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

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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.