Signor Marconi's Magic Box (18 page)

But the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company never applied for the rights to the patents Stubblefield had agreed to assign it in return for its worthless shares. The company was
uninterested in advancing wireless technology - it was in business to fleece the public with empty promises of future profits. Nothing came of the farmer’s invention. However a legend arose that it was Stubblefield, an amateur electrician way ahead of his time, who had invented radio in 1902. In time his farm became part of Murray State College in Kentucky, and today there is a touching memorial on the campus which reads:

But Stubblefield’s magic boxes were not radio: they worked on the same principles as Preece’s wireless telegraphy, that is, by induction rather than electro-magnetic waves. This is evident from patents he applied for himself, and which he was granted in the United States and Canada after leaving the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company. Stubblefield died embittered and impoverished, and the company he felt had swindled him was eventually convicted of fraud.

Stubblefield and his son had thought of their brand of ‘wireless’ as a means of public broadcast, however down-home and amateurish their public demonstrations. This had not occurred to Marconi or any other leading inventors of the time. Stubblefield did have his brief hour of glory, when the
Washington Times
reported that ‘in basic form he has achieved something even greater than Marconi’. It was not at all clear at the time what wireless could be used for, apart from its unique ability to set up communication to and from ships or isolated islands which had no telegraph cable connection. When Marconi’s Atlantic triumph was first written up in the American press there were many cartoons which showed the cable companies facing defeat, Goliaths challenged by the David of wireless. The United States was by then strewn with telephone and
telegraph wires, and it was anticipated with pleasure that these eyesores would soon disappear. There were bits of doggerel written about the dilemma birds would face when their telegraph perches were gone. Nearly everybody saw wireless simply as a competitor for the telegraph cable. It might possibly carry telephone calls, if the problem of sending speech through the ether could be solved. But nobody foresaw its development as a means of mass communication.

O
n his return journey across the Atlantic from New York in January 1902, Marconi took two of the fourteen luxury suites on the
Philadelphia
, which was not quite a state-of-the-art liner, but splendid enough. The cabins had electric light and hot running water, and Marconi had a brass bed, a sitting room furnished as in a private house, and his own bath and lavatory. Ingenious fans allowed air into the magnificent staterooms while keeping the salt water out. The ship’s grand dining saloon was fifty-three feet long, and light filtered in through an arched glass roof twenty-five feet high. From their swivel chairs passengers could admire the murals of mermaids and dolphins. There was an oak-panelled library with stained-glass windows on which poems about the sea were written, and smoking rooms in black walnut, with scarlet leather sofas and chairs. For those genteel passengers who had not got their sea-legs, or who were too old or weary to climb the staircases, there were ‘constantly ascending and descending electric chambers’.

Before the
Philadelphia
sailed, Marconi had arranged for engineers based at his newly formed American company to fit it out with wireless, so he could communicate with shore stations at Nantucket as they steamed away from the east coast of the United States, and pick up signals from Poldhu and the other stations as he approached the English south coast. The faithful George Kemp made sure Marconi ate regular meals, ordering breakfast for 8 a.m.
prompt, always two boiled eggs, toast and marmalade and tea. On the crossing to England Marconi got to know the captain and crew of the
Philadelphia
, and began to formulate a plan which, if agreed to by his board of directors, would silence his critics and demonstrate beyond any doubt that he was not fooling himself and the rest of the world with his claim to have heard the letter ‘S’ sent from Poldhu to St John’s.

In the three weeks Marconi was back in England his company got agreement from the
Philadelphia
’s owners to heighten the ship’s masts, and the tireless Kemp went to work. He noted in his diary: ‘I fitted a four part aerial on three bamboo crosses made with 14 foot bamboos; one at the masthead, the second at the mizzen mast head and the third between the two nearest boat davits to the instrument room.’ The receiver was set up in a cabin, and Marconi made a point of using one of his own coherers. It had been discovered that in Newfoundland he had used a different ‘mercury’ coherer developed by the Italian navy, and some critics had argued that this took away some of the personal glory of his achievement. He discarded too the telephone receiver he had used in St John’s in favour of a Morse printer, so that there could be no doubt that the signals were being received, and were not a fluke or a figment of his imagination.

Captain A.R. Mills and the
Philadelphia
’s officers agreed to witness messages received as the ship crossed the Atlantic for New York, and to sign the Morse tapes to confirm where and when they had been received. Before the
Philadelphia
sailed from Southampton on 21 February, Marconi instructed the Poldhu station to transmit signals two hours out of every twelve, or one hour out of every six, in periods of ten minutes, alternating with intervals of five-minute rests. He would not be able to send messages back once the ship was more than 150 miles out, because his on-board transmitter did not have the necessary power. The liner called at Cherbourg on the northern French coast, and Kemp and Marconi spent the night there in a hotel. Kemp then returned to Southampton, wishing his boss good luck on the
Philadelphia
.

The crew were sceptical, as they had every right to be. It was of vital importance to Marconi that he should convince the captain and his senior officers that there was no trickery involved. For the uninitiated there was still something suspiciously magical about wireless. Rudyard Kipling had been inspired by Marconi’s fame to write a short story which was published in
Scribner’s
magazine in 1902. In the story, simply called ‘Wireless’, an amateur enthusiast is demonstrating how he can tune in to a station at Poole and pick up signals from Royal Navy ships at Portsmouth. A lot of the Morse messages get jumbled up, and the navy operators become irritable. The enthusiast says: ‘That’s one of them complaining now. Listen: “Disheartening - most disheartening.” It’s quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic seance? It reminds me of that sometimes - odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere - a word here, a word here and there - no good at all.’ Kipling was struck by the apparently supernatural quality of wireless, and in the story an elderly man falls into a daze and appears to pick up verses sent through the ether by the long-dead poet Keats, who has possibly been contacted by the ‘Hertzian’ waves of the amateur’s little station.

Whatever the officers on the
Philadelphia
believed, they would have known that wireless had been shown to work over short distances, and was in use on other ships. But there was a persistent and widespread belief that its range had well-defined limits. And it would not have been difficult for Marconi to arrange for signals to be sent to his receiver from another ship on the Atlantic - or even from another part of the
Philadelphia
- and to pretend they had come from the Poldhu station. Such deceptions, with simple induction systems of wireless or hidden telephone links, had been practised by magicians and bogus spiritualist mediums for years.

On the second morning at sea, with the
Philadelphia
five hundred miles from land, an astonished Chief Officer Marsden saw and heard the tickertape of the Morse code printer rattle out a message which read: ‘All in order. V.E.’ The ‘V.E.’ was short for ‘Do you understand?’ Marsden told the captain what he had seen, but there
was still scepticism. Marconi then asked the captain and officers to witness the receipt of messages from Poldhu at appointed times. The events which followed were described in a piece written by Henry McClure for
McClure’s
magazine.

As the
Philadelphia
steamed towards New York, Captain Mills signed the Morse tapes to confirm the exact position at sea where they had been received. The distance from Poldhu was marked on a map, and a full chart of the voyage was produced and signed by the captain and Chief Officer Marsden. From time to time Marconi would turn his receiver on when Poldhu was off air to show the captain that what they were receiving was not the effect of atmospheric electricity, or a signal from another ship. His receiver was tuned only to Poldhu - another liner crossing the Atlantic at the same time, the
Umbria
, equipped with a Marconi receiver tuned to a different wavelength, received no Poldhu signals. Captain Mills’s signature appears on the Morse tape to confirm that the
Philadelphia
received short messages up to 1551.5 miles from Poldhu. Beyond that, Marconi was able to pick up only the simple ‘S’ signal. This time it was recorded on tape: ‘Received on S.S. “Philadelphia,” Lat. 42.1 N., Long. 47.23 W., distance 2,099 (two thousand and ninety-nine) statute miles from Poldhu. Capt. A.R. Mills.’

When Marconi was greeted by newspaper reporters in New York he held up two miles of Morse printer tape. He was unusually unguarded and ebullient. It would not be long, he declared, before he had a transatlantic wireless system working; and he believed he would be able to send a signal right around the world, and pick it up at the point from which it had been sent. He told Henry McClure:

But there was one aspect of the
Philadelphia
tests which troubled Marconi, and which he either did not mention to McClure, or the reporter chose to leave out of his story. The distance at which signals could be received from Poldhu was much greater at night than during the day. When the liner was seven hundred miles out from Southampton, all daytime signals were lost. Marconi thought it might have something to do with the effect of sunlight on the aerials he was using, but he knew of no solution to the problem. Cable was unaffected by light or darkness, but wireless clearly was, and this could be a fatal blow for a rival transatlantic service.

Marconi’s dilemma was in fact the clue that science needed to solve the riddle of his magic box. But no one could explain it. Oliver Lodge, Nikola Tesla, Sir Ambrose Fleming - in fact everyone working with wireless - still believed that electro-magnetic waves travelled through a substance as mysterious as Lodge’s
departed spirits: the ether. But how it was that they could travel so far was no better understood than it had been when Marconi first showed that they could be detected a mile away. It would take a mind of real but troubled genius to provide the answer.