Signor Marconi's Magic Box Read online

  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 title ‘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 electro-magnetic 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.

  2

  Silkworms and Whiskey

  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, mad
e 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 significantly 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.