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

6

Beside the Seaside

This was the heyday of the English seaside resort, before the new fashion for sunbathing drew the wealthy to the Mediterranean in the summer months. The luxury Blue Trains steamed down to the French Riviera only in winter, when the mild climate attracted the English aristocracy who developed the resorts of Nice and Cannes. Queen Victoria herself liked to stay in Hyères, near Toulon, but not beyond May, when the heat became unbearable and everyone returned north, the French to Honfleur and Deauville on the Normandy coast, and the English to their favoured grand hotels in Eastbourne, Bournemouth and other fashionable seaside towns.

The railways had opened up many resorts to day-trippers from London, and the south coast of England was becoming socially segregated as the ‘quality’ sought refuge from brash day-tripper resorts like Brighton in the more exclusive havens and coves. Aristocratic and royal families from all over Europe would spend time in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, a short ferry-ride from the coast. In August there was Cowes Regatta, a gathering of the wealthy and the upper crust who raced their huge yachts and enjoyed a splendid social round. Queen Victoria’s favourite retreat was Osborne House, close to Cowes, and she spent most summers here in her old age, enjoying the fresh sea air as she was wheeled around the extensive grounds in her bath-chair. On the white chalk clifftops of the island were grand hotels, those on the southern coast with a view across the Channel to France. Among them was the Royal Needles Hotel at Alum Bay, on the very western tip of the island.

It was in rented rooms at the Royal Needles that Marconi established the world’s first equipped and functioning wireless telegraphy station in November 1897. An aerial 120 feet high with a wire-netting antenna was erected in the grounds, without, it seems, giving rise to any complaints from other residents. In various rooms of the hotel were pieces of equipment for transmitting and receiving, and workshops where coils of wire were wound, wax was melted for insulation, and metals filed down for experimental versions of the receiver or coherer.

The location was chosen so that Marconi could test his equipment at sea and as a means of communication between ships and the shore. In the summer months, when the coast teemed with tourists and the horse-drawn bathing machines were trundled into the chilly waters of the Channel for women bathers to enjoy a discreet dip, coastal steamers ran regularly from the pier at Alum Bay to the resorts of Bournemouth and Swanage to the west. Marconi negotiated to fit wireless telegraphy equipment to two of these, the May Flower and the Solent, so that he could test the range and effectiveness of his station at the hotel. When he and his engineers were transmitting, guests were intrigued by the crackle and hiss of the sparks which generated the mysterious and invisible rays that activated the Morse code tickertape on the ships.

English hotels offered the young inventor comfort and fine food, a place where his mother and older brother Alphonso as well as the staff of engineers he was gathering around him could stay. Though Marconi and his mother had no time to enjoy the glamorous social life of London, they were able to find some relaxation on the breezy south coast of England. After Alum Bay another station was opened at the Madeira Hotel in Bournemouth, fifteen miles down the coast. Bournemouth had many distinguished visitors and residents in the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin had stayed there in the 1860s; the beautiful Emilie Charlotte le Breton, known by her stage name Lillie Langtry, lived in a house in Bournemouth provided by her lover, the Prince of Wales, in the 1880s; Robert Louis Stevenson had written The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Bournemouth while recovering from ill-health; and the artist Aubrey Beardsley had only recently left the resort after a period of convalescence when Marconi arrived.

The Bournemouth station first went into operation in January 1898, just before a blizzard blanketed the south coast in deep snow. Newspaper reporters had gathered in Bournemouth, where William Gladstone, the former Prime Minister and grand old man of British politics, was seriously ill. The weight of snow brought down the overhead telegraph wires, and communication with London was cut. It was characteristic of Marconi’s opportunism and instinct for publicity that he arranged for the newly opened station at the Madeira Hotel to send wireless messages to the Royal Needles Hotel, from where they could be forwarded to London by the telegraph links from the Isle of Wight, which were still open. In the event, Gladstone recovered sufficiently to return to his home, where he died in May 1898.

Marconi fell out with the management of the Madeira Hotel – it is not clear if the dispute was about money or the nuisance his wireless station caused to other guests – and moved his station to a house in Bournemouth, and then finally to the Haven Hotel, a former coaching inn in the adjoining resort of Poole. This became a home from home for him for many years, long after the station at the Royal Needles Hotel was closed down. After a day in which the Haven’s guests were entertained by the crackling of Marconi’s aerial, the inventor would often sit down at the piano after supper. Accompanied by his brother Alfonso on the violin and an engineer, Dr Erskine Murray, on cello, the trio would play popular classical pieces as the prevailing south-west wind rattled the hotel windows. Annie Marconi often stayed to look after her son, and those evenings in Poole were among the most delicious and poignant of her life. She was to see Guglielmo less and less as he pursued with steely determination his ambition to transmit wireless signals further and further across the sea. For the time being, however, the fame he had already achieved was a vindication of her faith in him, and indeed of the great risks she had taken in her own life.

7

Texting Queen Victoria

On 8 August 1898 the airwaves crackled with one of the first text messages in history: ‘Very anxious to have cricket match between Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers. Please ask the Queen whether she would allow match to be played at Osborne. Crescent goes to Portsmouth, Monday.’ It was sent from the royal yacht Osborne, off the Isle of Wight, to a small receiving station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House. Queen Victoria’s reply was tapped back across the sea: ‘The Queen approves of the match between the Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers being played at Osborne.’

The Queen, then seventy-nine years old, had spent much of the summer at Osborne, and could not fail to notice that something intriguing was going on a few miles to the south at the Royal Needles Hotel. Guglielmo Marconi was not only becoming something of a local figure, he had won tremendous acclaim in the press for one of the first commercial tests of his wireless telegraphy, when the Dublin Daily Express had asked him if he could cover the Kingston Regatta in Dublin Bay that July. The newspaper had been impressed by some experiments one of Marconi’s engineers had carried out on a treacherous part of the Irish coast for the shipping underwriters Lloyd’s of London. To cover the Kingston Regatta Marconi fitted up a tug, the Flying Huntress, with his equipment, and followed the yacht races at sea, sending back the latest news and positions to a receiving station on shore which then cabled the up-to-the-minute accounts to the Express’s sister paper, the Evening Mail.

The Flying Huntress was an old puffer, and looked comical with its makeshift aerial mast and a roll of wire rabbit-netting rigged up to exchange signals with the shore station in the gardens of the Kingston habourmaster’s home. In contrast to the bizarre sight of ‘Marconi’s magic netting hanging from an impromptu mast’, the Dublin Daily Express reporter found the inventor himself captivating.

A tall, athletic figure, dark hair, steady grey blue eyes, a resolute mouth and an open forehead – such is the young Italian inventor. His manner is at once unassuming to a degree, and yet confident. He speaks freely and fully, and quite frankly defines the limits of his own as of all scientists’ knowledge as to the mysterious powers of electricity and ether. At his instrument his face shows a suppressed enthusiasm which is a delightful revelation of character. A youth of twenty-three who can, very literally, evoke spirits from the vasty deep and despatch them on the wings of the wind must naturally feel that he had done something very like picking the lock of Nature’s laboratory. Signor Marconi listens to the crack-crack of his instrument with some such wondering interest as Aladdin must have displayed on first hearing the voice of the Genius who had been called up by the friction of his lamp.

There was just as much fascination with the shore station, where Marconi’s ‘chief assistant’ George Kemp, a stocky little Englishman with a handlebar moustache, an indefatigable worker who knew his masts and his ropes from his time in the Navy, and who Marconi had met through Preece at the Post Office, was tracked down by another Daily Express journalist. The ‘old navy man’ gave a down-to-earth account of the state of the art: ‘The one thing to do if you expect to find out anything about electricity is to work,’ said he, ‘for you can do nothing with theories. Signor Marconi’s discoveries prove that the professors are all wrong, and now they will have to go and burn their books. Then they will write new ones, which, perhaps some time they will have to burn in their turn.’ Of Marconi, Kemp said: ‘He works in all weather, and I remember him having to make three attempts to get out past the Needles in a gale before he succeeded. He does not care for storms or rain, but keeps pegging away in the most persistent manner.’

Yet another reporter on board the Flying Huntress described Marconi standing by the instruments ‘with a certain simple dignity, a quiet pride in his own control of a powerful force, which suggested a great musician conducting the performance of a masterpiece of his own composing’. Though he had been determined not to be overawed by this wonderful invention, the reporter confessed to a thrill when he joined Marconi in a little cabin to send a message to the shore. Having witnessed this remarkable demonstration, a devilish impulse to play with wireless overcame him.

Is it the Irish characteristic, or is it the common impulse of human nature, that when we find ourselves in command of a great force, by means of which stupendous results can be produced for the benefit of mankind, our first desire is to play tricks with it? No sooner were we alive to the extraordinary fact that it was possible, without connecting wires, to communicate with a station which was miles away and quite invisible to us, than we began to send silly messages, such as to request the man in charge of the Kingston station to be sure to keep sober and not to take too many ‘whiskey-and-sodas’.

All the English newspapers reported Marconi’s triumph at the Kingston Regatta, and the glowing descriptions of this modest young inventor and his magical abilities impressed Queen Victoria and her eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales, known affectionately as ‘Bertie’.

The Prince of Wales spent much of his time with rich friends, and had been a guest of the Rothschilds, the banking millionaires, in Paris, where he had fallen and seriously injured his leg. In August he was to attend the Cowes Regatta on the royal yacht, and a request was made to Marconi to set up a wireless link between the Queen at Osborne and her son on the ship moored offshore. Marconi was only too happy to oblige: it was excellent publicity, and it was no concern of his if, for the time being, wireless was employed frivolously. In any case, as he later told an audience of professional engineers, it offered him ‘the opportunity to study and meditate upon new and interesting elements concerning the influence of hills on wireless communication’.

With an aerial fixed to the mast of the royal yacht and a station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House, the textmessaging service between the Queen and her son was successfully established. A great many of the guests and members of the royal family on the yacht and staying at Osborne House took the opportunity to make use of this entirely novel means of communication. The messages were received as Morse code printout, which was then decoded and written in longhand on official forms headed ‘Naval Telegraphs and Signals’. In this way a lady called Emily Ampthill at Osborne was able to ask a Miss Knollys on the royal yacht: ‘Could you come to tea with us some day (end)’, to which the reply came: ‘Very sorry cannot come to tea. Am leaving Cowes tonight (end)’. More than a hundred messages were sent, many of them from Queen Victoria showing concern for Bertie’s bad leg.

This was another triumph for Marconi. He wrote home to his father to tell him excitedly of his two weeks with the world’s most famous royal family, that Prince Edward had presented him with a fabulous tiepin, and that he was granted an audience with Queen Victoria. However, what excited him most was the discovery that he could keep in touch with a moving ship up to a distance of fourteen miles, his signals apparently penetrating the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. The newspapers loved it, none more so than a new popular publication which had gone on sale for the first time in 1896, the Daily Mail. A full-page illustration showed Marconi at his wireless set, watched by two fascinated ladies, with his signals careering off along a wavy dotted line to the aerial of the royal yacht.

As an inventor Marconi was exceptionally lucky. While others struggled to find financial backers, his contacts through his mother’s aristocratic Anglo-Irish family had given him security for at least a year or two, and the money to pay for equipment and assistants. During his brief period under William Preece’s patronage Marconi had ‘borrowed’ the old sailor George Kemp, who became his most loyal attendant. Now Kemp was on the Marconi Wireless Company payroll,* rigging up aerials on windswept coasts wherever they were needed, for all the world like a mariner who had found a new lease of life raising masts on land with which to catch not the wind, but electronic waves. Young as Marconi was, his dedication and single-mindedness, his gentlemanly demeanour, so different from the popular image of the ‘mad inventor’, and his continuous success inspired loyalty in his small workforce of engineers, most of whom had learned their trade in the business of telegraph cables.

Although a lot of ‘secret’ experimentation went on in the hotel laboratories on the Isle of Wight and at Poole on the south coast, Marconi was always willing to chance his luck and his reputation with very public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy. This above all endeared him to the new popular journals of the day, which had a hunger for exciting and novel discoveries, especially those which might have potential for driving forward the already wonderful advances in modern civilisation. The dapper figure of Signor Marconi, always smartly dressed, the modest Italian who spoke perfect English and who appeared to be able to work miracles with a few batteries and a baffling array of wires, was irresistible.

*Marconi’s name was added to the company name in February 1900. Very rapidly other Marconi companies were formed, including the Marconi International Marine Company and the American Marconi Company, both also in 1900.

8

An American Investigates

Wherever Marconi went in these heady early days of his fame he was sure to have along with him a writer commissioned by the American McClure’s magazine. Founded in 1894 by an Irish émigré, Samuel McClure, McClure’s was one of the first publications to make use of the new process of photo-engraving, which put the old woodcut engravers out of business, as photographs could now be reproduced at a fraction of the cost of hand-carved illustrations. McClure’s sold for fifteen cents on the news-stands, yet it could attract such eminent writers as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was the policy of the magazine to invite writers of fiction to cover news events, and McClure’s fascination with Marconi resulted in a series of wonderfully colourful descriptions of the young inventor at work.

Marconi had already made the headlines with his coverage of the Kingston Regatta and his link-up between Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales at the Isle of Wight, as well as one or two other well-publicised demonstrations of his invention. When McClure’s learned that the French government had asked him if he could send a wireless signal across the English Channel – at thirty-two miles by far the greatest distance attempted up to that time – in the spring of 1899, it decided that this had to be covered. Cleveland Moffett, a writer of fictional detective stories, and a fellow reporter, Robert McClure, brother of the magazine’s founder, were despatched to cover the historic event, and to reassure themselves and their readers that there was no trickery involved. Moffett joined Marconi on the French side, in the small town of Wimereux, close to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where thirty-five years before Annie Jameson had secretly married Giuseppe Marconi. He wrote:

At five o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, March 27th, everything being ready, Marconi pressed the sending-key for the first cross-channel message. There was nothing different in the transmission from the method grown familiar now through months at the Alum Bay and Poole stations. Transmitter and receiver were quite the same; and a seven-strand copper wire, well insulated and hung from the sprit of a mast 150 feet high, was used. The mast stood in the sand just at sea level, with no height of cliff or bank to give aid.

‘Brripp – brripp – brripp – brripp – brrrrrr,’ went the transmitter under Marconi’s hand. The sparks flashed, and a dozen eyes looked out anxiously upon the sea as it broke fiercely over Napoleon’s old fort that rose abandoned in the foreground. Would the message carry all the way to England? Thirty-two miles seemed a long way.

‘Brripp – brripp – brrrrr – brripp – brrrrr – brripp – brripp.’ So he went, deliberately, with a short message telling them over there that he was using a two-centimeter spark, and signing three V’s at the end.

Then he stopped, and the room was silent, with a straining of ears for some sound from the receiver. A moment’s pause, and then it came briskly, the usual clicking of dots and dashes as the tape rolled off its message. And there it was, short and commonplace enough, yet vastly important, since it was the first wireless message sent from England to the Continent: First ‘V,’ the call; then ‘M,’ meaning, Your message is perfect;’ then, ‘Same here 2 c m s. V V V,’ the last being an abbreviation for two centimeters and the conventional finishing signal.