Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: The invention that sparked the radio revolution

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.