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

‘I see no reason to doubt it. What are a few thousand miles to this wonderful ether, which brings us our light every day from millions of miles?’

It was the universal belief among scientists at the time that light waves could not exist in a vacuum, but must travel through something, and so too with electro-magnetic waves. What that something was, nobody knew, but it was given the name ‘the ether’, and was conceived of as a very thin, colourless, odourless jelly, in which the whole of the universe was set. The most common way of explaining ‘wireless waves’ was with the analogy of throwing a stone into the still waters of a pond and watching the ripples spread out in ever larger circles. There was some popular confusion about the term ‘ether’, for it was also the name of a gas which was an early form of anaesthetic. When scientists referred to the ether it was sometimes imagined as a vapour, but really it made no differenece what it was. Marconi believed in its existence, and as far as he was concerned it had some special property which enabled the electro-magnetic waves he sent out to travel much further than they were supposed to.

After the triumph of his Channel transmissions, Marconi’s equipment was given a trial by the British Admiralty during naval manoeuvres in the summer of 1899, when the only rival method of long-distance communication was the carrier pigeon. At the same time the huge publicity afforded his experiments attracted the attention of the New York Herald’s flamboyant owner Gordon Bennett Jr, son of the famous newspaper proprietor of the same name who had built a reputation on being first with the news. Marconi, still surviving on the investment funds of his City backers and with precious little income, accepted an offer to cover for the Herald the America’s Cup yacht races, first held in 1851, which would take place in October 1899. When he set out for New York on the Cunard Line’s Aurania in September it was his first experience of the romance of the Atlantic liners which were to play such an important part in his life.

* (#ulink_82db4bba-0034-586c-ba5a-794006856952) There is an error in the original: this should read ‘640 miles’.

10 (#ulink_19cbd158-306c-5c28-bd46-59302a6dbd70)

A New York Welcome (#ulink_19cbd158-306c-5c28-bd46-59302a6dbd70)

In 1899 the night-time spectacle of New York as the great liners were steered on taut hawsers towards their moorings was breathtaking. The Statue of Liberty was floodlit, and the Brooklyn Bridge a blaze of light. While many homes were still lit by gas, the electricity which illuminated public buildings and stores had in just a decade or so turned New York into a dazzling wonder of the modern world. If Guglielmo Marconi was to find real rivals in the exploitation of his new invention it would surely be here, in a land apparently obsessed with electrical power. And yet he was greeted like a conquering hero by American newspapermen when the Auratiia docked in New York on 21 September. They all wanted to know who this young man was, and were struck by how much he differed from the inventive genius of their lively imaginations. In a report Marconi gave to the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company back in London he wrote that he had to ‘run the gauntlet’ of reporters and photographers as soon as he went down the gangway. ‘For some reason or other it seemed to come as a shock to the newspapers that I spoke English fluently, in fact “with quite a London accent” as one paper phrased it, and also that I appeared to be very young and did not in the slightest resemble the popular type associated with an inventor in those days in America, that is to say a rather wild haired and eccentrically costumed person.’ He did however for a while lose his legendary cool: half his luggage had by mistake been diverted to Boston. In its report of 22 September 1899 the New York Tribune, which noted that Marconi explained about his missing luggage in ‘good English’, commented: ‘He is a slight young man of light complexion and nervous temperament, and he is a bit absent-minded. He is evidently more concerned about his scientific studies and inventions than about conventionalities and dress. He has clear blue eyes, and his face is clean shaven, except for a small moustache.’ The Tribune man had clearly caught Marconi off his guard: it was rare for him to be described as anything but well dressed when he made his public appearances.

No sooner had Marconi and his engineers begun to establish a shore station for the coverage of the America’s Cup than his extraordinary celebrity was eclipsed by the return from the Far East of a real American conquering hero. In 1898 the United States had gone to war with Spain. Cuba was then still a Spanish colony, but was being torn apart by a nationalist rebellion which America supported. The United States also coveted the Spanish colonies in the Philippines. When the American battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbour the Spanish were ordered out of Cuba. Under the command of Admiral George Dewey, the American fleet had taken on the Spanish in the Philippines, and at the battle of Manila routed them without losing a single life. In September 1899 Admiral Dewey was on his way back to New York, where he would receive a tumultuous reception. The America’s Cup was delayed a few days so that the Governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt, could stage the most spectacular ‘welcome home’ ever witnessed in the United States.

When Dewey and his fleet steamed into New York the Brooklyn Bridge blazed ‘WELCOME DEWEY’ in lightbulb letters thirty-six feet high and 370 feet across. One thousand bulbs were used for the letter ‘W’ alone. On Manhattan a victory parade a mile and a half long was lined with wood and plaster statues leading to a Dewey Arch. A two-day holiday was declared, and fireworks cracked in the bright electric air for several nights. Not wanting to be upstaged, the New York Herald asked Marconi to throw his wireless equipment on a tug and go out to greet Dewey before he docked. Back in the 1830s James Gordon Bennett Sr had made his name by beating rivals to the European stories arriving on Atlantic ships. As the sailing packets and later the steam liners approached Staten Island, despatch boats were sent out to collect the news and carry it to the New York Herald office so that it could be published before the ships docked. Gordon Bennett Jr was the man who sent Henry Stanley to seek out Dr Livingstone in Africa, and Stanley’s celebrated formal greeting, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume,’ had entered the language. He was also the promoter of a company which was involved in laying the first telegraph cables across the Atlantic. Though the younger Bennett now spent most of his time on his lavish yacht in the Mediterranean, the Herald had not lost its competitive edge.

Admiral Dewey arrived in New York two days earlier than expected, and Marconi missed the chance to waylay him at sea. However, the Herald was not to be defeated, and was able to arrange for Marconi to take part in a parade of ships held in Admiral Dewey’s honour. Shore stations had already been set up on the Navesink Highlands along the New Jersey shoreline and atop a building on 34th Street in New York in preparation for the America’s Cup coverage, and Marconi and his engineers set up their equipment on two steamships, the Ponce and the Grande Duchesse. While they were still working frantically to make contact with the shore stations, the Herald had the Ponce cruise past Admiral Dewey’s flagship, and reported the great cheers that went up when the crowds on both decks were told that Marconi, the wireless genius, was aboard. At one point, according to an ecstatic Herald account, a young woman on a ship in the harbour picked up a microphone and called ‘Three cheers for Marconi!’, to which there was a roared response. Marconi himself, however, stayed at his station, and made no public appearance until he was sure his wireless equipment was working, leaving the captain of the Ponce to make his excuses by megaphone.

The Herald gave its Marconi wireless coverage a fanfare on Sunday, 1 October 1899, with illustrations of the young Italian’s equipment and glowing reports of the way in which he had turned a scientist’s dream into an accomplished fact. As he followed the fortunes of the competing yachts, the fabulously wealthy English tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock and the New York Yacht Club’s Columbia, the news was tapped back to the shore stations on the Navesink Highlands and 34th Street. From there it was sent to Europe and across North America by cable. Marconi worked at first on the Ponce, attracting a crowd of passengers who, according to Herald reports, were more interested in the inventor than in the progress of the races. There were good commercial reasons for the Herald to hire Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system, apart from the interest it would attract and the newspapers it would sell. As customers of the various land-line telegraph services, newspapers were always haggling over the cost of using cables for messages. If wireless worked, it would be a serious, and cheaper, rival.

From the day the races began on 3 October 1899 Marconi’s fame in the United States was assured. The unbelievable had been achieved. As the New York Times put it: “We at the latter edge of the nineteenth century have become supercilious with regard to the novelties in science; yet our languor may be stirred at the prospect of telegraphing through air and wood and stone without so much as a copper wire to carry the message. We are learning to launch our winged words.’ All the newspapers and popular magazines speculated on the future of wireless, the possibility of far-flung families being brought together, of peace descending upon the earth as nation talked to nation with a magic Morse key. And it would all be so much less expensive once the cable companies’ monopolies had been destroyed.

In New York Marconi demonstrated his equipment to the United States Navy, which at the time maintained a stock of carrier pigeons for long-distance communication. It went well, but despite enthusiastic reports by their observer on the Ponce, the naval authorities were not sure that wireless was worth the price Marconi’s company was asking, and chose to hedge their bets. Soon enough, they reasoned, American inventors would come up with their own version of wireless telegraphy. And in the middle of October, just as the America’s Cup was finishing, a notice appeared in a number of newspapers in New York to the effect that Marconi had infringed an American patent taken out as early as 1882 by a Professor at Tufts University in Boston, Amos Emerson Dolbear. This patent had been acquired by the Dolbear Electric Telephone Company of New Jersey in 1886, and then bought by a Lyman C. Larnard, who was now suing Marconi. Larnard wanted $100,000 for infringement of his patent, and for all Marconi’s demonstrations to be stopped. He told the newspapers that he had bought Dolbear’s patent in July 1899 expressly for the coverage of the America’s Cup, and that he had warned both the Herald and Marconi’s company that he would sue if they went ahead with their plans.

No notice was taken of this threat, for a brief look at the claim revealed that what Professor Dolbear had patented was the same effect of ‘induction’ that William Preece had used in England. Lyman C. Larnard had not grasped the difference between this and the use of Hertzian waves; but then, neither had anyone in the United States Navy, which would remain woefully ignorant of wireless technology for almost a decade.

There was for some years a confusion over the difference between the two methods of ‘wireless’ telegraphy: Marconi’s use of electromagnetic waves generated by a spark, and the alternative of ‘jumping’ currents between parallel wires as employed by Preece and others. Both worked, and both were genuinely ‘wireless’. But there were two very significant differences. The induction method was strictly limited in the distance it could cover, as William Preece had found to his cost. On a Sunday in 1898 he had commandeered the entire telephone networks down the west coast of England and the east coast of Ireland in an effort to send Morse signals across the Irish Sea. All he got was a babble of static; he wondered if he was picking up unintelligible messages from outer space.

In the United States Thomas Edison had had more success with induction, though over no significant distances. After a poverty-stricken childhood and youth Edison had, through his practical ingenuity, acquired considerable prestige and financial backing, and had set up a powerhouse for electrical experimentation at Menlo Park in New Jersey. While Marconi was still a boy playing with batteries and wires at the Villa Griffone, Edison was demonstrating his brilliantly simple system for sending and receiving telegraph signals from moving trains. All major railroads had running alongside them electric telegraph wires, providing communication between stops along the line. Edison’s device involved fitting to the tops of carriages a metal plate which could pick up signals which ‘jumped’ across the gap of more than twenty feet from the existing wires and transmitted them to a receiver inside the train. Edison had demonstrated this invention in October 1887, on a special train on a section of the Lehigh Valley railroad which ran from New York to Buffalo.

There were 230 distinguished guests aboard, members of the Electric Club and guests of the Consolidated Railway Telegraph Company. As the train flew along, reaching sixty miles an hour at times, four hundred messages were sent. One was relayed direct to London by transatlantic cable. Edison imagined that his invention would be a boon to newspaper reporters and businessmen. However, there was no demand for it: newsmen and businessmen preferred to be free from telegrams of all sorts while ‘on the wing’. Marconi’s magic boxes were soon to do away with such a leisurely attitude to life.

Edison’s induction method worked for a moving train. But it was never going to be any use to a ship at sea, as there were no fixed wires running alongside the liners as they criss-crossed the Atlantic, other than those sunk deep on the ocean bed. Marconi’s wireless, however, could be fitted to ships, and in fact to any moving object. Hertzian waves freed wireless to go wherever it was needed, and the means of sending and receiving messages could be packed up neatly in small boxes. That was the beauty of the Marconi system, and in many ways the world of the 1890s appeared to be awaiting his invention.

After a faltering beginning, steamships had conquered the Atlantic, first using the power of paddle-wheels as an aid to sails, then gradually exchanging funnels for masts. New and more efficient engines and the screw propeller cut the crossing times down to five or six days for the swiftest liners, which competed for the right to fly the Blue Riband, awarded to the ship which achieved the fastest crossing. For a very long time after the British government had awarded the Canadian Thomas Cunard the contract to carry mail across the Atlantic in 1838, his shipping line was the leader. Nearly all the large ships were built in Britain, in Belfast or on the Clyde estuary.

In the last twenty years of the century, competition became yet more intense. As they fought to attract the rapidly growing numbers of impoverished Europeans heading for a new life in America, and the wealthy Americans who were beginning to take tours of Europe, the shipping companies ordered larger and more luxurious liners. To have the biggest, fastest ship of the day was good for publicity, even if in other terms it did not make much economic sense. Such was the competition that a new ship was usually out of date within a year or so. Luxury was the keynote of the shipping lines’ advertising, which emphasised the romance of shipboard life, often with a wistful illustration of a pretty young lady chatting idly to a handsome officer. The brochures hinted at all kinds of fun – dancing on deck for the steerage passengers, chance meetings of eligible young things in first class. It was a complaint of those who took seafaring seriously that interior designers had taken over the art of shipbuilding, as the staterooms of first class became more and more luxurious.

America, which had had the fastest sailing ships in the early nineteenth century, fell behind in this shipbuilding spree, and the government decreed that only liners built in the United States could fly the Stars and Stripes. This had little effect, but it did produce the liner St Paul, which was launched from the Philadelphia shipyards in 1895, and was to provide the opulent setting for two of the most poignant episodes in Marconi’s life.

Once he had satisfied himself that wireless signals could be sent and received over distances which stretched beyond the horizon, and did not disappear into space as the scientists had predicted, Marconi began to dream of conquering the Atlantic. When he first sailed for New York on the Aurania it was out of touch with land for days on end. If another ship sailed within signalling distance in mid-ocean they could ‘speak’ to each other by means of the semaphore flags, but if they hit an iceberg, a common hazard in the North Atlantic in spring, or their engines failed, or they caught fire, they had no means of calling for assistance. Although the Cunard Line had an impeccable safety record, every year passenger and cargo ships disappeared, many leaving no survivors or clues to the fate that had befallen them. When Marconi sailed from New York on 9 November 1899, taking a suite of first-class cabins on the American Line’s St Paul, he laid plans to end the lonely isolation of ships at sea.

11 (#ulink_ee9014a3-e2db-5716-8936-60e8878a11f9)

Atlantic Romance (#ulink_ee9014a3-e2db-5716-8936-60e8878a11f9)

Within the exclusive social circle of first class on the St Paul, Marconi was a celebrity, the young inventor all New York had been talking about. But there were those in America who believed that Marconi’s fame and popularity were grounded in public ignorance of the new technology. The magazine Electrical World saw him off from New York with no more than grudging admiration for his gift for publicity: ‘If the visit of Marconi has resulted in no additions to our knowledge of wireless telegraphy, on the other hand, his managers have shown that they have nothing to learn from Yankeedom as to the art of commercial exploitation of an inventor and his inventions.’

Marconi did not, in fact, have any ‘managers’ orchestrating his publicity, nor did he need any. What had most impressed the newspapers was his refusal to make any claims for his system of wireless that he could not demonstrate publicly. Thomas Edison became one of his greatest admirers, and quipped that the Italian ‘delivered more than he promised’. He added that Marconi was the first inventor he had ever met who sported patent leather shoes. In his quiet way, Marconi was an accomplished self-publicist, and before he left New York on the St Paul he had devised a scheme which would make the headlines and astonish the first-class passengers on the liner. He arranged for a cable to be sent to the engineers manning the wireless station at the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, asking them to listen out for a signal from the St Paul as it approached the English Channel on the last leg of its voyage to Southampton.

Before he sailed, Marconi set up a wireless cabin on the liner, the first ever on an Atlantic voyage, and tested and tuned it in readiness for the last hours of the journey. The transmitter would have a limited range, of little more than fifty miles, and the St Paul would be near the end of its crossing before the Isle of Wight station could pick up its signals.

Before then, Marconi had time to enjoy the easy mid-Atlantic social life. Among the first-class passengers was a glamorous young American woman, Josephine Holman. A family friend of the Holmans’, Henry McClure of McClure’s, a cousin of the magazine’s founder, was also aboard, and he no doubt introduced Josephine to Marconi. By the time the St Paul was approaching the west coast of Ireland they were engaged. Neither of them was sure how their families would react to the news. Marconi’s fame did not necessarily mark him out as a fine ‘catch’ as far as the parents of marriageable young ladies were concerned. Despite his aristocratic associations through his mother’s family, he was fatally Italian, and therefore ‘foreign’; and his fortune was by no means assured. The wireless business, many reasoned, might turn out to be just a passing fad. And Marconi’s own family might not be keen for him to marry at such an uncertain time in his career, especially to an American woman they had never met. Josephine and Guglielmo decided to keep their engagement secret for the time being.

There was no certainty about when the St Paul would enter the English Channel, or when it would be within wireless range of the Isle of Wight. The Marconi engineers waiting at the Royal Needles Hotel were therefore on tenterhooks. In the same way that fishermen attach a bell to their line so that they will know if a fish is biting even if they have dozed off, the engineers had rigged up a system whereby a bell would wake them if their receiver was called up at night. Henry Jameson-Davis and Major Flood Page, the managing director of Marconi’s company, were at the hotel awaiting the St Paul’s signal. In a letter to The Times Major Flood Page gave a vivid description of the excitement of the occasion:

To make assurance doubly sure one of the assistants passed the night in the instrument room, but his night was not disturbed by the ringing of his bell, and we were all left to sleep in peace. Between six and seven a.m. I was down; everything was in order. The Needles resembled pillars of salt as one after the other they were lighted up by the brilliant sunrise. There was a thick haze over the sea, and it would have been possible for the liner to pass the Needles without our catching a sight of her. We chatted away pleasantly with the Haven [the station at the Haven Hotel, in Poole], Breakfast over, the sun was delicious as we paced on the lawn, but at sea the haze increased to fog; no ordinary signals could have been read from any ship passing the place at which we were.

The idea of failure never entered our minds. So far as we were concerned, we were ready, and we felt complete confidence that the ship would be all right with Mr Marconi himself on board. Yet, as may easily be imagined, we felt in a state of nervous tension. Waiting is ever tedious, but to wait for hours for the first liner that has ever approached these or any other shores with Marconi apparatus on board, and to wait from ten to eleven, when the steamer was expected, onto twelve, to one to two – it was not anxiety, it was certainly not doubt, not lack of confidence, but it was waiting. We sent our signals over and over again, when, in the most natural and ordinary way, our bell rang. It was 4.45 p.m. ‘Is that you St Paul?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘Sixty-six nautical miles away.’ Need I confess that delight, joy, satisfaction swept away all nervous tension, and in a few minutes we were transcribing, as if it were our daily occupation, four cablegrams for New York, and many telegrams for many parts of England and France, which had been sent fifty, forty-five, forty miles by ‘wireless’ to be despatched from the Totland Bay Post Office.

While the rustic Totland Bay post office was handling an unusually heavy load of telegraph messages, including one giving instructions for the menu at a forthcoming dinner party in London, on board the St Paul as it steamed towards Southampton there was a good deal of fun and games. The operator at the Royal Needles Hotel tapped out a few bits of news, including the latest from South Africa, where the British were engaged in an embarrassingly costly war with the Boers, who had besieged Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. With the permission of the ship’s commander, Captain Jamison, the on-board printers, accustomed to turning out menus and general notices, produced a small newssheet under the banner The Transatlantic Times,