Signor Marconi's Magic Box Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - In Darkest London

  Chapter 2 - Silkworms and Whiskey

  Chapter 3 - Sparks in the Attic

  Chapter 4 - In the Heart of the Empire

  Chapter 5 - Dancing on the Ether

  Chapter 6 - Beside the Seaside

  Chapter 7 - Texting Queen Victoria

  Chapter 8 - An American Investigates

  Chapter 9 - The Romance of Morse Code

  Chapter 10 - A New York Welcome

  Chapter 11 - Atlantic Romance

  Chapter 12 - Adventure at Mullion Cove

  Chapter 13 - An American Forecast

  Chapter 14 - Kite-Flying in Newfoundland

  Chapter 15 - The Spirits of the Ether

  Chapter 16 - Fishing in the Ether

  Chapter 17 - The End of the Affair

  Chapter 18 - Farewell the Pigeon Post

  Chapter 19 - The Power of Darkness

  Chapter 20 - The Hermit of Paignton

  Chapter 21 - The King’s Appendix

  Chapter 22 - The Thundering Professor

  Chapter 23 - A Real Colonel Sellers

  Chapter 24 - Defeat in the Yellow Sea

  Chapter 25 - A Wireless Rat

  Chapter 26 - Dazzling the Millions

  Chapter 27 - ‘Marky’ and his Motor

  Chapter 28 - On the American Frontier

  Chapter 29 - Marconi gets Married

  Chapter 30 - Wireless at War

  Chapter 31 - America’s Whispering Gallery

  Chapter 32 - A Voice on the Air

  Chapter 33 - The Bells of Budapest

  Chapter 34 - Wireless to the Rescue

  Chapter 35 - Dynamite for Marconi

  Chapter 36 - Le Match Dew-Crippen

  Chapter 37 - A Marriage on the Rocks

  Chapter 38 - Ice and the Ether

  Chapter 39 - ‘It’s a CQD, Old Man’

  Chapter 40 - After the Titanic

  Chapter 41 - The Crash

  Chapter 42 - The Suspect Italian

  Chapter 43 - Eclipse of Marconi on the Eiffel Tower

  Chapter 44 - In Bed with Mussolini

  EPILOGUE

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  By the same author

  The Making of Modern London: 1815-1914

  The Making of Modern London: 1914-1939

  London River

  Picture Post Britain

  Rescue: A History of the British Emergency Services

  The Frozen Water Trade

  For my father

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My greatest debt is to Louise Jamison, archivist of the Marconi Company, who found the time to unearth for me many newspaper cuttings, diary extracts and illustrations and who made me welcome at Chelmsford, where the records going back to 1896 are kept. Gordon Bussey, the company’s historical consultant, provided much technical assistance, in particular on the details of the first transatlantic signal of 1901. At the Villa Griffone, Barbara Valotti made me welcome, and Maurizio Bigazzi demonstrated some of Marconi’s very early equipment and showed me the lie of the land. Professor Giuliano Pancaldi of Bologna University gave me some valuable background information and a handsome book, some of which was translated for me by Mariluisa Achille. The only really intimate account of Marconi’s life is in his daughter Degna’s memoir My Father, Marconi.

  A very special thanks to Thomas H. White, an American I have not met but whose personally compiled website ‘United States Early Radio History’ contains an astonishing range of original material in the form of newspaper and magazine articles dating back to the late nineteenth century, many of which are not available in Britain. As always the British Library and the London Library were invaluable, and I would like to thank Kate Simpson and Patrick McDonnell for their diligent digging in the newspaper archives at Colindale.

  Susan J. Douglas’s wonderful academic work Inventing American Broadcasting was an inspiration early in my research, and Mary K. McCleod’s Marconi: The Canada Years provided a valuable account of the first wireless stations in Nova Scotia. Brian Stewart in Toronto and Clare Beaton in London made some very pertinent comments on early drafts of the book. At HarperCollins, Richard Johnson’s enthusiasm for the project was invaluable and Robert Lacey’s editing as meticulous and astute as always. I would like to thank them and my agent Charles Walker at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop for all their assistance with the book.

  The history of early wireless is fraught with claims and counterclaims about who really invented what, and I have done my best to take an objective view. Any mistakes I have made are naturally my responsibility alone.

  Gavin Weightman

  London, September 2002

  INTRODUCTION

  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 b
ig 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, filling 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.

  Marconi’s Early Wireless Telegraph Stations

  1

  In Darkest London

  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 invisib
le 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,1 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.