Signor Marconi's Magic Box (25 page)

Encouraged by the popular interest in wireless, de Forest decided to build a larger transmitter, nothing like the size of Marconi’s
new station on Cape Breton, but much bigger than anything he himself had attempted before, to send a signal from St Louis to Chicago, three hundred miles away. Huge, unstable batteries were cobbled together on the spot to generate giant sparks which sent thunderclaps across the exhibition grounds. A kind of pump handle had to be fashioned to fire the signals. Butler said tapping out messages on it was like ‘working at the village well for half an hour at a time’.

De Forest was an impatient and shoddy worker, and often his batteries would blow up. The air was filled with static electricity which fired bolts at Butler’s head. He recalled: ‘The roar from the spark gap could be heard a block away and it held its own in noise intensity with the ballyhoo bagpipe of the Jerusalem Exhibit on the one side and the cannonading in the Boer War Exhibit on the other. The odor of ozone, mixed with kerosene, was always present.’ They finally got the transmitter to work in September, and on ‘Electricity Day’ at the Fair de Forest managed to send a signal to the Railway Exchange Building in Chicago. Judges were stationed in Chicago and St Louis to ensure there was no cheating. De Forest claimed a record distance for wireless telegraphy over land, and was awarded the Grand Prize.

Abraham White’s publicity campaign brought orders for equipment from the Boston-based United Fruit Company, whose fleet of ships carried South American produce to the United States. As with all de Forest equipment at this time the system delivered to United Fruit was crude, and worked only erratically in the highly static atmosphere of the southern seas. But the company so valued the novel ability to keep in touch with its cargo vessels that it established shore stations in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Cuba, Louisiana and some West Indian islands, and fitted all its ships with wireless.

The United States Navy too responded to White’s hyperbole, asking de Forest to set up stations in the West Indies. For three years the naval authorities in America had recognised the potential of wireless, but had been unable to make a decision about which
was the best equipment to buy. They were not helped by their chosen representative in Europe, Commander Francis M. Barber, who in 1901 had been brought out of retirement to advise them on the relative merits of rival inventors. Commander Barber lived in Paris, spoke fluent French and German, and moved in elevated diplomatic circles. Much depended on his findings, but he disliked inventors as a species, feeling they were always making false claims.

Barber’s official reports to his old friend Admiral Bradford, chief of the Bureau of Equipment, who had initially favoured the Marconi Company, are peppered with dismissive accounts of most of the European contenders in the race to dominate the wireless industry. Count von Arco of the German Slaby-Arco system he described as ‘a weedy little chap with a great big head - he looks like a tadpole’. Barber went to and fro between two French rivals, Ducretet and Rochefort, who in turn insulted each other. But the man he had most contempt for was Marconi. All the criticisms thrown at ‘the inventor of radio’ by Oliver Lodge and, latterly, William Preece, were relayed across the Atlantic with a kind of wicked glee. Marconi had stolen everyone else’s ideas, and he was bound to fail. It was highly unlikely that he had really transmitted across the Atlantic. Barber went so far as to quote Colonel Hozier, the Secretary of Lloyd’s of London, who were negotiating a new contract with the Marconi Company (of which Hozier was also a director): ‘He thinks Marconi had never yet got a signal across the Atlantic or 2000 miles at sea either. The whole thing was a stock-jobbing operation worked in the interest of “a lot of Jews”.’ Barber wanted the American Marconi Company driven out of business.

Between 1901 and 1904 the US Navy tested every available wireless system, and began lobbying for this new technology to be brought under some kind of government control. At international conferences it began to side with Germany in its ‘malignant Marconiphobia’. The American Marconi Company fought a determined rearguard action opposing government regulation. Wireless telegraphy, which just three or four years earlier had been so novel,
magical and exciting, was now becoming tangled up in bureaucracy. For Marconi himself there were no new ‘great things’ to be achieved. At Glace Bay and Poldhu his engineers were no nearer creating a regular transatlantic service, and their failure was undermining the value of the company’s shares. A new and larger transmitter was being built at Louisberg on Cape Breton at tremendous cost. The weight of responsibility on Marconi’s shoulders was almost insupportable, but he continued to live a life of near-perpetual travel. He only rarely visited the Villa Griffone, he had no permanent home in England, and he rarely saw his fiancée, the beautiful firebrand suffragette Inez Milholland.

T
he one place Marconi could return to from time to time to relax was the Haven Hotel in Poole. Here he was wined and dined by distinguished visitors to the south coast resorts, and he became a frequent and much-admired guest of a wealthy Dutch couple, Charles and Florence van Raalte. In 1901 they had bought the whole of Brownsea Island, which lies just off Poole harbour. Over the centuries the island had had many owners, most of whom lost money trying to exploit it in one way or another. The van Raaltes, however, acquired it purely as a private playground for their own pleasure and amusement, and to entertain their upper-crust friends and celebrities of the day. When he was staying at the Haven Hotel, Marconi often made the short crossing to Brownsea to be entertained by the van Raaltes in their newly refurbished castle, and he became a favourite guest with their teenage daughters. The place may have reminded him of the Villa Griffone, where he spent so much of his childhood with his English cousins.

One of the van Raaltes’ daughters, Margarite, recalled years later the delights of the Haven Hotel and how enchanted Marconi was with Brownsea Island when he was invited to stay.

All the van Raaltes’ guests were given nicknames such as ‘Poops’ or ‘Winkle’, and before long Marconi was referred to affectionately as ‘Marky’.

In the relaxed atmosphere of Brownsea Island, with its pine woods and lakes, Marconi, a celebrity who was amusing, modest and mysterious, made a very favourable impression on the van Raalte girls. ‘Marconi was easy and pleasant,’ Margarite recalled. ‘He absolutely could not explain his inventions though he was clever enough to think them up.’

Much as he enjoyed Poole and Brownsea Island, Marconi was
able to make only fleeting visits. In March 1904, when Lee de Forest’s wireless operators were making history of a kind in the Yellow Sea, Marconi and a team of engineers were in Italy, where the company had been asked to set up what would be the largest transmitting station in the world at Coltano, a village on flat marshland near Pisa. Marconi spent much of his time in Bologna, where his ageing father was seriously ill and the family had gathered, fearing that he would not live much longer. On 25 March Giuseppe’s condition suddenly deteriorated, and in the early hours of the following day he died. Guglielmo, with his hectic schedule, just had time to attend the funeral a few days later. In May Marconi was in Italy again to receive an Order of Merit from the King: if his star had fallen in America, Europe still showered him with honours, and he had now acquired the lifestyle of the most favoured sons of the upper classes and aristocracy. This included an enthusiasm for the brand-new and dreadfully hazardous sport of motoring.

As early as the summer of 1903 Marconi had arrived at the Poldhu Hotel not on his motorbike but in a spluttering four-wheeled vehicle which raised a cloud of dust on the country roads. George Kemp recorded in his diary for 30 July: ‘I went to the Lizard Station in the afternoon and on to St Kevern with Mr Marconi in his new Napier car.’ Ominously, a brief entry for the following day reads: ‘The motor car I saw in pieces in the shed. In the afternoon Mr Marconi went to Gunwallow Church with me.’ Had Marconi crashed? It was quite likely, as these were very early days for motoring in England, and Marconi had joined an elite band of aristocrats and millionaires who were the first to threaten life and livestock on the unmetalled roads. In December 1903 Kemp noted that Marconi had arrived in ‘the Car’ with two drivers. There were no driving tests then, and the pioneer motorists were notorious for their flouting of the laws that Parliament quickly enacted in an attempt to control the wonderful but often fatal freedom of the open road.

The invention of a practical, petrol-driven motor-car had more or less kept pace with Marconi’s own development of wireless
telegraphy. All the early models were put together in France and Germany, where there were no legal restrictions on speed. In November 1896 a twelve-mile-per-hour limit was introduced in England, celebrated with the first London-to-Brighton ‘rally’. A collection of thirty-three self-propelled vehicles, including tricycles, attempted the sixty-mile run from the capital to the coast. Of these, fourteen made it to the finishing line, most of them foreign-made vehicles. Participants were warned: ‘Owners and drivers should remember that motor cars are on trial in England and that any rashness or carelessness might injure the industry in this country.’

The racing of cars had begun in privately organised events, and in 1900 the
New York Herald
’s flamboyant owner Gordon Bennett Jr had put up a trophy, the Coupe Internationale, for the winner of a race from Paris to Bordeaux. There was so much death and destruction on the 1903 run that stricter regulations were introduced. But by then the number of car owners had begun to grow rapidly both in Europe and in Britain, and new laws were created to keep them in check. In England the Motor Car Act, which came into force in January 1904, set a new upper speed limit of twenty miles per hour. By the end of that year there were 8500 motorists on the roads, one of them Marconi, who bought a white Mercedes in which he would drive from London down to Poole. Built by the German Daimler company, the 1904 Mercedes had proved itself the most advanced and fastest automobile on the roads. Sometimes Marconi raced wealthy aristocratic friends like Howard de Walden, whom he met at the van Raaltes’ on Brownsea.

Marconi in his Mercedes had to be ever-watchful for ‘trapping’, which became something of a sport for local police, who hid by the roadside with their stopwatches at the ready, in wait for speeding motorists. The motoring lobby argued that this was not a proper part of police duty, and that the law was unenforceable because of ‘inaccurate stop watches’. But a total of 1500 motorists were fined in 1904-05 for driving ‘furiously, negligently, recklessly or to the danger of the public’.

Before the arrival of the motor-car, the country roads of England
had been quiet. The railways had taken away much of the through traffic, and the horse-drawn farm wagons ambled slowly along without fear of the thundering hooves of the mail coach. Cyclists had appeared in great swarms in the 1890s and had caused some alarm, but they were not nearly so fearful as the dragon-like monsters that C.F.G. Masterman described in his
The Condition of England
, published in 1909: ‘Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within. You can see evidence of their activity in the dust-laden hedges of the south country roads, a grey mud colour, with no evidence of green; in the ruined cottage gardens of the south country villages.’

No doubt Marconi covered a few cottage gardens in dust on his trips from London to Poole, though there is no evidence from this era in his motoring career that he got into any serious trouble. For him the motor-car was not only convenient, providing him on land with the kind of freedom he felt on ocean liners: it confirmed his position as part of the upper-class English society in which he now mixed freely, attending
soirées
in London and enjoying invitations from the aristocracy and the wealthy on the south coast.

On one of Marconi’s visits to Brownsea Island that summer he was greeted at the pier by a young girl who was gauche and shy in the presence of such a famous man. The ill-kempt nineteen-year-old Beatrice O’Brien, known as ‘Bea’, was a friend of the van Raalte girls. Marconi, then thirty years old, fell in love at first sight. Bea was the daughter of a most distinguished Irish aristocrat Lord Inchiquin, making her pedigree similar to Marconi’s mother’s, though more prestigious. The Inchiquins could trace their aristocratic roots back several hundred years, and owned a family seat called Dromoland in County Clare,
⁶
as well as a mansion in London. At this time, however, their wealth was draining away.