Signor Marconi's Magic Box (12 page)

The Villa Griffone shimmering in the summer heat. As a boy Marconi had his home-made laboratory on the top floor, with a window looking onto the rolling vineyards and orchards behind. It was here he first sent wireless signals further than any scientists thought possible.

The little ‘coherer’ which began the radio revolution. Drawing on the discoveries of academic scientists, Marconi crafted this miniature receiver of wireless signals sent in the dots and dashes of Morse code.

William Preece, the distinguished Chief Electrical Engineer of the British Post Office who was Marconi’s patron when the young inventor first came to London. After Marconi set up his own company with family help Preece withdrew his support, and later claimed he had invented wireless himself.

One of the ‘magic boxes’ Marconi used to make his first demonstrations of wireless. This ‘coherer’ receiver was home-made, but beautifully crafted and ‘state of the art’ around 1897.

Marconi, fourth from the right, hand on his knee, demonstrates his wireless system to observers from the Italian navy at La Spezia in 1897. Morse code signals are received on the tickertape. Though his invention was funded in London and he spoke perfect English, Marconi remained an Italian patriot all his life.

British Post Office engineers testing Marconi’s spark transmitter during experiments in which signals were sent and received across the Bristol Channel in 1897. Though the tests were successful, the Post Office was not as impressed as the German professor Adolphus Slaby, who realised Marconi had discovered something new and dashed home to copy it.

The precipitous location of the world’s first working wireless station. In 1897 Marconi rented rooms in the clifftop Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight and transmitted messages along the coast and to passing steamers taking holidaymakers on day trips along the south coast of England.

The London
Daily Mail
’s graphic illustration on 19 August 1898 of a Marconi engineer tapping out Morse code messages from Lady Battenberg, staying at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, to friends on the royal yacht
Osborne
. Marconi was thrilled to discover that he could keep in touch with his land station while the royal yacht was on the move, and was rewarded with a fabulous tiepin presented to him by Prince Edward.

One of the first wireless ‘text messages’ in history: it was dictated by Queen Victoria and tapped out by a Marconi engineer in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Marconi himself deciphered the message to Prince Edward on the royal yacht
Osborne
.

The tireless and fiercely loyal ex-naval officer and Post Office employee George Kemp with his boss, the much younger Marconi, in their temporary wireless station set up at Wimereux on the northern coast of France in 1898 to demonstrate the sending of signals across the English Channel.

The Haven Hotel, Poole, Dorset, on the south coast of England. Decked out in this picture for the coronation of Edward VII in August 1902, the Haven was Marconi’s home and research station for several years.