Signor Marconi's Magic Box (19 page)

R
oughly halfway between the Haven Hotel in Dorset and Poldhu in Cornwall, on that stretch of Devon’s south coast which likes to call itself ‘the English Riviera’, is the resort of Torquay. In the spring of 1902 an eccentric Englishman would sometimes be seen flying down the steep country lanes outside the town on a bicycle, followed by an anxious, and not quite so daring, companion. They called this reckless cycling ‘scorching’, and the more timid man, George Searle, a Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, recalled: ‘We used to put our feet on the foot-rests on the front forks and then let the cycle run down hill. Oliver put his feet up, folded his arms, and let the thing rip down steep and quite rough lanes, leaving me far behind.’ This was one of the few pleasures in the mostly unhappy life of Oliver Heaviside, who was known locally and unflatteringly as ‘the Hermit of Paignton’, the small town nearby in which he had lived for a time.

Heaviside was born in 1850 in Camden Town, then a rough area of London close to where Charles Dickens had spent the unhappiest part of his childhood. The family was poverty-stricken, for Oliver’s father was a wood engraver and the development of photography from the 1850s had ruined his trade. He was a violent man, and regularly beat Oliver and his brothers. The Heavisides were saved from their penury when a sister of Oliver’s mother married Charles Wheatstone, a wealthy man who had been closely
involved with the development of the electric telegraph. Oliver was largely self-educated, having left school at the age of sixteen to work in a telegraphy office. He spent some time in Denmark working for a cable company based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but gave up work entirely at the age of twenty-four to study the mathematics of James Clerk Maxwell, whose theory of electro-magnetism had led to Marconi’s creation of a practical wireless system.

Charles Wheatstone gave Oliver an interest in music as well as science, and through his influence two of Oliver’s older brothers obtained jobs with a telegraph company. The family were still in Camden Town when Oliver gave up his job in favour of sitting alone in a small attic room, smoking a pipe and working his way through Maxwell’s mathematical equations. He later moved to Torquay to stay with his brother Charles, who managed a music shop there. Oliver Heaviside began his work in 1874, the year Marconi was born, and two years later published in the
Philosophical Magazine
a highly technical paper concerned with a recurrent problem in cable telegraphy, about which he knew a great deal. It was quite unintelligible to the lay reader, but those who could make sense of it recognised that Heaviside was quite brilliant. For the rest of his life he conducted a debate with the leading physicists and electrical experts of the day, either by writing to them or by publishing articles in the magazine
The Electrician.
These were often vitriolic, and many were aimed at the man he disparaged most: William Preece of the Post Office, Guglielmo Marconi’s erstwhile benefactor. Heaviside regarded Preece as a mathematical and scientific incompetent who talked and wrote nonsense, and understood nothing about telegraphy.

Heaviside’s life was utterly different from Marconi’s. In an affectionate memoir Professor G.F.C. Searle recalled a visit he made with his wife to Heaviside’s home: ‘We had been warned what we should find. The teapot spout was completely stopped up by tea leaves and no tea could come out of it. Oliver tipped the pot so far that tea ran out of the top. He caught what he could in the cups, and carefully spooned the tea leaves out of Mrs Searle’s cup.’
On another visit Heaviside told them: ‘There are nine pieces of bread and butter - three pieces each. There is some cake at the end but I would not recommend it.’ Heaviside wrote to Searle around 1902: ‘if I boil an egg, I am startled by a loud report; either I did not put any water in or else it has boiled away’.

At that time Heaviside was fifty-two years old, living in squalor with a woman relative who acted as housekeeper. His strange manner drew the attention of local boys, who constantly persecuted him, throwing stones at his windows. He offered the local police 150 apples from his garden if they would keep a watch on his home. And yet this social misfit was one of only two scientists in the world in 1902 who proposed the correct solution to the puzzle of how Marconi was able to transmit wireless signals to distances of over two thousand miles.

Heaviside was a pure scientist: he arrived at Heinrich Hertz’s proof of electro-magnetic waves through deduction at the time the German was testing James Clerk Maxwell’s ideas in his laboratory. When Marconi’s wireless telegraphy began to receive wide publicity, Heaviside was quick to point out that William Preece - who was publicly suggesting it was he, and not Marconi, who had developed it - did not understand it at all, and could not tell the difference between induction and Hertzian waves. In September 1900, while Marconi and Ambrose Fleming were about to start work at Poldhu, Preece was telling the British Association: ‘The sensation created in 1897 by Mr Marconi’s application of Hertzian waves distracted attention from the more practical, simpler and older method.’ By 1907 he was telling a committee of the House of Commons that he had been working on wireless telegraphy twelve years before Marconi came to Britain.

When Heaviside heard about Marconi’s transatlantic signal he quickly had an explanation based on his profound understanding of electro-magnetism. He wrote to
The Electrician
suggesting that there might be a conducting layer in the upper atmosphere which reflected the wireless waves, but his letter was not published. Then, in 1902, he was asked to contribute a piece on ‘The Theory of
the Electric Telegraph’ to the tenth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. In it he mentioned, almost in passing, that seawater had ‘enough conductivity’ for Hertzian waves to bounce off it, and that ‘there may possibly be a sufficiently conducting layer in the upper air. If so, the waves will, so to speak, catch on it more or less. Then the guidance will be by the sea on one side and the upper layer on the other.’

The theory of an upper layer of the atmosphere which reflected wireless waves downwards was also proposed by Arthur Kennelly, an expatriate Briton working in America. But nobody took any notice, and there were plenty of rival theories. None of this mattered much to Marconi, for even if there
was
a reflecting layer sending his long wireless waves back to earth, nobody had any idea how it behaved.

Oliver Heaviside turned down a number of honours. He declined the invitation to the banquet held for all the contributors to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, although he did accept the fee. In his last years he took to awarding himself the self-deprecating acronym ‘W.O.R.M.’ after his name. There is no record of any correspondence or contact between him and Marconi.

As far as the development of wireless went, Heaviside’s brilliant speculation was of no practical use at the time, because nobody knew how to examine the properties of the upper atmosphere. And there were still many urgent unanswered questions. Would wireless waves travel as far over land as over the sea? Most self-appointed experts thought not; mountain ranges might prove to be an obstacle. Marconi himself was not sure. There was only one way to find out.

Q
ueen Victoria had died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 22 January 1901. The nation was in mourning for six months, decked out in miles of black crêpe. The coronation of her son Edward in Westminster Abbey was fixed for 26 June 1902, and for weeks beforehand London was transformed, with the arrival of exotic troops of soldiers and sailors from all over the Empire who would take part in the coronation parades. There was to be a naval review at Spithead, and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy made arrangements to arrive by sea aboard his cruiser the
Carlo Alberto.
The twenty-nine-year-old Emmanuel had come to the throne only two years earlier, after the assassination of his father, King Umberto, by a member of an international group of anarchists, an Italian from New Jersey.

A friend of Marconi’s, the Italian naval officer Luigi Solari, had asked the young King if a ship might be made available for wireless experiments. Fiercely proud that the world-famous inventor of wireless was an Italian national, Emmanuel invited Marconi to install his equipment aboard the
Carlo Alberto
, so that when the coronation and naval review were over Marconi could join the King and conduct whatever wireless tests he liked as they steamed back to Italy. This was a tremendous opportunity for Marconi and he happily accepted Emmanuel’s offer.

When the
Carlo Alberto
came in sight of the English coast on
the morning of 18 June 1902, the captain, Admiral Mirabello, the King and the ship’s crew could see the masts of Poldhu in the distance. With equipment Luigi Solari had fitted to the ship they exchanged messages with the Marconi station. The next day George Kemp bought a large Union Jack in preparation for Coronation Day, and hoisted it on one of the wireless masts.

At 11.15 a.m. on 24 June a notice was posted outside Buckingham Palace which read: ‘The King is suffering from perityphlitis. His condition on Saturday was so satisfactory that it was hoped that with care his Majesty would be able to go through the Coronation ceremony. On Monday evening a recrudescence became manifest, rendering a surgical operation necessary today.’ Crowds gathered outside the palace waiting for news, while others went to St James’s Square to see if they could learn anything from the Earl Marshal at Norfolk House, organisational headquarters for the coronation.
The Times
reported: ‘But the servant who answered the door . . . had nothing to say to the general inquirer. Even to the accredited press representative his answer was courteous but laconic: “The Coronation will be postponed; we can tell you no more.”

In early-twentieth-century England, only the poor were treated in hospitals: the well-to-do were attended and operated on at home. Edward had what we now call appendicitis. He needed an operation, and the surgeon chosen was the celebrated Frederick Treves of the London Hospital, who had announced his retirement in his early forties after making a fortune in private practice. It was Treves who had befriended and found a haven for the deformed Joseph Merrick, known as ‘the Elephant Man’. An operating bed was brought from the London Hospital and installed in a room in Buckingham Palace, with one nurse in attendance.

The anaesthetics in use at the time were ether and chloroform, which were applied only briefly. Surgeons like Treves prided themselves on the speed with which they worked so patients were not rendered unconscious for long. Edward, however, was sixty-four years old, overweight and not in the best physical condition. He reacted violently to the first administration of the anaesthetic, and
almost swallowed his tongue: his beard had to be pulled hard to retrieve it so that he did not choke. Queen Alexandra, who was present, became hysterical and had to be ushered from the room. Treves, wearing a dirty old coat - he was an old-fashioned practitioner, with little time for what he regarded as the ‘continental’ obsession with cleanliness which had developed after the discovery of micro-organisms - then proceeded to open up the future monarch and drain the pus from his infected appendix.

It was not at all certain that Edward would survive, and if he did, how long the coronation would be delayed. Many foreign visitors packed up and went home. King Victor Emmanuel decided to go back to Italy on the
Carlo Alberto
, and hasty arrangements were made to get Marconi’s equipment aboard at Poole. Then Emmanuel changed his mind. He had been in touch by cable with Tsar Nicholas, who invited him to Russia. Marconi had gone to London, leaving George Kemp to organise the fitting-out of the
Carlo Alberto
. At the last minute it was arranged that he would meet the ship at Dover, by which time Kemp would have it ready for an exciting series of experiments as it sailed north. An extra mast was raised on the ship, and a four-stranded aerial rigged as high as possible as the
Carlo Alberto
steamed towards Dover. Once again Kemp stayed behind in England, waving Marconi goodbye and wishing him well with his latest invention. On board the
Carlo Alberto
for this unexpected voyage north was an entirely new kind of detector which Marconi had only just put together.

Any device which reacted to the impact of electro-magnetic waves could be turned into a receiver of Morse dots and dashes. Marconi had read accounts by the brilliant New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford of experiments in which electro-magnetic waves were used to demagnetise iron needles. Just three years older than Marconi, Rutherford was a true scientist who had become famous for his work on radioactivity; in 1931 he would be honoured with the title Lord Rutherford.

In 1894 Rutherford had written a paper showing how a coil of magnetised wire could become a detector of wireless waves. It
took Marconi’s dogged determination and craftsman’s ingenuity to fashion from Rutherford’s blueprint a practical wireless detector out of bits and pieces he could lay his hands on while working at the Haven Hotel. Like the Vail brothers, who bought milliners’ copper wire designed for ‘skyscraper hats’ for their experimental electric telegraph, Marconi made use of an unexpected source for the thin wire he needed. While cycling around the Poole area he had often gone into Bournemouth, and his attention had been attracted by a pretty girl in a flower shop who worked all day making posies for visitors to the resort. Marconi remembered that she had used a delicate wire frame for their structure, and in a moment of inspiration he cycled to Bournemouth and persuaded the girl in the flower shop to sell him some lengths of fine decorative wire. He almost ‘scorched’ Heaviside-fashion back to the Haven Hotel in his impatience to begin winding it into a coil.

George Kemp produced a wooden Havana cigar box in which to house the new receiver, and horseshoe magnets were not hard to find. But Marconi also required a revolving strand of wire on two small wooden spools, and these needed a miniature motor of some kind. As always, late-Victorian ingenuity unwittingly provided just the thing. On 2 June Kemp noted in his diary: ‘I went to Bournemouth where I bought a second-hand Edison Phonograph; the clockwork was taken out and used for revolving the iron core of No. 40 silk covered iron wire through the primary coil of the detector.’ Cannibalised Edison cylindrical phonographs were to provide several of the early motors for Marconi’s new invention.