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

How an Amateur Inventor

Defied Scientists

and Began the Radio Revolution

GAVIN WEIGHTMAN

1

In Darkest London

On a winter’s evening in 1896 a brougham, a four-wheeled cab drawn by a single horse, left the fashionable stuccoed terraces of west London and headed eastwards along the dirt roads and cobbled streets of the capital, which glistened in the gaslight under a light rain. The passengers were a young man who had with him two large black boxes, and a gentleman in his sixties sporting a long grey beard, his thinning hair pasted to his head in a centre parting. Steam rose from the horse’s flanks in the dank air as the brougham rattled through the canyons of streets in the City and, leaving the Square Mile, came to the fitfully-lit roads of Whitechapel. This was the frontier of the notorious East End, where only a few years earlier Jack the Ripper had mutilated his victims and left them dead or dying in dark alleyways.

The cab turned onto Commercial Street, and the young man peered through the smoke-filled air for a sight of their destination. Finally they lurched off the main road and entered a courtyard fronting an elegant building that looked as if it might have stood there for hundreds of years. This was Toynbee Hall, which had in fact been completed just fifteen years previously. It was the inspiration of the remarkable Canon Barnett, vicar of the poverty-stricken parish of St Jude’s in Whitechapel, who had chosen to conduct his missionary work not in Africa but in that part of the capital William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had called ‘Darkest London’. Toynbee Hall, modelled on Oxford and Cambridge’s colleges, was a ‘settlement’ built with money subscribed by those ancient universities. Here some of the leading figures of the coming generation of politicians and civil servants were invited to live for months at a time, so they could learn about poverty and offer some culture and instruction to the poor. There was a large lecture theatre, in which many distinguished people had delivered their opinions on the great moral, political and scientific issues of the day. A few years later the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would attend lectures at Toynbee Hall.

The speaker this evening, Saturday, 12 December 1896, was not the young man who unloaded his black boxes from the cab: he and his apparatus were to be the star turn of the lecture which was to be given by his older companion. The two had met for the first time only that April, and the bearded Victorian gentleman had subsequently been so impressed by the young man’s invention that he had become his patron. Some private demonstrations of what the black boxes could achieve had been given on the rooftops of London and out on the open chalk lands of Salisbury Plain, where the British Army rehearsed cavalry charges close to the Neolithic monument of Stonehenge. But this evening at Toynbee Hall was to be the first exhibition of the magic boxes to a public audience. The lecture was entitled ‘Telegraphy without Wires’, a subject about which little was then known outside the science laboratory and the telegraph business itself.

Toynbee Hall was packed. The speaker, William Preece, had gained a reputation for delivering lucid and amusing public lectures on recent exciting scientific discoveries. On this evening he did not at first reveal who his accomplice was, but gave a little of the history as he knew it of methods of sending telegraph messages without a wire connection. As long ago as 1838 a German, Professor Steinbjel, one of half a dozen scientists who claimed to have invented the electric telegraph, had foreseen a time when it might be possible to do away with the cable altogether.

In fact, Preece continued, he himself had already achieved this. Just two years previously he had been astonished to discover that messages being sent on underground telegraph cables owned by the British Post Office could be picked up by the exchange of a telephone company in the City, which had its wires above ground. Somehow the electronic impulses in one wire had jumped across to another, creating, in effect, a form of ‘wireless’ communication. Some experiments had been carried out to see if this could be the basis of a new system of communication. Some limited success had been achieved, but that evening Preece had an important announcement to make about an entirely new form of wireless telegraphy. It was at this point, according to newspaper reports which appeared the following Monday, 14 December, that Preece introduced his audience to the young man who shared the platform with him. He was an Italian electrician named Guglielmo Marconi who, Preece explained, had come to him recently with his home-made equipment. This evening he and Signor Marconi would for the very first time demonstrate to a general audience the working of this system.

‘The apparatus was then exhibited,’ said the Daily Chronicle report. ‘What appeared to be just two ordinary boxes were stationed at each end of the room, the current was set in motion at one end and a bell was immediately rung in the other. To show there was no deception Mr Marconi held the receiver and carried it about, the bell ringing whenever the vibrations at the other box were set up.’ When Preece pressed a lever in the sending box there was the crack of an electric spark, and an instantaneous ringing in the receiver held by Marconi. The effect was achieved, the audience was told, by the transmission from the sending box of ‘electrostatic’ waves much the same as light. These were received by the other box, in which there was a device which, when activated, rang the bell. In other words, a signal was being sent around the lecture hall which was invisible, but as tangible in its effects as any telegraph impulse sent along a wire. And it followed Marconi wherever he went in the hall.

To any modern audience this device would look more like a mildly diverting toy than an invention at the very forefront of technology. No transmission of speech, or music, or anything now associated with radio was being demonstrated. No messages were being sent at all – just an 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,* 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’.