Signor Marconi's Magic Box (7 page)

There was just as much fascination with the shore station, where Marconi’s ‘chief assistant’ George Kemp, a stocky little Englishman with a handlebar moustache, an indefatigable worker who knew his masts and his ropes from his time in the Navy, and who Marconi had met through Preece at the Post Office, was tracked down by another
Daily Express
journalist. The ‘old navy man’ gave a down-to-earth account of the state of the art: ‘The one thing to do if you expect to find out anything about electricity is to work,’
said he, ‘for you can do nothing with theories. Signor Marconi’s discoveries prove that the professors are all wrong, and now they will have to go and burn their books. Then they will write new ones, which, perhaps some time they will have to burn in their turn.’ Of Marconi, Kemp said: ‘He works in all weather, and I remember him having to make three attempts to get out past the Needles in a gale before he succeeded. He does not care for storms or rain, but keeps pegging away in the most persistent manner.’

Yet another reporter on board the
Flying Huntress
described Marconi standing by the instruments ‘with a certain simple dignity, a quiet pride in his own control of a powerful force, which suggested a great musician conducting the performance of a masterpiece of his own composing’. Though he had been determined not to be overawed by this wonderful invention, the reporter confessed to a thrill when he joined Marconi in a little cabin to send a message to the shore. Having witnessed this remarkable demonstration, a devilish impulse to play with wireless overcame him.

All the English newspapers reported Marconi’s triumph at the Kingston Regatta, and the glowing descriptions of this modest young inventor and his magical abilities impressed Queen Victoria and her eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales, known affectionately as ‘Bertie’.

The Prince of Wales spent much of his time with rich friends,
and had been a guest of the Rothschilds, the banking millionaires, in Paris, where he had fallen and seriously injured his leg. In August he was to attend the Cowes Regatta on the royal yacht, and a request was made to Marconi to set up a wireless link between the Queen at Osborne and her son on the ship moored offshore. Marconi was only too happy to oblige: it was excellent publicity, and it was no concern of his if, for the time being, wireless was employed frivolously. In any case, as he later told an audience of professional engineers, it offered him ‘the opportunity to study and meditate upon new and interesting elements concerning the influence of hills on wireless communication’.

With an aerial fixed to the mast of the royal yacht and a station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House, the text-messaging service between the Queen and her son was successfully established. A great many of the guests and members of the royal family on the yacht and staying at Osborne House took the opportunity to make use of this entirely novel means of communication. The messages were received as Morse code printout, which was then decoded and written in longhand on official forms headed ‘Naval Telegraphs and Signals’. In this way a lady called Emily Ampthill at Osborne was able to ask a Miss Knollys on the royal yacht: ‘Could you come to tea with us some day (end)’, to which the reply came: ‘Very sorry cannot come to tea. Am leaving Cowes tonight (end)’. More than a hundred messages were sent, many of them from Queen Victoria showing concern for Bertie’s bad leg.

This was another triumph for Marconi. He wrote home to his father to tell him excitedly of his two weeks with the world’s most famous royal family, that Prince Edward had presented him with a fabulous tiepin, and that he was granted an audience with Queen Victoria. However, what excited him most was the discovery that he could keep in touch with a moving ship up to a distance of fourteen miles, his signals apparently penetrating the cliffs of the Isle of Wight. The newspapers loved it, none more so than a new popular publication which had gone on sale for the first time in 1896, the
Daily Mail
. A full-page illustration showed Marconi at
his wireless set, watched by two fascinated ladies, with his signals careering off along a wavy dotted line to the aerial of the royal yacht.

As an inventor Marconi was exceptionally lucky. While others struggled to find financial backers, his contacts through his mother’s aristocratic Anglo-Irish family had given him security for at least a year or two, and the money to pay for equipment and assistants. During his brief period under William Preece’s patronage Marconi had ‘borrowed’ the old sailor George Kemp, who became his most loyal attendant. Now Kemp was on the Marconi Wireless Company payroll,
²
rigging up aerials on windswept coasts wherever they were needed, for all the world like a mariner who had found a new lease of life raising masts on land with which to catch not the wind, but electronic waves. Young as Marconi was, his dedication and single-mindedness, his gentlemanly demeanour, so different from the popular image of the ‘mad inventor’, and his continuous success inspired loyalty in his small workforce of engineers, most of whom had learned their trade in the business of telegraph cables.

Although a lot of ‘secret’ experimentation went on in the hotel laboratories on the Isle of Wight and at Poole on the south coast, Marconi was always willing to chance his luck and his reputation with very public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy. This above all endeared him to the new popular journals of the day, which had a hunger for exciting and novel discoveries, especially those which might have potential for driving forward the already wonderful advances in modern civilisation. The dapper figure of Signor Marconi, always smartly dressed, the modest Italian who spoke perfect English and who appeared to be able to work miracles with a few batteries and a baffling array of wires, was irresistible.

W
herever Marconi went in these heady early days of his fame he was sure to have along with him a writer commissioned by the American
McClure’s
magazine. Founded in 1894 by an Irish émigré, Samuel McClure,
McClure’s
was one of the first publications to make use of the new process of photo-engraving, which put the old woodcut engravers out of business, as photographs could now be reproduced at a fraction of the cost of hand-carved illustrations.
McClure’s
sold for fifteen cents on the news-stands, yet it could attract such eminent writers as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was the policy of the magazine to invite writers of fiction to cover news events, and
McClure’s
fascination with Marconi resulted in a series of wonderfully colourful descriptions of the young inventor at work.

Marconi had already made the headlines with his coverage of the Kingston Regatta and his link-up between Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales at the Isle of Wight, as well as one or two other well-publicised demonstrations of his invention. When
McClure’s
learned that the French government had asked him if he could send a wireless signal across the English Channel - at thirty-two miles by far the greatest distance attempted up to that time - in the spring of 1899, it decided that this had to be covered. Cleveland Moffett, a writer of fictional detective stories, and a fellow reporter, Robert McClure, brother of the magazine’s
founder, were despatched to cover the historic event, and to reassure themselves and their readers that there was no trickery involved. Moffett joined Marconi on the French side, in the small town of Wimereux, close to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where thirty-five years before Annie Jameson had secretly married Giuseppe Marconi. He wrote:

For a while the makeshift Wimereux station was besieged by dignitaries of various kinds eager to see this extraordinary invention in action. Among them was a British Army officer, Baden Baden-Powell, brother of Robert Baden-Powell, later the hero of Mafeking and the founder of the Boy Scouts. A particular interest of Baden-Powell was the use of man-lifting kites for reconnaissance in battle, and he was devising models of these which were being tested on Salisbury Plain. Marconi had found them useful for raising a temporary aerial when there was no time to set up a wooden mast, and it was not long before Baden-Powell’s patented man-lifting ‘Levitor’ kites were to prove vital in the development of wireless.

Although he himself was clearly convinced that Marconi was not a charlatan, Cleveland Moffett had been told to double-check that there was no sleight of hand going on with the cross-Channel demonstration. Deceit would not have been all that difficult: there were cables under the sea by which messages could have been passed secretly; or there might have been some prearranged set of messages which gave the impression that the sending had been successful. Electricity was exciting, but its properties and potential remained mysterious and magical, and the layman was always in danger of being duped. Moffett continued his account:

A
s a boy staying with his cousins in Livorno, Marconi had befriended an elderly blind man, a retired telegraph operator. Marconi would read aloud to him and in return he was taught the Morse code and the technique of tapping it out with a Morse key. This was a skill which had been acquired by thousands of young men, and some women, working in the telegraph business in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which of course required no specialist skills to operate, had not replaced the cable telegraph. Dots and dashes which spelled out letters and punctuation in all languages remained, in Marconi’s boyhood and for a very long time afterwards, universal. Morse messages could be sent much greater distances than any phone communication, and they could easily accommodate ciphers, which gave a degree of confidentiality.