Signor Marconi's Magic Box (5 page)

In April Marconi wrote home to his father that he had had a meeting with a Mr Price - he got the name wrong - who had shown an interest in wireless. It is not clear exactly when Marconi demonstrated his working model to Preece. A description of Marconi’s arrival at the General Post Office building in St Martin’s-le-Grand in the City was given years later by a lad who was one of Preece’s assistants, P.R. Mullis. While Mullis was going to and fro unloading Preece’s brougham, he noticed Marconi examining a little scale model of an ingenious bag-catching device used by the Post Office which enabled trains to take on post without stopping. He recalled that Marconi had with him two large bags. Preece emerged, shook hands with Marconi and polished his gold-rimmed spectacles as the young man unloaded brass knobs, coils and tubes and set them out on the table. Mullis was sent to fetch a Morse key, some batteries and wire. When he returned, Preece looked at his gold pocket-watch, remarked that it was past midday, and told Mullis to take Marconi to the Post Office
refreshment bar and to ‘see he gets a good dinner on my account’. They were to be back by 2 p.m.

When they returned from lunch, Preece watched as Marconi pressed the Morse key and rang a bell in his receiving apparatus. This greatly intrigued the Post Office chief, who had apparently never witnessed the use of electronic waves in this way. At the end of the day Marconi was invited back, and he and Preece made some adjustments to the equipment with the help of the Post Office workshop. By the end of July Preece felt confident enough to arrange for Marconi to demonstrate his wireless to senior officials of the Post Office. What impressed everyone most was the fact that the signals could be sent three hundred yards, then nearly a mile, and then even further, with that mysterious ability to go straight through stone walls.

Preece had been booked long before to speak on wireless telegraphy at Toynbee Hall in December, and had intended to give an account of his own work sending messages across the sea on the west coast of Scotland. But he now wondered if his system, which required huge lengths of parallel wires to cover quite short distances, was less promising than Marconi’s. If it did the same job, Marconi’s would certainly be quicker and cheaper to install. Preece decided to take the opportunity of the Toynbee Hall lecture to introduce his protégé to a wider audience, which is how the two of them came to travel to Whitechapel that December evening. It had been as recently as the summer of 1894 that Marconi first conceived the idea of the use of Hertzian waves for telegraphy; in just over two years he was being fêted by the Chief Electrical Engineer of the mighty British Post Office, and by the spring of 1897 he was being pursued by more than one investor interested in his patents.

I
n the springtime migrant birds moving north to their nesting grounds, yellow wagtails and peregrine falcons, cross the Bristol Channel between the northern coasts of the English counties of Devon and Dorset and the south coast of Glamorgan in Wales. They skim over Steepholm and Flatholm Islands, which lie in the middle of the Channel, and rise up over Lavernock Point, a low cliff facing south from the Welsh coast. A colourful host of pink and white flowers attracts the butterflies which dance in the coastal breezes. There are relics of old gun batteries here, which guarded the wide estuary of the Severn River. When William Preece was experimenting with his method of wireless telegraphy in 1892 he chose the three-mile span between Lavernock Point and Flatholm Island, and found that he could establish a link between the two. He had much less success when he tried to create a link to Steepholm Island, which lies more than five miles from Lavernock.

Flatholm to Lavernock seemed to Preece the ideal testing ground for Marconi’s novel wireless system, and in May 1897 he arranged for an experiment which would demonstrate the potential of his protégé’s equipment. Although Preece had publicly expressed great faith in Marconi’s invention, he was not at all sure that these magic boxes could send and receive signals over any great distance. By nature he was a risk-taker, but over his long career some embarrassing experiences had taught him caution. There was the time in
1877 when the young Alexander Graham Bell, not quite thirty years old, was invited to demonstrate his new invention, the telephone, to Queen Victoria at her summer home, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Beginning at 9.30 p.m., Bell, with the help of Preece, had created a link between the main house and a cottage in the grounds so that the Queen could speak to two aristocrats familiar to her. She listened also to a rendition of the song ‘Coming Through the Rye’ sung by an American journalist called Kate Field, who had been hired to write promotional articles about the telephone. The Queen was most impressed as calls and performances came in from Cowes, Southampton and London. The grand finale was to be ‘God Save the Queen’, played by a brass band in Southampton. This had been William Preece’s patriotic idea. But as Her Majesty waited for the burst of music, the line from Southampton went dead. By the time it was fixed the musicians had packed away their tubas and trumpets and gone home. Not wanting to disappoint everybody after such a successful day, Preece himself put his mouth to the microphone and hummed the national anthem down the line, putting as much oompah into his rendition as he could. After listening for a few moments, Queen Victoria is said to have remarked: ‘It is the national anthem, but it is not well played.’

Preece was aware that he might be in for another embarrassing experience in the cause of technological advance when he asked Marconi to send a signal from Flatholm to Lavernock. There was an element of rivalry in the experiment, for Preece regarded himself as an old hand at this business of telegraphing without wires, and wanted a demonstration of the merits of his own system alongside that of the young Italian. Despite his apparent enthusiasm for Marconi’s invention, Preece appears to have hedged his bets, and was not convinced that it would have more than a very limited value to the Post Office. It was still a novelty, and might turn out to be no more than that.

While Marconi assembled his transmitter on Flatholm Island and a receiving station on the cliff at Lavernock, Preece had already
had lengths of wire put in place, running in parallel on either side of the Bristol Channel. When an electric charge was sent through one of these wires it would emit waves which were picked up by the other, and a charge was made to ‘jump’ across the space between, just like the ‘crossed lines’ that had caused problems with telephones and telegraphs in the City. By turning the current on and off, it was possible to send the dots and dashes of Morse code. Preece had used this ‘induction’ system as a temporary link between the Isle of Skye on the west coast of Scotland and the mainland when the telegraph cable snapped, and knew it worked across the Bristol Channel.

Preece presumably did not imagine he was about to witness anything of historic importance as he waited in the buffeting breezes for Marconi’s signals to come through to Lavernock Point. He was, after all, the head of a British government department which dominated cable telegraphy worldwide, and which could hardly be threatened by a young amateur scientist and his makeshift apparatus. Preece had invited a German Professor, Adolphus Slaby of the Technical High School at Charlottenburg, near Berlin, to witness the demonstration. Slaby had read about Marconi’s ability to send signals over quite long distances, although he himself had had much less success.

Lavernock Point is about sixty feet above sea level. Marconi had an aerial put up which rose a further sixty feet in the air, and was topped with a zinc cylinder connected to a receiver which had been set up to record signals in Morse code on a tickertape. Another wire went from the receiver down the cliff to the seashore. The transmitter, firing off a crackle of sparks, was three miles away on Flatholm Island. For two tense days nothing came through on the Lavernock receiver. In desperation, Marconi had the receiver taken down to the beach below the cliff, to see if that made any difference. Almost instantly it began to work.

While William Preece did not really grasp the significance of the occasion, an amazed Professor Slaby certainly did. ‘It will be for me an ineffaceable recollection,’ he said later. ‘Five of us stood
round the apparatus in a wooden shed as a shelter from the gale, with eyes and ears directed towards the instruments with an attention which was almost painful, and waited for the hoisting of a flag which was the signal that all was ready. Instantaneously we heard the first
tic tac, tic tac
, and saw the Morse instrument print the signals which came to us silently and invisibly from the island rock, whose contour was scarcely visible to the naked eye - came to us dancing on that unknown and mysterious agent the ether!’ He wrote up an account of what he had witnessed for the American
Century Magazine
, which was published in April 1898.

Slaby hurried back to Germany with Marconi’s secret, and set to work replicating as best he could the brilliant success of the Bristol Channel experiment.

And so it was that Marconi’s first benefactor, William Preece, had unwittingly enabled the nation which was for many years to be a bitter rival of Britain in the development of wireless telegraphy to indulge in a blatant piece of industrial espionage. With the backing of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to excel in all fields of technology, and demanded that scientists be given state backing, Professor Slaby joined forces with others to develop a Teutonic version of the Italian’s new and quite magical means of communication. Meanwhile, Preece established his own induction wireless link across the Bristol Channel, and remained sceptical about the potential of Marconi’s use of Hertzian waves.

However, the City of London was mightily impressed. The potential value of what Marconi had demonstrated out on Salisbury Plain and at Toynbee Hall, and now across the Bristol Channel, lay, as far as the City investor was concerned, almost entirely in the patent rights. If an exclusive legal claim to the mechanism in the magic boxes could be established, this patent could be sold around the world, bringing instant riches. As early as March 1896, barely a month after his arrival in London, Marconi was writing to his father at the Villa Griffone with details of offers that were being made to him by various members of the extensive family contacts of the Jamesons. There was a Mr Wynne, who was related to his cousins the Robertsons, offering £2400 if Marconi would allow him to set up a company in which he would be given half the shares. Then there was another cousin, Ernesto Burn, a
lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, who told Marconi he had a friend who had been paid £10,000 by the British government with a stipend of £2000 a year for ‘a discovery useful to the army’.

While Marconi, staying in Bayswater with his mother, conducted a frantic round of meetings in an effort to find a backer for his invention, his father offered advice which reflected his hope that Guglielmo would cash in as fast as he could and return with his spoils to buy a property near the Villa Griffone. Some solace from home arrived in two barrels of Griffone wine, which Marconi arranged to have bottled. In his letters home he pleaded not for wine but for the funds to pay for patent rights not only in England but in Russia, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain, India and the United States. In January 1897 he had written to his father:

A sense of urgency, of being on the brink not only of international fame but of a fortune, runs through the letters to old Giuseppe, and was the driving force in Marconi’s life after his arrival in London. This conviction that they were onto something which could bring them all riches was evidently shared by his mother’s side of the family, and their willingness to gamble a small fortune on Marconi arose from the pressure to prevent others from profiting from his invention. There was, at the same time, an underlying anxiety about the validity of the young man’s claim to have devised a genuinely unique technology, for in a very real sense every piece of his ingeniously fashioned and beautifully crafted
equipment was derived from the experimental work of others. Marconi himself was acutely aware of this, and it took the very best patent lawyers in London months to find a form of words which amounted to a convincing case that in assembling bits and pieces devised in laboratories in Germany, France, England and Italy - coils, spark gaps and ‘coherers’ - Guglielmo Marconi had arrived at a unique arrangement.