Signor Marconi's Magic Box (20 page)

As the
Carlo Alberto
raced up the North Sea, Marconi worked night and day testing his magnetic detector. It worked well apart from a persistent problem with atmospheric interference, the price of its greater sensitivity. He also rigged up a coherer and Morse printer to provide a permanent record of messages received. But once again, as on the
Philadelphia
, the sunrise cut them off from Poldhu once they were five hundred miles away, and signals could not get through again until half an hour after sunset. With a midshipman, Raineri-Biscia, Marconi worked through the night
adjusting his equipment and trying out all kinds of devices which he hoped might bring Poldhu back in daylight. But nothing worked. Raineri-Biscia noticed that Marconi became more and more agitated, shouting in Italian with a Bolognese accent: ‘Damn the sun! How long will it torment us!’

When the
Carlo Alberto
reached Russia they anchored at Kronstadt, and King Victor Emmanuel went off to meet Tsar Nicholas. Naturally the Tsar wanted to see for himself this remarkable invention of Marconi’s, with which he was able to receive messages from Cornwall, 1600 miles away. He arrived in splendour, with the battleships of his fleet firing salutes, the sailors cheering and bands playing the national anthem. Marconi showed the wireless equipment to the Tsar, who was thrilled to see a special greeting tapped out on the printer. Speaking in English, he asked Marconi where it had come from. Marconi apologetically explained that it had been sent not from Cornwall, but from the other end of the
Carlo Alberto
, where a transmitter had been hastily put together by Solari. They would not hear from Poldhu again until the sun had set.

As a matter of courtesy, King Victor Emmanuel had arranged to rendezvous at sea with the German Emperor. Kaiser Wilhelm II, cousin to Edward VII, was regarded in royal and diplomatic circles as ‘not quite sane’. Bismarck said of him: ‘The Kaiser is like a balloon. If you do not hold fast to the string, you never know where he will be off to.’ It was Wilhelm who had demanded that Germany have great ships like the British, and who had ordered the building of the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
and the
Deutschland
, both former holders of the Blue Riband. It was also he who had asked William Preece to allow Professor Adolphus Slaby to spy on Marconi. The Kaiser wanted Germany to be ahead of all other countries in new technologies, and it did not please him that Marconi appeared to be far more successful than his own scientists and inventors. The wireless system which Slaby and Count von Arco had developed was fitted on a few ships by 1902, one of them the
Deutschland
. Other German vessels, like the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
,
had Marconi equipment. And it was the Marconi Company that had most of the shore stations.

Early in 1902 the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Heinrich, had made an official visit to the United States, sailing on the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
. He was pleased to find that he could send messages via Marconi operators either to the east or the west all voyage, and was never out of wireless contact. He sailed back from America on the
Deutschland
, and found to his great annoyance that he could not get any messages through at all with its German wireless equipment. The Germans believed that the Marconi Company was refusing to listen in to Slaby-Arco operators because it wanted a worldwide monopoly of wireless. When the Kaiser learned of this apparent snub to his brother, he was furious. What the American magazine
Electrical World
described as ‘malignant Marconiphobia’ spread across Germany, and soon Slaby and others were writing indignant letters to the
New York Herald
complaining that they were the victims of deliberate wireless sabotage.

Marconi replied in letters to various newspapers, including the
New York Times
, that the
Deutschland
’s Slaby-Arco equipment was not tuned to his. It was simply a technical matter, and had nothing to do with any monopolistic ambitions of his company. Had there been the desire, the two systems could have been made compatible, though Marconi’s was superior. His claim that the problem was technical rather than political was disingenuous: he was just trying to calm things down. Nevertheless, according to
Electrical World
the battle raged with ‘berserk fury’ in Germany, as it did in the columns of American newspapers. This grievance was still raw when King Victor Emmanuel ordered Admiral Mirabello to take the
Carlo Alberto
to the German port of Kiel for an official meeting with the Kaiser, who was wandering aimlessly at sea in the imperial yacht
Hohenzollern
awaiting the outcome of Edward’s operation at Buckingham Palace.

Poor George Kemp, who had been working on installations in England, was cabled by Marconi with a message to get to Kiel as quickly as possible. At 9.25 a.m. on 22 July he bought a train-boat
ticket to Kiel at Holborn station in London, and he was on a steamer heading for Germany at 11.30 that morning. Some of his luggage had gone missing when he reached the German coast and he had to cable for it before settling down in a restaurant car on his way to Hamburg. He was in Kiel soon after 11 o’clock the following morning - just over twenty-four hours after leaving London. As there was no sign of the
Carlo Alberto
he booked himself into a hotel, and watched the harbour. The next morning he noted in his diary: ‘I was aroused by a band and a company of soldiers on the march.’ German militarism was even then evident, a portent of the great conflict to come. Kemp watched the German battleships leave the harbour, and in the early afternoon was pleased to see the
Carlo Alberto
arrive. After a stroll along the seafront with Marconi and Admiral Mirabello he was given a cabin and dinner on the Italian ship.

The rendezvous with the Kaiser was some days off, and the time was spent testing Marconi’s equipment in Kiel harbour. Kemp and Marconi stayed up until the early hours of the morning, as that was the only time they could pick up the Poldhu signals - half an hour after daybreak the signals would cease, which Kemp believed had something to do with a ‘change in the earth’s magnetic medium’.

The arrival of the
Hohenzollern
with an already aggrieved Kaiser aboard did not go well. It was around midnight, and Admiral Mirabello was ordered by the Germans to greet their King with a twenty-one-gun salute. He replied that it would be a breach of his orders to fire a salute after dark, and when the demand was repeated the decision was taken for the
Carlo Alberto
to leave immediately. According to the story told by Luigi Solari, which perhaps has some romance in it, as they passed the
Hohenzollern
they sent her a message by wireless, asking if she wanted news from Poldhu. The reply came back that such a long-distance signal was impossible, whereupon the German operator leaned on his key, jamming the airwaves with meaningless dots and dashes.

If such an incident did take place, it was an early salvo in what
was to be a series of battles between the Marconi Company and the German Kaiser up to and during the First World War. Wilhelm ordered all German ships, including the navy, to use only Slaby-Arco equipment, even though it had a very limited range and was obviously inferior to Marconi’s. He then began an international campaign to try to compel the Marconi Company to communicate with other wireless systems. A series of conferences were called to thrash out the issue, and international agreements were signed seeking to force Marconi to comply with the principle of intercommunication. These were resisted for several years, but the more Marconi demonstrated to the wonder of the world that wireless waves could carry Morse messages over huge distances, and the more reliable his system became, the greater the threat he faced from competition and government control.

Edward VII survived surgery at the hands of Frederick Treves, and after a period of convalescence his coronation was rescheduled for 6 August. The
Carlo Alberto
returned to England and had pride of place at the Spithead naval review, only to lose it to an unfortunate change in the wind which dislodged its anchor so that it was left trailing the field. After the celebrations King Victor Emmanuel visited Poldhu for a few days, and some of his officers went ashore to take a look at the amazing contrivances of Professor Fleming, and the giant web of a mast. Finally they set sail for Italy, with Marconi and Solari testing coherers and the new magnetic detector all the way. The crucial time for Marconi would be when the
Carlo Alberto
steamed into the Straits of Gibraltar, where the great landmass of the Iberian Peninsula would form a barrier between her and Poldhu.

Admiral Mirabello slowed the
Carlo Alberto
down in anticipation of the first attempt to pick up Cornwall at 2 o’clock on the morning of 5 September. The ship drifted in thick fog while Marconi, Solari and the Admiral waited by the receiver with earphones and Morse printer ready. Nothing came through. When the prearranged time for transmissions was up, Marconi paced the deck. There was no way he could find out if anything had gone wrong at Poldhu, and
he had to wait until 3 a.m. before attempting to tune in again.

The
Carlo Alberto
continued to circle in the fog so that Marconi could have another chance to pick up Poldhu. When, at just after 3 a.m., the Morse printer began to tap out a series of ‘V’s - the standard call signal from Cornwall - Solari ran straight to the bridge to tell Mirabello. He found the cruiser lit up by a beam of light from another ship which had come out from Gibraltar to investigate. The
Carlo Alberto
had stayed around too long, and the British Navy considered its strange behaviour suspicious. Rather than involve himself in a dispute, Mirabello headed full steam for Italy.

Although he was once again triumphant, Marconi fell ill. He had had a year of incredible nervous anticipation and endless travel, and now he lay in bed with a high fever. When the cruiser was nearing La Spezia he rallied, and began to set up his equipment to receive a telegram he had arranged to have sent from Cornwall to King Victor Emmanuel aboard the
Carlo Alberto
. The signal came through, but when Marconi tried to decipher it, he found it was gibberish. In frustration and fury, he smashed up his receivers, believing that the operator of the Morse key at Poldhu must be incompetent. When he had calmed down his equipment was reassembled, but no signal came through. According to Solari, Marconi guessed that Poldhu had inadvertently changed wavelengths. The measurement of wavebands was still crude, and a slight alteration in the transmitter set-up required an adjustment to the receiver which was a matter of guesswork. To adapt his receiver Marconi wound some wire around a candle, and attached it to the aerial. Finally the message got through, but wavelength and tuning were still tormenting Marconi. And time, as always, seemed to be against him.

On the surface, however, everything was splendid. Victor Emmanuel had honoured Marconi with an audience, during which they talked over the excitements of the
Carlo Alberto
voyage. Marconi visited Bologna, where crowds cheered him, and he was given the use of an ocean-going steamer and her crew.

By the middle of September the
Carlo Alberto
was back in the English Channel, with Marconi aboard. He had been lent it by the Italian navy, as the King believed that its presence in Canada when the first regular transatlantic service began would give Italy a great deal of prestige. After a short stay in England Marconi headed back across the Atlantic to Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, confident that he would soon be sending the first readable Morse messages across the Atlantic both from east to west and west to east.

T
he transmitter at Poldhu built by Professor Fleming presented a frightening spectacle. Arthur Blok, who worked with Fleming in the early days, recalled:

The basic technology of generating wireless signals had not changed since Marconi first arrived in London with his magic boxes. To achieve greater distances it had merely grown, requiring massive power which could produce terrifying discharges of electricity. In contrast to Marconi’s neat little cigar-box magnetic detectors,
the transmitters were fire-breathing monsters. The sparks that were intended to send messages across the Atlantic were created between two revolving metal discs the size of dinner plates, and the power was stored in banks of giant Leyden jar batteries which together weighed tens of tons. Ambrose Fleming was then in his early fifties, and a little deaf.
⁴
But even he could hear Poldhu when it was transmitting, and anyone in the Poldhu Hotel who could translate Morse code by ear would have known what messages were being sent by the thunderous alternating dots and dashes.

Fleming had chosen the call-sign ‘V’ when testing the equipment, which in Morse code is ‘dot-dot-dot-dash’. Blok recalled the Professor humming ‘da-da-da-daaaa’ to himself, or whistling it between his teeth. He had made a little machine which would fire off the letter ‘V’ continuously from a revolving tape, driving those around him mad. Fleming was a tireless researcher, constantly trying to improve Marconi’s equipment with experiments both in Cornwall and at University College, London. In October 1902 he was preparing for the test which would show whether or not a transatlantic wireless service was possible. He had found a way of producing more power, and everyone at Poldhu now knew that the only hope of repeating the success of the ‘S’ the previous December was to confine transmission to the hours of darkness. How the ‘S’ had ever got to St John’s in daylight they never understood, and it was a long time before they were able to repeat the achievement.