guglielmo would allow his English cousins to visit the attic, where he would show them the magic he could perform with crackling sparks which made a bell ring by a mysterious force. He himself could not really explain how these tricks worked. He achieved them by trial and error, making use of every bit of electrical equipment and every published experiment he could lay his hands on. For his electricity supply he could buy batteries. It was also a simple matter to get hold of a Morse key and a Morse printer, for these were mass-produced for the telegraph industry, and there were many models on the market.
Morse code was a set of dots and dashes which represented the letters of the alphabet. The sender pressed a lever on the key, making an electrical connection which in turn activated a circuit connected to a printer which recorded either a dot or a dash. Hold the lever down for a short time, and it was a dot; longer, and it was a dash. It was as simple as that. You could use a Morse key to turn a lightbulb on and off, sending out a visual signal. Ships flashed Morse messages to each other with powerful beams, but could only do this when they were in sight of each other. This was, in a sense, ‘wireless’ communication. So too were the smoke signals used by Native Americans, or jungle drums, or the simple messages sent across the sea from one island to another by striking a resonant shell with a stick. But to receive any of these messages, you had to be able to see or hear the signals. To send a message over a long distance a relay was needed. Europe had such a system in the early nineteenth century, with ‘telegraph’ stations positioned on hills. Large wooden arms were moved to relay semaphore signals from one hill to the next. The invention in the 1840s of the electric telegraph, with Morse keys and receivers connected by cables, revolutionised long-distance communication, and the old hilltop telegraph stations fell derelict.
The great potential of the ‘Hertzian’ waves that Marconi wanted to harness lay in the fact that you did not have to be able to see or hear them to receive them, and you needed no connecting cable to send a signal. How far they could travel through the air Marconi did not know, but that was not the first problem. If you could not hear or see them, how could you detect them? Marconi knew from reading electrical magazines that some ingenious solutions had been found. A French physicist, Edouard Branly, had shown in 1890 that metal filings when scattered in a test tube would not conduct electric current. However, if they were ‘hit’ by an electric charge the filings clung together, and a current could pass through the tube.
The English Professor Oliver Lodge showed in 1893 that the ‘Branly tube’ could act as a detector of Hertzian waves. When a spark was generated the invisible electro-magnetic force would, at a distance, cause metal filings to stick together. Lodge called his version of the Branly tube a ‘coherer’, and showed how it could act as a kind of electronic ‘valve’. If the coherer were put into a circuit with wires from each end, the coherer could turn a current on and off. When the filings lay scattered in the tube no current could pass through it. However, when an invisible Hertzian wave hit the tube, the filings instantly clogged together, allowing an electric current to pass through them and the circuit to be closed. It was like a tap that could be turned on or off from a distance. From a few yards away it was possible to send an invisible, inaudible signal from a ‘transmitter’, which produced Hertzian waves, to a ‘receiver’, which reacted to them, closing a circuit which might light a bulb or ring a bell.
That was more or less the state of the art when Marconi began his experiments in earnest. What he wanted to be able to do was to activate, at a distance, a Morse printer so that each time he pressed his sending key the signals would show up as dots and dashes on a tape. Batteries powered the printer, and the current from them had to flow through the coherer, which would be ‘on’ when the filings inside stuck together, and ‘off’ when they were scattered. It was relatively easy to ring a bell once, but then the metal filings in the coherer stayed stuck together, and the bell would continue to ring even after Marconi had raised the Morse lever and was no longer sending out Hertzian waves. To break the circuit and silence the bell the glass coherer had to be shaken so the metal filings lay scattered once again, and no current could pass through them.
The solution Marconi devised to this problem illustrated his craftsman’s genius. Firstly, he experimented for hours to find the best and most sensitive metal filings to put in the coherer. He then made the glass tube smaller and smaller. To do this he used thermometers, which he remoulded using a hand-bellows, heating the glass with a naked flame. He had to create a vacuum inside these miniaturised coherers to increase their efficiency, and tiny silver plugs were used at either end as terminals. Marconi estimated that to make one little coherer took him a thousand hours.
Once he had his super-sensitive mini-coherer working, Marconi devised a little hammer mechanism which was activated each time he raised the lever on his Morse key and cut off the Hertzian waves. The sharp rap the hammer gave to the tiny coherer loosened the metal filings, cutting off the current and silencing the bell. In the same way, it would turn a Morse printer on and off. Hold the key down for a short time, and you produced a dot. Raise the lever, and the printer stopped. Hold the key down again for longer, and you got a dash. It was incredibly slow, but it worked.
It had been relatively easy to make the transmitter. All that was needed was batteries to provide the current, a coil to bump up the charge, and two brass balls fixed so that there was a small gap between them. Press the Morse key and the current flowed; the electricity jumping between the brass balls created a crackling bluish-yellow spark which generated electro-magnetic waves. These waves travelled at the same speed as light – in fact they were a form of light – but the crest between the waves was much longer, and they could not therefore be seen. During thunderstorms lightning gives out Hertzian waves, which is why radios crackle in response to each flash.
Less than a year after the death of Hertz, Marconi had a working wireless system. But if it was to be of any real use, he had to discover if the sparks of his transmitter could send out waves that a receiver could pick up at a distance of more than a few yards. In the searing heat of the summer of 1895 he first took his boxes outside into the parched fields and neatly trimmed vineyards of the Villa Griffone to discover what the limits of his invention were.
There was nothing in any of the electrical magazines he had read which could help him. All he could do was try different arrangements of transmitter and receiver. Possibly recalling Benjamin Franklin’s experiment with the kite in a thunderstorm, Marconi had the idea that if he raised a wire in the air and put another in the earth, there might be extra power. He was thrilled to discover that this arrangement worked, and he found that the higher the wire, and the more powerful the spark, the further signals would travel. His brother Alfonso moved the receiver and transmitter further and further apart. When the distance reached about a mile, Alfonso was out of sight on the brow of a hill which rose gently behind the villa, and he or one of the farmhands who was helping had to fire a gun to confirm that a signal had got through. Marconi’s father, who had funded his son’s madcap experiments with disgruntled reluctance, was at last impressed enough to discuss how this intriguing invention might be turned into a commercial venture.
From the moment he developed his primitive, home-made wireless system, Marconi felt he was in a race against time. If he could achieve the results he had working in the attic and the grounds of the Villa Griffone, surely someone in a university or a telegraphy company would soon come up with the same thing, or something better. If Marconi failed to make his name and his fortune with this invention, he had nothing to fall back on. His father had wanted him to join the Italian navy, but Guglielmo, preoccupied with his experiments, had failed the examinations for entry to the naval college.
Now old Giuseppe accepted that his youngest son’s future, if he had one, was with the odd bits of wire and batteries strewn about the attic of the villa, and the strange-looking antennae erected in the grounds of the estate. But who would be interested in Guglielmo’s magic boxes? And would anyone invest in them, so that the family fortune would not dwindle away? The Italian ministry of posts? Or the navy, perhaps? According to Marconi family legend, approaches were made, but after a wait of several months they received a polite refusal. This is possible, although no records have been found of any contacts with the government. Perhaps the story was invented later to protect Marconi’s reputation as a staunch Italian patriot. As it was, Guglielmo and his mother were soon on their way to London, where there was a much greater chance that his invention might be taken up, with the help of Annie Marconi’s many wealthy and influential relatives.
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In the Heart of the Empire (#ulink_8b355954-63ff-5d21-beda-20987e7c644e)
London, the heart of the British Empire, was a huge metropolis in the last decade of the nineteenth century, with a population of more than six million. The smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys filled the air with the sooty haze that so attracted Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, who captured on canvas the strange light that hung about the Thames, the great railway stations and the Houses of Parliament. London had had a steam-driven underground railway since the 1860s, and the first of the new electric underground lines had been opened between the suburb of Stockwell and the City in 1890. But the open-topped buses, carriages and goods wagons were still horse-drawn, as were the trams which provided cheaper fares out to the new working-class suburbs. Though gas and petrol engines had been devised, and the first imported motor-car had made a brief appearance on the streets in 1894, the only familiar motorised road transport was steam-driven. These lumbering, steam-engine-like vehicles were kept to a speed limit of four miles per hour in the countryside, and two miles per hour in London and other towns, and were required to have a man walking twenty yards ahead of them; the stipulation that he carry a red flag, first made law in 1865, was dropped in 1878.
Most of the metropolis was still gas-lit, though electric light in one form or another had been around for a number of years. The first experimental electric street lights had been of the carbon arc variety: a fierce, crackling white glow was produced by passing a current through two carbon rods separated by a small gap. These had been used as early as 1878 to floodlight a football match in the northern town of Sheffield, an experiment that was abandoned when the players complained that they were blinded by the glare and could not see the ball. The little town of Godalming in Surrey, to the south of London, had been the first in the world to have public electric street lighting in 1881, but the electric supplier found it uneconomical, and Godalming returned to gas. The façades of one or two London theatres, such as the Gaiety, were brilliantly lit with arc lamps, which were described as like ‘half a dozen harvest moons shining at once in the Strand’.
The forerunner of the modern electric lightbulb had been invented simultaneously in the 1870s by Thomas Edison in the United States and Joseph Swan in England, and in 1879 they joined forces as ‘Ediswan’ and were turning them out in their thousands. But only large institutions and the grander private houses could afford to have a generator installed, whether it was steam-driven or water-powered – the first hydro-electric system was fitted by Edison in Cragside, the stately home of the English arms magnate William Armstrong, in 1880. There were no large power stations in Britain – nothing to compare with the massive turbines driven by Niagara Falls in the United States – and only a handful of people in London could flick a switch to turn on domestic lights. In fact, so unfamiliar were light switches that notices were sometimes placed next to them, warning that no attempt should be made to ignite them with a match.
It was in February 1896 that Guglielmo Marconi and his mother Annie left Bologna and travelled by steam train across Europe, then by ferry to England, arriving at Victoria station in London where the air was thick with the reek of coal-smoke and horse-dung. Henry Jameson-Davis, the son of one of Annie’s sisters, who had known Guglielmo as a boy, agreed to find them a place to stay, and was intrigued by his young cousin’s wireless equipment.
Jameson-Davis was an engineer himself, specialising in the design of windmills, and invited his friends to see Marconi’s invention. One of them, A.A. Campbell Swinton, knew William Preece, Chief Electrical Engineer at the Post Office, and agreed to give Marconi a letter of introduction. Dated 30 March 1896, the letter stated:
I am taking the liberty of sending to you with this note a young Italian of the name of Marconi, who has come over to this country with the idea of getting taken up a new system of telegraphy without wires, at which he has been working. It appears to be based upon the use of Hertzian waves, and Oliver Lodge’s coherer, but from what he tells me he appears to have got considerably beyond what I believe other people have done in this line. It has occurred to me that you might possibly be kind enough to see him and hear what he has to say and I also think that what he has done will very likely be of interest to you. Hoping that I am not troubling you too much …
In April Marconi wrote home to his father that he had had a meeting with a Mr Price – he got the name wrong – who had shown an interest in wireless. It is not clear exactly when Marconi demonstrated his working model to Preece. A description of Marconi’s arrival at the General Post Office building in St Martin’s-le-Grand in the City was given years later by a lad who was one of Preece’s assistants, P.R. Mullis. While Mullis was going to and fro unloading Preece’s brougham, he noticed Marconi examining a little scale model of an ingenious bag-catching device used by the Post Office which enabled trains to take on post without stopping. He recalled that Marconi had with him two large bags. Preece emerged, shook hands with Marconi and polished his gold-rimmed spectacles as the young man unloaded brass knobs, coils and tubes and set them out on the table. Mullis was sent to fetch a Morse key, some batteries and wire. When he returned, Preece looked at his gold pocket-watch, remarked that it was past midday, and told Mullis to take Marconi to the Post Office refreshment bar and to ‘see he gets a good dinner on my account’. They were to be back by 2 p.m.
When they returned from lunch, Preece watched as Marconi pressed the Morse key and rang a bell in his receiving apparatus. This greatly intrigued the Post Office chief, who had apparently never witnessed the use of electronic waves in this way. At the end of the day Marconi was invited back, and he and Preece made some adjustments to the equipment with the help of the Post Office workshop. By the end of July Preece felt confident enough to arrange for Marconi to demonstrate his wireless to senior officials of the Post Office. What impressed everyone most was the fact that the signals could be sent three hundred yards, then nearly a mile, and then even further, with that mysterious ability to go straight through stone walls.
Preece had been booked long before to speak on wireless telegraphy at Toynbee Hall in December, and had intended to give an account of his own work sending messages across the sea on the west coast of Scotland. But he now wondered if his system, which required huge lengths of parallel wires to cover quite short distances, was less promising than Marconi’s. If it did the same job, Marconi’s would certainly be quicker and cheaper to install. Preece decided to take the opportunity of the Toynbee Hall lecture to introduce his protégé to a wider audience, which is how the two of them came to travel to Whitechapel that December evening. It had been as recently as the summer of 1894 that Marconi first conceived the idea of the use of Hertzian waves for telegraphy, in just over two years he was being fêted by the Chief Electrical Engineer of the mighty British Post Office, and by the spring of 1897 he was being pursued by more than one investor interested in his patents.
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Dancing on the Ether (#ulink_e2f52a8d-493a-53f5-8b8e-e24cd5a0bda6)
In the springtime migrant birds moving north to their nesting grounds, yellow wagtails and peregrine falcons, cross the Bristol Channel between the northern coasts of the English counties of Devon and Dorset and the south coast of Glamorgan in Wales. They skim over Steepholm and Flatholm Islands, which lie in the middle of the Channel, and rise up over Lavernock Point, a low cliff facing south from the Welsh coast. A colourful host of pink and white flowers attracts the butterflies which dance in the coastal breezes. There are relics of old gun batteries here, which guarded the wide estuary of the Severn River. When William Preece was experimenting with his method of wireless telegraphy in 1892 he chose the three-mile span between Lavernock Point and Flatholm Island, and found that he could establish a link between the two. He had much less success when he tried to create a link to Steepholm Island, which lies more than five miles from Lavernock.
Flatholm to Lavernock seemed to Preece the ideal testing ground for Marconi’s novel wireless system, and in May 1897 he arranged for an experiment which would demonstrate the potential of his protégé’s equipment. Although Preece had publicly expressed great faith in Marconi’s invention, he was not at all sure that these magic boxes could send and receive signals over any great distance. By nature he was a risk-taker, but over his long career some embarrassing experiences had taught him caution. There was the time in 1877 when the young Alexander Graham Bell, not quite thirty years old, was invited to demonstrate his new invention, the telephone, to Queen Victoria at her summer home, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Beginning at 9.30 p.m., Bell, with the help of Preece, had created a link between the main house and a cottage in the grounds so that the Queen could speak to two aristocrats familiar to her. She listened also to a rendition of the song ‘Coming Through the Rye’ sung by an American journalist called Kate Field, who had been hired to write promotional articles about the telephone. The Queen was most impressed as calls and performances came in from Cowes, Southampton and London. The grand finale was to be ‘God Save the Queen’, played by a brass band in Southampton. This had been William Preece’s patriotic idea. But as Her Majesty waited for the burst of music, the line from Southampton went dead. By the time it was fixed the musicians had packed away their tubas and trumpets and gone home. Not wanting to disappoint everybody after such a successful day, Preece himself put his mouth to the microphone and hummed the national anthem down the line, putting as much oompah into his rendition as he could. After listening for a few moments, Queen Victoria is said to have remarked: ‘It is the national anthem, but it is not well played.’
Preece was aware that he might be in for another embarrassing experience in the cause of technological advance when he asked Marconi to send a signal from Flatholm to Lavernock. There was an element of rivalry in the experiment, for Preece regarded himself as an old hand at this business of telegraphing without wires, and wanted a demonstration of the merits of his own system alongside that of the young Italian. Despite his apparent enthusiasm for Marconi’s invention, Preece appears to have hedged his bets, and was not convinced that it would have more than a very limited value to the Post Office. It was still a novelty, and might turn out to be no more than that.
While Marconi assembled his transmitter on Flatholm Island and a receiving station on the cliff at Lavernock, Preece had already had lengths of wire put in place, running in parallel on either side of the Bristol Channel. When an electric charge was sent through one of these wires it would emit waves which were picked up by the other, and a charge was made to ‘jump’ across the space between, just like the ‘crossed lines’ that had caused problems with telephones and telegraphs in the City. By turning the current on and off, it was possible to send the dots and dashes of Morse code. Preece had used this ‘induction’ system as a temporary link between the Isle of Skye on the west coast of Scotland and the mainland when the telegraph cable snapped, and knew it worked across the Bristol Channel.
Preece presumably did not imagine he was about to witness anything of historic importance as he waited in the buffeting breezes for Marconi’s signals to come through to Lavernock Point. He was, after all, the head of a British government department which dominated cable telegraphy worldwide, and which could hardly be threatened by a young amateur scientist and his makeshift apparatus. Preece had invited a German Professor, Adolphus Slaby of the Technical High School at Charlottenburg, near Berlin, to witness the demonstration. Slaby had read about Marconi’s ability to send signals over quite long distances, although he himself had had much less success.
Lavernock Point is about sixty feet above sea level. Marconi had an aerial put up which rose a further sixty feet in the air, and was topped with a zinc cylinder connected to a receiver which had been set up to record signals in Morse code on a tickertape. Another wire went from the receiver down the cliff to the seashore. The transmitter, firing off a crackle of sparks, was three miles away on Flatholm Island. For two tense days nothing came through on the Lavernock receiver. In desperation, Marconi had the receiver taken down to the beach below the cliff, to see if that made any difference. Almost instantly it began to work.
While William Preece did not really grasp the significance of the occasion, an amazed Professor Slaby certainly did. ‘It will be for me an ineffaceable recollection,’ he said later. ‘Five of us stood round the apparatus in a wooden shed as a shelter from the gale, with eyes and ears directed towards the instruments with an attention which was almost painful, and waited for the hoisting of a flag which was the signal that all was ready. Instantaneously we heard the first tic tac, tic tac, and saw the Morse instrument print the signals which came to us silently and invisibly from the island rock, whose contour was scarcely visible to the naked eye – came to us dancing on that unknown and mysterious agent the ether!’ He wrote up an account of what he had witnessed for the American Century Magazine, which was published in April 1898.
In January, 1897, when the news of Marconi’s first successes ran through the newspapers, I myself was earnestly occupied with similar problems. I had not been able to telegraph more than one hundred metres through the air. It was at once clear to me that Marconi must have added something else – something new – to what was already known, whereby he had been able to attain to lengths measured by kilometres. Quickly making up my mind, I travelled to England, where the Bureau of Telegraphs was undertaking experiments on a large scale. Mr. Preece, the celebrated engineer-in-chief of the General Post-Office, in the most courteous and hospitable way, permitted me to take part in these; and in truth what I there saw was something quite new. Marconi had made a discovery. He was working with means the entire meaning of which no one before him had recognised. Only in that way can we explain the secret of his success.
Slaby hurried back to Germany with Marconi’s secret, and set to work replicating as best he could the brilliant success of the Bristol Channel experiment.
Having returned to my home, I went to work at once to repeat the experiments with my own instruments, with the use of Marconi’ s wires. Success was instant … Meantime the attention of the German Emperor had been drawn to the new form of telegraphy … For carrying out extensive experiments, the waters of the Havel River near Potsdam were put at my disposal, as well as the surrounding royal parks – an actual laboratory of nature under a laughing sky, in surroundings of paradise! The imperial family delight to sail and row on the lakes formed by the Havel; therefore a detachment of sailors is stationed there during the summer, and I was permitted to employ the crews as helpers.
And so it was that Marconi’s first benefactor, William Preece, had unwittingly enabled the nation which was for many years to be a bitter rival of Britain in the development of wireless telegraphy to indulge in a blatant piece of industrial espionage. With the backing of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to excel in all fields of technology, and demanded that scientists be given state backing, Professor Slaby joined forces with others to develop a Teutonic version of the Italian’s new and quite magical means of communication. Meanwhile, Preece established his own induction wireless link across the Bristol Channel, and remained sceptical about the potential of Marconi’s use of Hertzian waves.
However, the City of London was mightily impressed. The potential value of what Marconi had demonstrated out on Salisbury Plain and at Toynbee Hall, and now across the Bristol Channel, lay, as far as the City investor was concerned, almost entirely in the patent rights. If an exclusive legal claim to the mechanism in the magic boxes could be established, this patent could be sold around the world, bringing instant riches. As early as March 1896, barely a month after his arrival in London, Marconi was writing to his father at the Villa Griffone with details of offers that were being made to him by various members of the extensive family contacts of the Jamesons. There was a Mr Wynne, who was related to his cousins the Robertsons, offering £2400 if Marconi would allow him to set up a company in which he would be given half the shares. Then there was another cousin, Ernesto Burn, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, who told Marconi he had a friend who had been paid £10,000 by the British government with a stipend of £2000 a year for ‘a discovery useful to the army’.
While Marconi, staying in Bayswater with his mother, conducted a frantic round of meetings in an effort to find a backer for his invention, his father offered advice which reflected his hope that Guglielmo would cash in as fast as he could and return with his spoils to buy a property near the Villa Griffone. Some solace from home arrived in two barrels of Griffone wine, which Marconi arranged to have bottled. In his letters home he pleaded not for wine but for the funds to pay for patent rights not only in England but in Russia, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain, India and the United States. In January 1897 he had written to his father:
I met two American gendemen who are willing to acquire my patent rights for the United States of America … I understand they would give me £10,000 divided as follows: four thousand immediately and six thousand when the patent is granted by the American Government … I believe it may be better for me to accept one of these early offers … even in the case something goes wrong with the other applications I would still have made a considerable profit.
A sense of urgency, of being on the brink not only of international fame but of a fortune, runs through the letters to old Giuseppe, and was the driving force in Marconi’s life after his arrival in London. This conviction that they were onto something which could bring them all riches was evidently shared by his mother’s side of the family, and their willingness to gamble a small fortune on Marconi arose from the pressure to prevent others from profiting from his invention. There was, at the same time, an underlying anxiety about the validity of the young man’s claim to have devised a genuinely unique technology, for in a very real sense every piece of his ingeniously fashioned and beautifully crafted equipment was derived from the experimental work of others. Marconi himself was acutely aware of this, and it took the very best patent lawyers in London months to find a form of words which amounted to a convincing case that in assembling bits and pieces devised in laboratories in Germany, France, England and Italy – coils, spark gaps and ‘coherers’ – Guglielmo Marconi had arrived at a unique arrangement.
Marconi’s blood had run cold when in 1896 he met on Salisbury Plain a companionable young man, Captain Henry Jackson of the Royal Navy, who told him that he too had been experimenting with Hertzian waves, and had actually built and operated a wireless telegraphy system which had been given a trial run on a battleship, with some success. According to Captain Jackson, as Marconi listened he became crestfallen, and it was only when the naval officer assured him that this work was top secret, and there were no plans to apply for a patent, that he cheered up. William Preece, during his brief honeymoon with Marconi, would insist on basking in the reflected glory of having ‘discovered’ the Italian inventor, and continued to lecture to audiences around the country on the great value this new sort of wireless telegraphy might have for lightships and lighthouses. Preece’s promotion of Marconi infuriated one of the leading English scientists of the day, Professor Oliver Lodge of Liverpool University.
Preece and Lodge had a longstanding feud about the best way to erect lightning conductors – the Post Office had hundreds of them, to protect the telegraphy system from storms – and Lodge could not abide what he regarded as Preece’s ill-informed recounting of the miraculous Marconi invention. An undignified spat broke out on the pages of The Times. ‘It appears that many persons suppose that the method of signalling across space by means of Hertzian waves received by a Branly tube of filings is a new discovery made by Signor Marconi,’ Lodge wrote in a letter to The Times in June 1897. ‘It is well known to physicists, and perhaps the public may be willing to share the information, that I myself showed what was essentially the same plan of signalling in 1894. My apparatus acted vigorously across the college quadrangle, a distance of 60 yards, and I estimated that there would be a response up to a limit of half a mile.’
By that time Marconi had already demonstrated that the range of wireless waves was not as limited as Lodge claimed. Lodge protested that he did not mean that half a mile was the absolute limit, and commended Marconi for working hard ‘to develop the method into a commercial success’. In the same letter he continued: ‘For all this the full credit is due – I do not suppose that Signor Marconi himself claims any more – but much of the language indulged in during the last few months by writers of popular articles on the subject about “Marconi waves”, “important discoveries” and “brilliant novelties” has been more than usually absurd.’
While this storm was brewing between his bearded benefactor and the piqued professor, the Jameson family freed Marconi from Preece’s patronage. His father Giuseppe was persuaded to put up the £300 necessary to pay for legal expenses in procuring patents. Then his cousin, the engineer Henry Jameson-Davis, raised £100,000 in the City, mostly from corn merchants connected with the Jameson whiskey business. The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company was set up with this substantial investment, equivalent to more than £5 million in today’s money. It was a commercial venture, the sole purpose of which was to buy the patents and give Marconi the money he needed to continue his experiments. He got sixty thousand of the £1 shares, £15,000 for his patents and £25,000 to spend on research. It was a massive vote of confidence from his mother’s family and their business associates.
Henry Jameson-Davis was not acting in a sentimental fashion by raising this huge sum for his cousin. Jameson-Davis was the archetypal Victorian gendeman, a keen foxhunter who would be out with the hounds in Ireland and England as often as six times a week in the winter hunting season. He would not gamble family money on a twenty-three-year-old with an intriguing but largely untried gadget without good reason. He and the other investors hoped to make a fortune when in July 1897 the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company opened its offices at 28 Mark Lane in the City. By buying the patent rights as soon as they were awarded, the company put William Preece and the British Post Office out of the picture, and left Marconi to get on with the work of demonstrating what a valuable invention the newly formed company owned.
Marconi anticipated that Preece would not take kindly to being supplanted by a family concern, and on 21 July 1897 he wrote to him from the Villa Griffone explaining his position. All the governments of Europe, he said, wanted demonstrations of his equipment, his patents were being disputed by the likes of Professor Oliver Lodge in England and others in America, and he needed money to refine his equipment, take out new patents and fund more ambitious experiments. His letter concluded: ‘Hoping that you will continue in your benevolence towards me I beg to state that all your great kindness shall never be forgotten by me in all my life. I shall also do my best to keep the company on amicable terms with the British Government. I hope to be in London on Saturday. Believe me dear Sir, yours truly G. Marconi.’
Naturally enough, Preece replied that the patronage of the British Post Office could no longer be continued. He showed little concern over the loss of control of the new invention, evidently taking the view that it was not going to be of much practical use anyway.
Privately, Preece was pouring cold water on Marconi’s spark transmitter in confidential memoranda to the Post Office and the government, suggesting that really there was not much future in it, and in any case the patent was probably not secure, as Oliver Lodge had a prior claim to it. In his Toynbee Hall lecture Preece had said, to the cheers of the audience, that he would see to it that the Post Office would fund Marconi. But the promised £10,000 had not been forthcoming. With his family firm, Marconi now had the funds and the freedom to set up whatever experiments he wished. As he had become convinced that the most promising practical use of wireless was sending messages from ships to shore, he headed for the coast to test the range and flexibility of wireless telegraphy.
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Beside the Seaside (#ulink_27a0c099-a2e7-58fa-9675-42d66aa7d19a)
This was the heyday of the English seaside resort, before the new fashion for sunbathing drew the wealthy to the Mediterranean in the summer months. The luxury Blue Trains steamed down to the French Riviera only in winter, when the mild climate attracted the English aristocracy who developed the resorts of Nice and Cannes. Queen Victoria herself liked to stay in Hyères, near Toulon, but not beyond May, when the heat became unbearable and everyone returned north, the French to Honfleur and Deauville on the Normandy coast, and the English to their favoured grand hotels in Eastbourne, Bournemouth and other fashionable seaside towns.
The railways had opened up many resorts to day-trippers from London, and the south coast of England was becoming socially segregated as the ‘quality’ sought refuge from brash day-tripper resorts like Brighton in the more exclusive havens and coves. Aristocratic and royal families from all over Europe would spend time in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, a short ferry-ride from the coast. In August there was Cowes Regatta, a gathering of the wealthy and the upper crust who raced their huge yachts and enjoyed a splendid social round. Queen Victoria’s favourite retreat was Osborne House, close to Cowes, and she spent most summers here in her old age, enjoying the fresh sea air as she was wheeled around the extensive grounds in her bath-chair. On the white chalk clifftops of the island were grand hotels, those on the southern coast with a view across the Channel to France. Among them was the Royal Needles Hotel at Alum Bay, on the very western tip of the island.
It was in rented rooms at the Royal Needles that Marconi established the world’s first equipped and functioning wireless telegraphy station in November 1897. An aerial 120 feet high with a wire-netting antenna was erected in the grounds, without, it seems, giving rise to any complaints from other residents. In various rooms of the hotel were pieces of equipment for transmitting and receiving, and workshops where coils of wire were wound, wax was melted for insulation, and metals filed down for experimental versions of the receiver or coherer.
The location was chosen so that Marconi could test his equipment at sea and as a means of communication between ships and the shore. In the summer months, when the coast teemed with tourists and the horse-drawn bathing machines were trundled into the chilly waters of the Channel for women bathers to enjoy a discreet dip, coastal steamers ran regularly from the pier at Alum Bay to the resorts of Bournemouth and Swanage to the west. Marconi negotiated to fit wireless telegraphy equipment to two of these, the May Flower and the Solent, so that he could test the range and effectiveness of his station at the hotel. When he and his engineers were transmitting, guests were intrigued by the crackle and hiss of the sparks which generated the mysterious and invisible rays that activated the Morse code tickertape on the ships.
English hotels offered the young inventor comfort and fine food, a place where his mother and older brother Alphonso as well as the staff of engineers he was gathering around him could stay. Though Marconi and his mother had no time to enjoy the glamorous social life of London, they were able to find some relaxation on the breezy south coast of England. After Alum Bay another station was opened at the Madeira Hotel in Bournemouth, fifteen miles down the coast. Bournemouth had many distinguished visitors and residents in the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin had stayed there in the 1860s; the beautiful Emilie Charlotte le Breton, known by her stage name Lillie Langtry, lived in a house in Bournemouth provided by her lover, the Prince of Wales, in the 1880s; Robert Louis Stevenson had written The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Bournemouth while recovering from ill-health; and the artist Aubrey Beardsley had only recently left the resort after a period of convalescence when Marconi arrived.
The Bournemouth station first went into operation in January 1898, just before a blizzard blanketed the south coast in deep snow. Newspaper reporters had gathered in Bournemouth, where William Gladstone, the former Prime Minister and grand old man of British politics, was seriously ill. The weight of snow brought down the overhead telegraph wires, and communication with London was cut. It was characteristic of Marconi’s opportunism and instinct for publicity that he arranged for the newly opened station at the Madeira Hotel to send wireless messages to the Royal Needles Hotel, from where they could be forwarded to London by the telegraph links from the Isle of Wight, which were still open. In the event, Gladstone recovered sufficiently to return to his home, where he died in May 1898.
Marconi fell out with the management of the Madeira Hotel – it is not clear if the dispute was about money or the nuisance his wireless station caused to other guests – and moved his station to a house in Bournemouth, and then finally to the Haven Hotel, a former coaching inn in the adjoining resort of Poole. This became a home from home for him for many years, long after the station at the Royal Needles Hotel was closed down. After a day in which the Haven’s guests were entertained by the crackling of Marconi’s aerial, the inventor would often sit down at the piano after supper. Accompanied by his brother Alfonso on the violin and an engineer, Dr Erskine Murray, on cello, the trio would play popular classical pieces as the prevailing south-west wind rattled the hotel windows. Annie Marconi often stayed to look after her son, and those evenings in Poole were among the most delicious and poignant of her life. She was to see Guglielmo less and less as he pursued with steely determination his ambition to transmit wireless signals further and further across the sea. For the time being, however, the fame he had already achieved was a vindication of her faith in him, and indeed of the great risks she had taken in her own life.
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Texting Queen Victoria (#ulink_b8a16e52-a497-5ead-8d3c-95e1fdd9ade6)
On 8 August 1898 the airwaves crackled with one of the first text messages in history: ‘Very anxious to have cricket match between Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers. Please ask the Queen whether she would allow match to be played at Osborne. Crescent goes to Portsmouth, Monday.’ It was sent from the royal yacht Osborne, off the Isle of Wight, to a small receiving station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House. Queen Victoria’s reply was tapped back across the sea: ‘The Queen approves of the match between the Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers being played at Osborne.’
The Queen, then seventy-nine years old, had spent much of the summer at Osborne, and could not fail to notice that something intriguing was going on a few miles to the south at the Royal Needles Hotel. Guglielmo Marconi was not only becoming something of a local figure, he had won tremendous acclaim in the press for one of the first commercial tests of his wireless telegraphy, when the Dublin Daily Express had asked him if he could cover the Kingston Regatta in Dublin Bay that July. The newspaper had been impressed by some experiments one of Marconi’s engineers had carried out on a treacherous part of the Irish coast for the shipping underwriters Lloyd’s of London. To cover the Kingston Regatta Marconi fitted up a tug, the Flying Huntress, with his equipment, and followed the yacht races at sea, sending back the latest news and positions to a receiving station on shore which then cabled the up-to-the-minute accounts to the Express’s sister paper, the Evening Mail.
The Flying Huntress was an old puffer, and looked comical with its makeshift aerial mast and a roll of wire rabbit-netting rigged up to exchange signals with the shore station in the gardens of the Kingston habourmaster’s home. In contrast to the bizarre sight of ‘Marconi’s magic netting hanging from an impromptu mast’, the Dublin Daily Express reporter found the inventor himself captivating.
A tall, athletic figure, dark hair, steady grey blue eyes, a resolute mouth and an open forehead – such is the young Italian inventor. His manner is at once unassuming to a degree, and yet confident. He speaks freely and fully, and quite frankly defines the limits of his own as of all scientists’ knowledge as to the mysterious powers of electricity and ether. At his instrument his face shows a suppressed enthusiasm which is a delightful revelation of character. A youth of twenty-three who can, very literally, evoke spirits from the vasty deep and despatch them on the wings of the wind must naturally feel that he had done something very like picking the lock of Nature’s laboratory. Signor Marconi listens to the crack-crack of his instrument with some such wondering interest as Aladdin must have displayed on first hearing the voice of the Genius who had been called up by the friction of his lamp.
There was just as much fascination with the shore station, where Marconi’s ‘chief assistant’ George Kemp, a stocky little Englishman with a handlebar moustache, an indefatigable worker who knew his masts and his ropes from his time in the Navy, and who Marconi had met through Preece at the Post Office, was tracked down by another Daily Express journalist. The ‘old navy man’ gave a down-to-earth account of the state of the art: ‘The one thing to do if you expect to find out anything about electricity is to work,’ said he, ‘for you can do nothing with theories. Signor Marconi’s discoveries prove that the professors are all wrong, and now they will have to go and burn their books. Then they will write new ones, which, perhaps some time they will have to burn in their turn.’ Of Marconi, Kemp said: ‘He works in all weather, and I remember him having to make three attempts to get out past the Needles in a gale before he succeeded. He does not care for storms or rain, but keeps pegging away in the most persistent manner.’
Yet another reporter on board the Flying Huntress described Marconi standing by the instruments ‘with a certain simple dignity, a quiet pride in his own control of a powerful force, which suggested a great musician conducting the performance of a masterpiece of his own composing’. Though he had been determined not to be overawed by this wonderful invention, the reporter confessed to a thrill when he joined Marconi in a little cabin to send a message to the shore. Having witnessed this remarkable demonstration, a devilish impulse to play with wireless overcame him.
Is it the Irish characteristic, or is it the common impulse of human nature, that when we find ourselves in command of a great force, by means of which stupendous results can be produced for the benefit of mankind, our first desire is to play tricks with it? No sooner were we alive to the extraordinary fact that it was possible, without connecting wires, to communicate with a station which was miles away and quite invisible to us, than we began to send silly messages, such as to request the man in charge of the Kingston station to be sure to keep sober and not to take too many ‘whiskey-and-sodas’.
All the English newspapers reported Marconi’s triumph at the Kingston Regatta, and the glowing descriptions of this modest young inventor and his magical abilities impressed Queen Victoria and her eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales, known affectionately as ‘Bertie’.
The Prince of Wales spent much of his time with rich friends, and had been a guest of the Rothschilds, the banking millionaires, in Paris, where he had fallen and seriously injured his leg. In August he was to attend the Cowes Regatta on the royal yacht, and a request was made to Marconi to set up a wireless link between the Queen at Osborne and her son on the ship moored offshore. Marconi was only too happy to oblige: it was excellent publicity, and it was no concern of his if, for the time being, wireless was employed frivolously. In any case, as he later told an audience of professional engineers, it offered him ‘the opportunity to study and meditate upon new and interesting elements concerning the influence of hills on wireless communication’.
With an aerial fixed to the mast of the royal yacht and a station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House, the textmessaging service between the Queen and her son was successfully established. A great many of the guests and members of the royal family on the yacht and staying at Osborne House took the opportunity to make use of this entirely novel means of communication. The messages were received as Morse code printout, which was then decoded and written in longhand on official forms headed ‘Naval Telegraphs and Signals’. In this way a lady called Emily Ampthill at Osborne was able to ask a Miss Knollys on the royal yacht: ‘Could you come to tea with us some day (end)’, to which the reply came: ‘Very sorry cannot come to tea. Am leaving Cowes tonight (end)’. More than a hundred messages were sent, many of them from Queen Victoria showing concern for Bertie’s bad leg.
This was another triumph for Marconi. He wrote home to his father to tell him excitedly of his two weeks with the world’s most famous royal family, that Prince Edward had presented him with a fabulous tiepin, and that he was granted an audience with Queen Victoria. However, what excited him most was the discovery that he could keep in touch with a moving ship up to a distance of fourteen miles, his signals apparently penetrating the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. The newspapers loved it, none more so than a new popular publication which had gone on sale for the first time in 1896, the Daily Mail. A full-page illustration showed Marconi at his wireless set, watched by two fascinated ladies, with his signals careering off along a wavy dotted line to the aerial of the royal yacht.
As an inventor Marconi was exceptionally lucky. While others struggled to find financial backers, his contacts through his mother’s aristocratic Anglo-Irish family had given him security for at least a year or two, and the money to pay for equipment and assistants. During his brief period under William Preece’s patronage Marconi had ‘borrowed’ the old sailor George Kemp, who became his most loyal attendant. Now Kemp was on the Marconi Wireless Company payroll,* (#ulink_e4f4fbae-4cd5-5b57-b127-4196634fcd61) rigging up aerials on windswept coasts wherever they were needed, for all the world like a mariner who had found a new lease of life raising masts on land with which to catch not the wind, but electronic waves. Young as Marconi was, his dedication and single-mindedness, his gentlemanly demeanour, so different from the popular image of the ‘mad inventor’, and his continuous success inspired loyalty in his small workforce of engineers, most of whom had learned their trade in the business of telegraph cables.
Although a lot of ‘secret’ experimentation went on in the hotel laboratories on the Isle of Wight and at Poole on the south coast, Marconi was always willing to chance his luck and his reputation with very public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy. This above all endeared him to the new popular journals of the day, which had a hunger for exciting and novel discoveries, especially those which might have potential for driving forward the already wonderful advances in modern civilisation. The dapper figure of Signor Marconi, always smartly dressed, the modest Italian who spoke perfect English and who appeared to be able to work miracles with a few batteries and a baffling array of wires, was irresistible.
* (#ulink_28c24e05-e7d5-58fa-90f6-57a9f72caeea)Marconi’s name was added to the company name in February 1900. Very rapidly other Marconi companies were formed, including the Marconi International Marine Company and the American Marconi Company, both also in 1900.
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An American Investigates (#ulink_3b490b46-7ba4-575e-8a27-bfb7ff481090)
Wherever Marconi went in these heady early days of his fame he was sure to have along with him a writer commissioned by the American McClure’s magazine. Founded in 1894 by an Irish émigré, Samuel McClure, McClure’s was one of the first publications to make use of the new process of photo-engraving, which put the old woodcut engravers out of business, as photographs could now be reproduced at a fraction of the cost of hand-carved illustrations. McClure’s sold for fifteen cents on the news-stands, yet it could attract such eminent writers as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was the policy of the magazine to invite writers of fiction to cover news events, and McClure’s fascination with Marconi resulted in a series of wonderfully colourful descriptions of the young inventor at work.
Marconi had already made the headlines with his coverage of the Kingston Regatta and his link-up between Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales at the Isle of Wight, as well as one or two other well-publicised demonstrations of his invention. When McClure’s learned that the French government had asked him if he could send a wireless signal across the English Channel – at thirty-two miles by far the greatest distance attempted up to that time – in the spring of 1899, it decided that this had to be covered. Cleveland Moffett, a writer of fictional detective stories, and a fellow reporter, Robert McClure, brother of the magazine’s founder, were despatched to cover the historic event, and to reassure themselves and their readers that there was no trickery involved. Moffett joined Marconi on the French side, in the small town of Wimereux, close to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where thirty-five years before Annie Jameson had secretly married Giuseppe Marconi. He wrote:
At five o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, March 27th, everything being ready, Marconi pressed the sending-key for the first cross-channel message. There was nothing different in the transmission from the method grown familiar now through months at the Alum Bay and Poole stations. Transmitter and receiver were quite the same; and a seven-strand copper wire, well insulated and hung from the sprit of a mast 150 feet high, was used. The mast stood in the sand just at sea level, with no height of cliff or bank to give aid.
‘Brripp – brripp – brripp – brripp – brrrrrr,’ went the transmitter under Marconi’s hand. The sparks flashed, and a dozen eyes looked out anxiously upon the sea as it broke fiercely over Napoleon’s old fort that rose abandoned in the foreground. Would the message carry all the way to England? Thirty-two miles seemed a long way.
‘Brripp – brripp – brrrrr – brripp – brrrrr – brripp – brripp.’ So he went, deliberately, with a short message telling them over there that he was using a two-centimeter spark, and signing three V’s at the end.
Then he stopped, and the room was silent, with a straining of ears for some sound from the receiver. A moment’s pause, and then it came briskly, the usual clicking of dots and dashes as the tape rolled off its message. And there it was, short and commonplace enough, yet vastly important, since it was the first wireless message sent from England to the Continent: First ‘V,’ the call; then ‘M,’ meaning, Your message is perfect;’ then, ‘Same here 2 c m s. V V V,’ the last being an abbreviation for two centimeters and the conventional finishing signal.
And so, without more ado, the thing was done. The Frenchmen might stare and chatter as they pleased, here was something come into the world to stay. A pronounced success surely, and everybody said so as messages went back and forth, scores of messages, during the following hours and days, and all correct.
For a while the makeshift Wimereux station was besieged by dignitaries of various kinds eager to see this extraordinary invention in action. Among them was a British Army officer, Baden Baden-Powell, brother of Robert Baden-Powell, later the hero of Mafeking and the founder of the Boy Scouts. A particular interest of Baden-Powell was the use of man-lifting kites for reconnaissance in battle, and he was devising models of these which were being tested on Salisbury Plain. Marconi had found them useful for raising a temporary aerial when there was no time to set up a wooden mast, and it was not long before Baden-Powell’s patented man-lifting ‘Levitor’ kites were to prove vital in the development of wireless.
Although he himself was clearly convinced that Marconi was not a charlatan, Cleveland Moffett had been told to doublecheck that there was no sleight of hand going on with the cross-Channel demonstration. Deceit would not have been all that difficult: there were cables under the sea by which messages could have been passed secretly, or there might have been some prearranged set of messages which gave the impression that the sending had been successful. Electricity was exciting, but its properties and potential remained mysterious and magical, and the layman was always in danger of being duped. Moffett continued his account:
On Wednesday, Mr. Robert McClure and I, by the kindness of Mr. Marconi, were allowed to hold a cross-channel conversation, and, in the interests of our readers, satisfy ourselves that this wireless telegraphy marvel had really been accomplished. It was about three o’clock when I reached the Boulogne station [actually Wimereux, about three miles from Boulogne], Mr. Kemp called up the other side thus: ‘Moffett arrived. Wishes to send message. Is McClure ready?’
Immediately the receiver clicked off: ‘Yes, stand by,’ which meant that we must wait for the French officials to talk, since they had the right of way. And talk they did, for a good two hours, keeping the sparks flying and the ether agitated with their messages and inquiries. At last, about five o’clock, I was cheered by this service along the tape: ‘If Moffett is there, tell him McClure is ready.’ And straightway I handed Mr. Kemp a simple cipher message which I had prepared to test the accuracy of transmission. It ran thus:
MCCLURE, DOVER: Gniteerg morf Ecnarf ot Dnalgne hguorht eht rehte. MOFFETT.
Read on the printed page it is easy to see that this is merely, ‘Greeting from France to England through the ether,’ each word being spelled backward. For the receiving operator at Dover, however, it was as hopeless a tangle of letters as could have been desired. Therefore was I well pleased when the Boulogne receiver clicked me back the following:
MOFFETT, BOULOGNE: Your message received. It reads all right. Vive Marconi, MCCLURE.
Then I sent this:
MARCONI, DOVER: Hearty congratulations on success of first experiment in sending aerial messages across the English channel. Also best thanks on behalf of editors MCCLURE’S MAGAZINE for assistance in preparation of article, MOFFETT.
And got this reply:
MOFFETT, BOULOGNE: The accurate transmission of your messages is absolutely convincing. Good-by. MCCLURE.
Then we clicked back ‘Good-by,’ and the trial was over. We were satisfied; yes, more, we were delighted.
9 (#ulink_ac2aad65-819f-513d-a9bb-a6c3e4f75717)
The Romance of Morse Code (#ulink_ac2aad65-819f-513d-a9bb-a6c3e4f75717)
As a boy staying with his cousins in Livorno, Marconi had befriended an elderly blind man, a retired telegraph operator. Marconi would read aloud to him and in return he was taught the Morse code and the technique of tapping it out with a Morse key. This was a skill which had been acquired by thousands of young men, and some women, working in the telegraph business in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which of course required no specialist skills to operate, had not replaced the cable telegraph. Dots and dashes which spelled out letters and punctuation in all languages remained, in Marconi’s boyhood and for a very long time afterwards, universal. Morse messages could be sent much greater distances than any phone communication, and they could easily accommodate ciphers, which gave a degree of confidentiality.
It was quite by chance that Morse code proved to be ideally suited to Marconi’s primitive spark transmitters, which could only send messages in the form of long and short bursts of electromagnetic waves. In fact, had Morse code not been devised more than half a century before Marconi began to create his wireless system at the Villa Griffone, he would have had to invent something very like it. In all probability, he would not have had the idea of wireless telegraphy at all.
The man who gave his name to the code was Samuel Finley Breese Morse. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791 and studied at Yale University, where he took an interest in science. His ambition, however, was to be a great painter. He studied in Europe, and had some success with his landscapes and more dramatic canvases. In London he won prizes for his depiction of The Dying Hercules as well as for his sculpture. But in America he found it hard to earn a living. He had an unpaid academic post in New York, and got by painting portraits which fetched only about $15 each. On a trip back from Europe on the sailing packet Scully in 1837 he fell into conversation with fellow passengers about the uses of electricity, and conceived the idea of an electric telegraph. It was not an original idea, and Morse was not the man to turn it into a workable invention: he lacked the meticulous craftsmanship which was Marconi’s greatest talent. But it was his inspiration which led to the development of the telegraph code which would for ever after bear his name.
Morse’s original idea was to assign to hundreds of words a dedicated number, and to use electric current to activate a machine at a distance which would record a series of figures on paper. In September 1837 he set up a demonstration in a lecture theatre at New York University, with wires wound around the hall to give a distance of about a third of a mile. It was not a working system, but the prototype for something which with a bit of imagination might be made commercial. Morse and his brother Sidney were the publishers of the Journal of Commerce, which was read by, among others, the very inventive Vail family of Speedwell, New Jersey. Stephen Vail, the father, had turned a local blacksmith’s works into a thriving iron foundry which had built the steam engine for the SS Savannah, which in 1819 had become the first ship to cross the Atlantic powered by paddle-wheels as well as sail. His son Alfred had studied at New York University, and saw there by chance one of Morse’s telegraph demonstrations. He introduced himself, and with his father’s agreement subsequently offered to help develop the system.
Morse had no money, while the Vails had prospered from their steam engines and the casting of hundreds of miles of track for the railways which were beginning to spread out across America. An agreement was signed by which Alfred Vail and his brother George would share with Morse all the rights and rewards of a commercial telegraph system. The Vail brothers went to work on improving the technology, while Morse handled the publicity. A deadline was set for 1 January 1838, by which time Morse wanted to be able to offer the US government and businesses a workable system. It was a tall order: the only available electric cable was milliners’ copper wire, used to give a structure to the ‘skyscraper’ bonnets which were then fashionable. The Vails’ first batteries were made of cherry wood, with beeswax as insulation.
The local people in the Vails’ town of Speedwell thought Alfred and George had lost their minds as they worked long hours on what was regarded as a crazy venture. Meanwhile, Morse continued to compile his dictionary, assigning to each of five thousand words a specific number – England, for example, was ‘252’. However, devising a machine which could write ‘252’ proved too much for the Vails. They were close to despair when Alfred had the brainwave that a lever which had an up-and-down movement could more easily mark dots and dashes, and these, rather than whole numbers, could represent letters and numerals. Alfred and George had missed their deadline, but they had cracked the problem.
Alfred feverishly studied the letters of the alphabet, and found that ‘E’ was used more frequently than any other. He assigned it one dot. Other letters were then given their codes – ‘S’ became three dots, for example. It took until 1844 before the first commercial telegraphy system using what became known as ‘Morse code’ went into service in the United States. It was in truth Alfred Vail who devised it, but he allowed Samuel Morse to take the plaudits and enjoy the innumerable international honours which were showered upon him.
Operating Morse keys was an entirely new skill, as was the interpretation of the dots and dashes. With the invention of the telephone receiver a tape printer was no longer necessary, for the operator could simply listen to the urgent staccato of the Morse messages, translating them instantaneously from dots and dashes to letters and words. Very soon those with experience found they could recognise the styles of other individual Morse operators; some claimed they could tell the difference between the styles of men and women. Competitions were held to find the most skilful operators, and, ever attentive to the texture of contemporary life, McClure’s magazine sent a reporter to one such public demonstration held in New York at the turn of the century. It was a ‘fast sending competition’, held in a great hall in which ‘sets of shining telegraph instruments’ had been set up. Most of the audience were themselves telegraph operators, there to see which of the dozen young male contestants was adjudged the best. McClure’s described the scene:
One by one the contestants stepped to the test table, and manipulated the key. There was a tense stillness throughout the hall, broken when ‘time’ was called by a trill of metallic pulsations read by most of the audience as from a printed page. The text of the matter is of no concern, an excerpt from a great speech, a page of blank verse, or only the ‘conditions’ found at the top of a telegraph form. Speed and accuracy alone are vital. Forty, forty-five, fifty words a minute are rattled off, seven hundred and fifty motions of the wrist and still the limit is not reached. The contestants show the same evidences of strain that characterise the most strenuous physical contest – the dilating nostril, the quick or suspended breathing, the starting eye.
Presently a fair-haired young man takes the chair, self confidence and reserve force in every gesture. Away he goes, and his transmission is as swift and pure as a mountain stream … The audience, enthralled, forgets the speed, and hearkens only to the beauty of the sending. On and on fly the dots and dashes, and though it is clear that his pace is not up to that set by the leaders, nevertheless there is a finish – an indefinable quality of perfection in the performance that at the end brings the multitude to its feet in a spontaneous burst of applause; such an outburst as might have greeted a great piece of oratory or acting.
Marconi was at this time using exactly the same shining Morse keys as the contestants used for their New York sending competition. But he could not hope to match their speed, and certainly nobody would hearken to the beauty of his sending. Each dot and dash sent by wireless was created by a deafening spark – the operators soon took to wearing earplugs. At the receiving end, if the operator was using headphones, which was soon the regular practice, the noise of interference was also disturbing and uncomfortable. It was like listening intently to a station improperly tuned on the radio. There was no tuning in the modern sense of finding the exact point on the wave spectrum to receive a transmitter’s signal. And wireless telegraphy was painfully slow. When in 1897 Marconi returned briefly to Italy to fulfil his obligation to carry out his military service, he demonstrated his invention to the navy at La Spezia. On that occasion each Morse dot required the transmitting lever to be held down for five seconds, and each dash for fifteen seconds. The letter ‘H’ alone (dot, dash, dot, dot, dot) took more than half a minute to send. The messages relayed to and from the royal yacht Osborne were equally laborious.
Lack of speed was not, however, Marconi’s greatest concern. He needed to prove not only that his system worked, but that it could span distances which the leading scientists of the day insisted were unattainable. Unless he could send messages hundreds of miles, he could never compete with the cable telegraph, and wireless would have only a restricted value for ships at sea. The widely accepted view was that because the earth was round, a spark signal transmitted from any point on land would head off over the horizon, keep going until it reached the upper atmosphere and head out into space. There was no reason to believe that electro-magnetic waves would ‘hug’ the surface of land or sea. However high you raised your transmitting and receiving aerials, the signal could be picked up no further than the line of sight between the topmost points. Marconi, and those working with him, had no theory to contradict the received wisdom. All they could do was carry on blindly, in the hope of demonstrating that the theory was wrong.
The degree to which Marconi was able to inspire confidence in his assistants, most of whom were a good deal older than him – he was just twenty-five in 1899 – was remarkable. Quiet and modest though he was in his dealings with the press, Marconi evidently had a messianic quality in his workshops in the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight and the Haven Hotel in Poole. He led by example, often working into the night.
The detective writer turned wireless sleuth for McClure’s, Cleveland Moffett, visited both these stations in 1899, and chatted to Marconi and the engineers working with him. One of these was Dr Erskine Murray, based at the Haven Hotel, where he sometimes tuned up his cello to make up a trio with Marconi and his brother Alfonso. Moffett wrote:
… after a breezy ride across the Channel on the self-reliant side-wheeler ‘Lymington’, then an hour’s railway journey and a carriage jaunt of like duration over gorse-spread sand dunes, I found myself at the Poole Signal Station, really six miles beyond Poole, on a barren promontory. Here the installation is identical with that at the Needles, only on a larger scale, and here two operators are kept busy at experiments, under the direction of Mr. Marconi himself and Dr. Erskine-Murray, one of the company’s chief electricians. With the latter I spent two hours in profitable converse.
‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘this is a fine day for your work?’ The sun was shining and the air mild.
‘Not particularly,’ said he. ‘The fact is, our messages seem to carry best in fog and bad weather. This past winter we have sent through all kinds of gales and storms without a single breakdown.’
‘Don’t thunder-storms interfere with you, or electric disturbances?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘How about the earth’s curvature? I suppose that doesn’t amount to much just to the Needles?’
‘Doesn’t it though? Look across, and judge for yourself. It amounts to 100 feet at least. You can only see the head of the Needles lighthouse from here, and that must be 150 feet above the sea. And the big steamers pass there hulls and funnels down.’
‘Then the earth’s curvature makes no difference with your waves?’
‘It has made none up to twenty-five miles, which we have covered from a ship to shore; and in that distance the earth’s dip amounts to about 500 feet. If the curvature counted against us then, the messages would have passed some hundreds of feet over the receiving-station; but nothing of the sort happened. So we feel reasonably confident that these Hertzian waves follow around smoothly as the earth curves.’
‘And you can send messages through hills, can you not?’
‘Easily. We have done so repeatedly.’
‘And you can send in all kinds of weather?’
‘We can.’
‘Then,’ said I after some thought, ‘if neither land nor sea nor atmospheric conditions can stop you, I don’t see why you can’t send messages to any distance.’
‘So we can,’ said the electrician, ‘so we can, given a sufficient height of wire. It has become simply a question now of how high a mast you are willing to erect. If you double the height of your mast, you can send a message four times as far. If you treble the height of your mast, you can send a message nine times as far. In other words the law established by our experiments seems to be that the range of distance increases as the square of the mast’s height. To start with, you may assume that a wire suspended from an eighty-foot mast will send a message twenty miles. We are doing about that here.’
‘Then,’ said I, multiplying, ‘a mast 160 feet high would send a message eighty miles?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And a mast 320 feet high would send a message 320 miles;* (#ulink_d688222c-5c17-5eac-bb18-f2433b6b966d) a mast 640 feet high would send a message 1280 miles; and a mast 1280 feet high would send a message 5120 miles?’
‘That’s right. So you see if there were another Eiffel Tower in New York, it would be possible to send messages to Paris through the ether and get answers without ocean cables.’
‘Do you really think that would be possible?’
‘I see no reason to doubt it. What are a few thousand miles to this wonderful ether, which brings us our light every day from millions of miles?’
It was the universal belief among scientists at the time that light waves could not exist in a vacuum, but must travel through something, and so too with electro-magnetic waves. What that something was, nobody knew, but it was given the name ‘the ether’, and was conceived of as a very thin, colourless, odourless jelly, in which the whole of the universe was set. The most common way of explaining ‘wireless waves’ was with the analogy of throwing a stone into the still waters of a pond and watching the ripples spread out in ever larger circles. There was some popular confusion about the term ‘ether’, for it was also the name of a gas which was an early form of anaesthetic. When scientists referred to the ether it was sometimes imagined as a vapour, but really it made no differenece what it was. Marconi believed in its existence, and as far as he was concerned it had some special property which enabled the electro-magnetic waves he sent out to travel much further than they were supposed to.
After the triumph of his Channel transmissions, Marconi’s equipment was given a trial by the British Admiralty during naval manoeuvres in the summer of 1899, when the only rival method of long-distance communication was the carrier pigeon. At the same time the huge publicity afforded his experiments attracted the attention of the New York Herald’s flamboyant owner Gordon Bennett Jr, son of the famous newspaper proprietor of the same name who had built a reputation on being first with the news. Marconi, still surviving on the investment funds of his City backers and with precious little income, accepted an offer to cover for the Herald the America’s Cup yacht races, first held in 1851, which would take place in October 1899. When he set out for New York on the Cunard Line’s Aurania in September it was his first experience of the romance of the Atlantic liners which were to play such an important part in his life.
* (#ulink_82db4bba-0034-586c-ba5a-794006856952) There is an error in the original: this should read ‘640 miles’.
10 (#ulink_19cbd158-306c-5c28-bd46-59302a6dbd70)
A New York Welcome (#ulink_19cbd158-306c-5c28-bd46-59302a6dbd70)
In 1899 the night-time spectacle of New York as the great liners were steered on taut hawsers towards their moorings was breathtaking. The Statue of Liberty was floodlit, and the Brooklyn Bridge a blaze of light. While many homes were still lit by gas, the electricity which illuminated public buildings and stores had in just a decade or so turned New York into a dazzling wonder of the modern world. If Guglielmo Marconi was to find real rivals in the exploitation of his new invention it would surely be here, in a land apparently obsessed with electrical power. And yet he was greeted like a conquering hero by American newspapermen when the Auratiia docked in New York on 21 September. They all wanted to know who this young man was, and were struck by how much he differed from the inventive genius of their lively imaginations. In a report Marconi gave to the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company back in London he wrote that he had to ‘run the gauntlet’ of reporters and photographers as soon as he went down the gangway. ‘For some reason or other it seemed to come as a shock to the newspapers that I spoke English fluently, in fact “with quite a London accent” as one paper phrased it, and also that I appeared to be very young and did not in the slightest resemble the popular type associated with an inventor in those days in America, that is to say a rather wild haired and eccentrically costumed person.’ He did however for a while lose his legendary cool: half his luggage had by mistake been diverted to Boston. In its report of 22 September 1899 the New York Tribune, which noted that Marconi explained about his missing luggage in ‘good English’, commented: ‘He is a slight young man of light complexion and nervous temperament, and he is a bit absent-minded. He is evidently more concerned about his scientific studies and inventions than about conventionalities and dress. He has clear blue eyes, and his face is clean shaven, except for a small moustache.’ The Tribune man had clearly caught Marconi off his guard: it was rare for him to be described as anything but well dressed when he made his public appearances.
No sooner had Marconi and his engineers begun to establish a shore station for the coverage of the America’s Cup than his extraordinary celebrity was eclipsed by the return from the Far East of a real American conquering hero. In 1898 the United States had gone to war with Spain. Cuba was then still a Spanish colony, but was being torn apart by a nationalist rebellion which America supported. The United States also coveted the Spanish colonies in the Philippines. When the American battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbour the Spanish were ordered out of Cuba. Under the command of Admiral George Dewey, the American fleet had taken on the Spanish in the Philippines, and at the battle of Manila routed them without losing a single life. In September 1899 Admiral Dewey was on his way back to New York, where he would receive a tumultuous reception. The America’s Cup was delayed a few days so that the Governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt, could stage the most spectacular ‘welcome home’ ever witnessed in the United States.
When Dewey and his fleet steamed into New York the Brooklyn Bridge blazed ‘WELCOME DEWEY’ in lightbulb letters thirty-six feet high and 370 feet across. One thousand bulbs were used for the letter ‘W’ alone. On Manhattan a victory parade a mile and a half long was lined with wood and plaster statues leading to a Dewey Arch. A two-day holiday was declared, and fireworks cracked in the bright electric air for several nights. Not wanting to be upstaged, the New York Herald asked Marconi to throw his wireless equipment on a tug and go out to greet Dewey before he docked. Back in the 1830s James Gordon Bennett Sr had made his name by beating rivals to the European stories arriving on Atlantic ships. As the sailing packets and later the steam liners approached Staten Island, despatch boats were sent out to collect the news and carry it to the New York Herald office so that it could be published before the ships docked. Gordon Bennett Jr was the man who sent Henry Stanley to seek out Dr Livingstone in Africa, and Stanley’s celebrated formal greeting, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume,’ had entered the language. He was also the promoter of a company which was involved in laying the first telegraph cables across the Atlantic. Though the younger Bennett now spent most of his time on his lavish yacht in the Mediterranean, the Herald had not lost its competitive edge.
Admiral Dewey arrived in New York two days earlier than expected, and Marconi missed the chance to waylay him at sea. However, the Herald was not to be defeated, and was able to arrange for Marconi to take part in a parade of ships held in Admiral Dewey’s honour. Shore stations had already been set up on the Navesink Highlands along the New Jersey shoreline and atop a building on 34th Street in New York in preparation for the America’s Cup coverage, and Marconi and his engineers set up their equipment on two steamships, the Ponce and the Grande Duchesse. While they were still working frantically to make contact with the shore stations, the Herald had the Ponce cruise past Admiral Dewey’s flagship, and reported the great cheers that went up when the crowds on both decks were told that Marconi, the wireless genius, was aboard. At one point, according to an ecstatic Herald account, a young woman on a ship in the harbour picked up a microphone and called ‘Three cheers for Marconi!’, to which there was a roared response. Marconi himself, however, stayed at his station, and made no public appearance until he was sure his wireless equipment was working, leaving the captain of the Ponce to make his excuses by megaphone.
The Herald gave its Marconi wireless coverage a fanfare on Sunday, 1 October 1899, with illustrations of the young Italian’s equipment and glowing reports of the way in which he had turned a scientist’s dream into an accomplished fact. As he followed the fortunes of the competing yachts, the fabulously wealthy English tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock and the New York Yacht Club’s Columbia, the news was tapped back to the shore stations on the Navesink Highlands and 34th Street. From there it was sent to Europe and across North America by cable. Marconi worked at first on the Ponce, attracting a crowd of passengers who, according to Herald reports, were more interested in the inventor than in the progress of the races. There were good commercial reasons for the Herald to hire Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system, apart from the interest it would attract and the newspapers it would sell. As customers of the various land-line telegraph services, newspapers were always haggling over the cost of using cables for messages. If wireless worked, it would be a serious, and cheaper, rival.
From the day the races began on 3 October 1899 Marconi’s fame in the United States was assured. The unbelievable had been achieved. As the New York Times put it: “We at the latter edge of the nineteenth century have become supercilious with regard to the novelties in science; yet our languor may be stirred at the prospect of telegraphing through air and wood and stone without so much as a copper wire to carry the message. We are learning to launch our winged words.’ All the newspapers and popular magazines speculated on the future of wireless, the possibility of far-flung families being brought together, of peace descending upon the earth as nation talked to nation with a magic Morse key. And it would all be so much less expensive once the cable companies’ monopolies had been destroyed.
In New York Marconi demonstrated his equipment to the United States Navy, which at the time maintained a stock of carrier pigeons for long-distance communication. It went well, but despite enthusiastic reports by their observer on the Ponce, the naval authorities were not sure that wireless was worth the price Marconi’s company was asking, and chose to hedge their bets. Soon enough, they reasoned, American inventors would come up with their own version of wireless telegraphy. And in the middle of October, just as the America’s Cup was finishing, a notice appeared in a number of newspapers in New York to the effect that Marconi had infringed an American patent taken out as early as 1882 by a Professor at Tufts University in Boston, Amos Emerson Dolbear. This patent had been acquired by the Dolbear Electric Telephone Company of New Jersey in 1886, and then bought by a Lyman C. Larnard, who was now suing Marconi. Larnard wanted $100,000 for infringement of his patent, and for all Marconi’s demonstrations to be stopped. He told the newspapers that he had bought Dolbear’s patent in July 1899 expressly for the coverage of the America’s Cup, and that he had warned both the Herald and Marconi’s company that he would sue if they went ahead with their plans.
No notice was taken of this threat, for a brief look at the claim revealed that what Professor Dolbear had patented was the same effect of ‘induction’ that William Preece had used in England. Lyman C. Larnard had not grasped the difference between this and the use of Hertzian waves; but then, neither had anyone in the United States Navy, which would remain woefully ignorant of wireless technology for almost a decade.
There was for some years a confusion over the difference between the two methods of ‘wireless’ telegraphy: Marconi’s use of electromagnetic waves generated by a spark, and the alternative of ‘jumping’ currents between parallel wires as employed by Preece and others. Both worked, and both were genuinely ‘wireless’. But there were two very significant differences. The induction method was strictly limited in the distance it could cover, as William Preece had found to his cost. On a Sunday in 1898 he had commandeered the entire telephone networks down the west coast of England and the east coast of Ireland in an effort to send Morse signals across the Irish Sea. All he got was a babble of static; he wondered if he was picking up unintelligible messages from outer space.
In the United States Thomas Edison had had more success with induction, though over no significant distances. After a poverty-stricken childhood and youth Edison had, through his practical ingenuity, acquired considerable prestige and financial backing, and had set up a powerhouse for electrical experimentation at Menlo Park in New Jersey. While Marconi was still a boy playing with batteries and wires at the Villa Griffone, Edison was demonstrating his brilliantly simple system for sending and receiving telegraph signals from moving trains. All major railroads had running alongside them electric telegraph wires, providing communication between stops along the line. Edison’s device involved fitting to the tops of carriages a metal plate which could pick up signals which ‘jumped’ across the gap of more than twenty feet from the existing wires and transmitted them to a receiver inside the train. Edison had demonstrated this invention in October 1887, on a special train on a section of the Lehigh Valley railroad which ran from New York to Buffalo.
There were 230 distinguished guests aboard, members of the Electric Club and guests of the Consolidated Railway Telegraph Company. As the train flew along, reaching sixty miles an hour at times, four hundred messages were sent. One was relayed direct to London by transatlantic cable. Edison imagined that his invention would be a boon to newspaper reporters and businessmen. However, there was no demand for it: newsmen and businessmen preferred to be free from telegrams of all sorts while ‘on the wing’. Marconi’s magic boxes were soon to do away with such a leisurely attitude to life.
Edison’s induction method worked for a moving train. But it was never going to be any use to a ship at sea, as there were no fixed wires running alongside the liners as they criss-crossed the Atlantic, other than those sunk deep on the ocean bed. Marconi’s wireless, however, could be fitted to ships, and in fact to any moving object. Hertzian waves freed wireless to go wherever it was needed, and the means of sending and receiving messages could be packed up neatly in small boxes. That was the beauty of the Marconi system, and in many ways the world of the 1890s appeared to be awaiting his invention.
After a faltering beginning, steamships had conquered the Atlantic, first using the power of paddle-wheels as an aid to sails, then gradually exchanging funnels for masts. New and more efficient engines and the screw propeller cut the crossing times down to five or six days for the swiftest liners, which competed for the right to fly the Blue Riband, awarded to the ship which achieved the fastest crossing. For a very long time after the British government had awarded the Canadian Thomas Cunard the contract to carry mail across the Atlantic in 1838, his shipping line was the leader. Nearly all the large ships were built in Britain, in Belfast or on the Clyde estuary.
In the last twenty years of the century, competition became yet more intense. As they fought to attract the rapidly growing numbers of impoverished Europeans heading for a new life in America, and the wealthy Americans who were beginning to take tours of Europe, the shipping companies ordered larger and more luxurious liners. To have the biggest, fastest ship of the day was good for publicity, even if in other terms it did not make much economic sense. Such was the competition that a new ship was usually out of date within a year or so. Luxury was the keynote of the shipping lines’ advertising, which emphasised the romance of shipboard life, often with a wistful illustration of a pretty young lady chatting idly to a handsome officer. The brochures hinted at all kinds of fun – dancing on deck for the steerage passengers, chance meetings of eligible young things in first class. It was a complaint of those who took seafaring seriously that interior designers had taken over the art of shipbuilding, as the staterooms of first class became more and more luxurious.
America, which had had the fastest sailing ships in the early nineteenth century, fell behind in this shipbuilding spree, and the government decreed that only liners built in the United States could fly the Stars and Stripes. This had little effect, but it did produce the liner St Paul, which was launched from the Philadelphia shipyards in 1895, and was to provide the opulent setting for two of the most poignant episodes in Marconi’s life.
Once he had satisfied himself that wireless signals could be sent and received over distances which stretched beyond the horizon, and did not disappear into space as the scientists had predicted, Marconi began to dream of conquering the Atlantic. When he first sailed for New York on the Aurania it was out of touch with land for days on end. If another ship sailed within signalling distance in mid-ocean they could ‘speak’ to each other by means of the semaphore flags, but if they hit an iceberg, a common hazard in the North Atlantic in spring, or their engines failed, or they caught fire, they had no means of calling for assistance. Although the Cunard Line had an impeccable safety record, every year passenger and cargo ships disappeared, many leaving no survivors or clues to the fate that had befallen them. When Marconi sailed from New York on 9 November 1899, taking a suite of first-class cabins on the American Line’s St Paul, he laid plans to end the lonely isolation of ships at sea.
11 (#ulink_ee9014a3-e2db-5716-8936-60e8878a11f9)
Atlantic Romance (#ulink_ee9014a3-e2db-5716-8936-60e8878a11f9)
Within the exclusive social circle of first class on the St Paul, Marconi was a celebrity, the young inventor all New York had been talking about. But there were those in America who believed that Marconi’s fame and popularity were grounded in public ignorance of the new technology. The magazine Electrical World saw him off from New York with no more than grudging admiration for his gift for publicity: ‘If the visit of Marconi has resulted in no additions to our knowledge of wireless telegraphy, on the other hand, his managers have shown that they have nothing to learn from Yankeedom as to the art of commercial exploitation of an inventor and his inventions.’
Marconi did not, in fact, have any ‘managers’ orchestrating his publicity, nor did he need any. What had most impressed the newspapers was his refusal to make any claims for his system of wireless that he could not demonstrate publicly. Thomas Edison became one of his greatest admirers, and quipped that the Italian ‘delivered more than he promised’. He added that Marconi was the first inventor he had ever met who sported patent leather shoes. In his quiet way, Marconi was an accomplished self-publicist, and before he left New York on the St Paul he had devised a scheme which would make the headlines and astonish the first-class passengers on the liner. He arranged for a cable to be sent to the engineers manning the wireless station at the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, asking them to listen out for a signal from the St Paul as it approached the English Channel on the last leg of its voyage to Southampton.
Before he sailed, Marconi set up a wireless cabin on the liner, the first ever on an Atlantic voyage, and tested and tuned it in readiness for the last hours of the journey. The transmitter would have a limited range, of little more than fifty miles, and the St Paul would be near the end of its crossing before the Isle of Wight station could pick up its signals.
Before then, Marconi had time to enjoy the easy mid-Atlantic social life. Among the first-class passengers was a glamorous young American woman, Josephine Holman. A family friend of the Holmans’, Henry McClure of McClure’s, a cousin of the magazine’s founder, was also aboard, and he no doubt introduced Josephine to Marconi. By the time the St Paul was approaching the west coast of Ireland they were engaged. Neither of them was sure how their families would react to the news. Marconi’s fame did not necessarily mark him out as a fine ‘catch’ as far as the parents of marriageable young ladies were concerned. Despite his aristocratic associations through his mother’s family, he was fatally Italian, and therefore ‘foreign’; and his fortune was by no means assured. The wireless business, many reasoned, might turn out to be just a passing fad. And Marconi’s own family might not be keen for him to marry at such an uncertain time in his career, especially to an American woman they had never met. Josephine and Guglielmo decided to keep their engagement secret for the time being.
There was no certainty about when the St Paul would enter the English Channel, or when it would be within wireless range of the Isle of Wight. The Marconi engineers waiting at the Royal Needles Hotel were therefore on tenterhooks. In the same way that fishermen attach a bell to their line so that they will know if a fish is biting even if they have dozed off, the engineers had rigged up a system whereby a bell would wake them if their receiver was called up at night. Henry Jameson-Davis and Major Flood Page, the managing director of Marconi’s company, were at the hotel awaiting the St Paul’s signal. In a letter to The Times Major Flood Page gave a vivid description of the excitement of the occasion:
To make assurance doubly sure one of the assistants passed the night in the instrument room, but his night was not disturbed by the ringing of his bell, and we were all left to sleep in peace. Between six and seven a.m. I was down; everything was in order. The Needles resembled pillars of salt as one after the other they were lighted up by the brilliant sunrise. There was a thick haze over the sea, and it would have been possible for the liner to pass the Needles without our catching a sight of her. We chatted away pleasantly with the Haven [the station at the Haven Hotel, in Poole], Breakfast over, the sun was delicious as we paced on the lawn, but at sea the haze increased to fog; no ordinary signals could have been read from any ship passing the place at which we were.
The idea of failure never entered our minds. So far as we were concerned, we were ready, and we felt complete confidence that the ship would be all right with Mr Marconi himself on board. Yet, as may easily be imagined, we felt in a state of nervous tension. Waiting is ever tedious, but to wait for hours for the first liner that has ever approached these or any other shores with Marconi apparatus on board, and to wait from ten to eleven, when the steamer was expected, onto twelve, to one to two – it was not anxiety, it was certainly not doubt, not lack of confidence, but it was waiting. We sent our signals over and over again, when, in the most natural and ordinary way, our bell rang. It was 4.45 p.m. ‘Is that you St Paul?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘Sixty-six nautical miles away.’ Need I confess that delight, joy, satisfaction swept away all nervous tension, and in a few minutes we were transcribing, as if it were our daily occupation, four cablegrams for New York, and many telegrams for many parts of England and France, which had been sent fifty, forty-five, forty miles by ‘wireless’ to be despatched from the Totland Bay Post Office.
While the rustic Totland Bay post office was handling an unusually heavy load of telegraph messages, including one giving instructions for the menu at a forthcoming dinner party in London, on board the St Paul as it steamed towards Southampton there was a good deal of fun and games. The operator at the Royal Needles Hotel tapped out a few bits of news, including the latest from South Africa, where the British were engaged in an embarrassingly costly war with the Boers, who had besieged Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. With the permission of the ship’s commander, Captain Jamison, the on-board printers, accustomed to turning out menus and general notices, produced a small newssheet under the banner The Transatlantic Times,
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Gavin Weightman
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: The intriguing story of how wireless was invented by Guglielmo Marconi – and how it amused Queen Victoria, saved the lives of the Titanic survivors, tracked down criminals and began the radio revolution.Wireless was the most fabulous invention of the 19th century: the public thought it was magic, the popular newspapers regarded it as miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day (in Europe and America) could not understand how it worked. In 1897, when the first wireless station was established by Marconi in a few rooms of the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, nobody knew how far these invisible waves could travel through the ‘ether’, carrying Morse Coded messages decipherable at a receiving station. (The definitive answer was not discovered till the 1920s, by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry filling the airwaves with a cacaphony of sounds – most of it American.)Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.Marconi himself was the son of an Italian father and an Irish mother (from the Jameson whiskey family); he grew up in Italy and was fluent in Italian and English, but it was in England that his invention first caught on. Marconi was in his early twenties at the time (he died in 1937). With the ‘new telegraphy’ came the real prospect of replacing the network of telegraphic cables that criss-crossed land and sea at colossal expense. Initially it was the great ships that benefited from the new invention – including the Titanic, whose survivors owed their lives to the wireless.