Signor Marconi's Magic Box (15 page)

In 1889 Mrs Leonore Piper had gained fame in Boston as a
medium, and had convinced some serious thinkers that she was genuine. Professor Myers invited her to England so that he could arrive at his own opinion about her, and Lodge found himself the guinea pig in an experiment to test her abilities. He was astonished by the experience. Through Mrs Piper he heard his Aunt Anne speaking to him in her own ‘well remembered voice’. That was proof enough for Oliver Lodge that there was life after death. For him to lend his authority to the belief in spiritualism was not insignificant. By the 1890s he was a well-known personality in the lecture halls, and had a reputation as an academic who took a close interest in social issues and new inventions. He had devised an electro-magnetic method of gathering dust in factories, had demonstrated Edison’s primitive phonograph, and regarded Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone as the greatest innovation in his lifetime. He was a friend of many of the luminaries of the day, including George Bernard Shaw, who liked to make fun of Lodge’s belief in life after death. Shaw wrote to him:

A month after the announcement by Roentgen of the discovery of X-rays in January 1896, Lodge, who was then the first ever Professor of Physics at Liverpool University, had replicated the equipment and was using it in the treatment of patients. He X-rayed a boy with a bullet in his head, another child with a halfpenny stuck in his throat, and a jumble of strange objects which had become lodged in infant bowels. Lodge’s interest in psychic matters should not obscure the fact that he was a practical as well
as a theoretical scientist, and a leading light in the exploration of Hertzian waves.

Lodge knew Heinrich Hertz, and believed him to be the true discoverer of wireless. When the young German died in 1894 it was Lodge who gave the memorial lecture at the Royal Institution in London, and demonstrated to the audience the way in which electro-magnetic signals could be sent and received. Four months later he showed the equipment again at a meeting in Oxford, adding a Morse transmitter and receiver provided by Alexander Muirhead, a friend who manufactured telegraph equipment. Another friend of Lodge, the physicist and SPR devotee William Crookes, had predicted with remarkable foresight the development of wireless telegraphy up to the point Marconi had taken it by 1901. As early as 1892 Crookes had written in the
Fortnightly Review
:

However, shortly after Hertz died, Professor Lodge began showing more interest in communicating with the dead than fashioning a new technology. In December 1894, while Marconi was working feverishly in the attic of the Villa Griffone with his candles and hand-bellows refining Lodge’s coherer, the Professor himself was sitting at a table in semi-darkness as a forty-year-old Italian woman, Eusapia Palladino, used her spiritual power to move chairs and other furniture around the room. Palladino had a ‘control’, or spirit medium she called St John, who would startle members of her audiences by grabbing their arms. At the session Lodge observed
Mrs Palladino had been hedged about with electrical and other devices in an attempt to detect any cheating, but Lodge came away from it with few doubts.

It was while Lodge was preoccupied with psychic research and the demonstration and practical use of X-rays that he learned that William Preece had taken Marconi under his wing, and was presenting him to learned societies and the general public as some kind of genius. Lodge summed up his feelings about this in a letter to J. Arthur Hill of the SPR: ‘Marconi came over with the same thing in a secret box, with aristocratic introductions to Preece of the Government Telegraphs, and was taken up and assisted by him - who was far more ignorant than he ought to have been of what had already been done.’

The truth of the matter was that not only Preece, but William Crookes and Lodge himself should have realised that the invention Marconi was presenting to the world had been discovered nearly twenty years earlier by a brilliant English scientist called David Edward Hughes. Both Preece and William Crookes had witnessed his demonstration of it, without recognising it for what it was. This startling revelation was made in the earliest ever history of wireless, published in 1900, which recalled experiments Hughes had made as far back as 1879. In his
History of Wireless Telegraphy 1838-1899
, the electrician J.J. Fahie described how Hughes had set up a transmitter in his home in Great Portland Street in London, and picked up its signals on a portable receiver which he carried up and down the road outside. Nothing was known then about the existence of ‘Hertzian waves’, and James Clerk Maxwell had not yet published his theoretical account of how they might behave.

Born in London in 1830, Hughes had been educated at St Joseph’s College in Kentucky, after his parents emigrated to America. His interests were music and natural philosophy, but he was also intrigued by the new electric telegraph, and at the age of twenty-six invented a much-improved type-printing machine which was successful in America, but not in England. Hughes took his telegraph printer to Europe, where he made a small fortune
from the sale of his invention and received many honours, including the French Légion d’Honneur. For a number of years he lived in Paris, but he was back in London when Bell’s telephone appeared in 1876, and set about designing improvements. Within a year he had invented the microphone, and it was while he was experimenting with it that he noticed the effects of small disconnections which appeared to emit signals. He could pick these up with a portable receiver. They seemed to be just clicking sounds with no meaning, but were genuine Hertzian waves, and Hughes showed a number of scientists how he could pick them up with a receiver around Great Portland Street. By the time Marconi arrived in London in 1896 Hughes was a London University Professor, and had long ago abandoned his interest in wireless. As there was no theory to explain what he had discovered it was assumed that he had sent his signals by ‘induction’, which was not new. Not even William Crookes, who had observed the demonstrations Hughes gave, had guessed that a breakthrough had been made.

For his history of wireless, Fahie tracked Hughes down in 1899, a year before his death at the age of seventy, and persuaded him to give an account of his experiments for the historical record. At the same time he asked for Hughes’s opinion of what Marconi had achieved. Hughes told Fahie: ‘Marconi has lately demonstrated that by the use of the Hertzian waves and Branly’s coherer he has been enabled to transmit and receive aerial waves to a greater distance than previously ever dreamed of by the numerous discoverers and inventors who have worked silently in this field. His efforts at demonstration merit the success he has achieved.’

If anyone had a claim to have invented wireless before Marconi it was David Hughes, and his magnanimous tribute is in sharp contrast to the disgruntled griping of Oliver Lodge. Yet Lodge had not only failed to exploit the technology he claimed to have pioneered, he had no vision at all of its potential. Whereas a lack of scientific theory had undermined the early work of Hughes, by the time Marconi came on the scene a very limited understanding of the behaviour of wireless waves among scientists had discouraged
experimentation. What Marconi was undertaking was an act of faith on which the whole of his future depended. On the windswept shores of Newfoundland he was flying kites, figuratively and literally. Had David Hughes lived even another year, he would have been astonished by the claim Marconi was to make in December 1901.

A
s blizzards swirled around the makeshift receiving station in the old military hospital at Signal Hill, Marconi sat wrapped in his coat for hours, listening intently for the three Morse code dots fired through the ether from Cornwall. Outside, his men braved the icy winds which blew small icebergs into Glace Bay. When it became clear that the balloons were not going to remain in the air long enough to hold an aerial, Kemp and Paget with some local help began to fly Baden-Powell man-lifting Levitor kites. They were unstable and difficult to handle, but on 12 December, at the appointed hour of 12.30 p.m. St John’s time, Marconi thought he picked up the distinctive three dots of the letter ‘S’ from Poldhu. He had abandoned the Morse printer in favour of an earphone, and had given up on his supposedly ‘tuned’ circuit. In effect he was fishing desperately in the sky for the telltale signal which would make or break his company. When Marconi thought he had heard the three dots again he handed the phone to his assistant, asking, ‘Do you hear anything, Mr Kemp?’ Kemp listened intently, and confirmed that he did. Their excitement was intense, but neither leapt in the air with joy. The link with Cornwall could not have been more tenuous, and Marconi was acutely aware that there would be scepticism among other scientists. This was not solely because theory was against him; everyone would know
that he was under tremendous commercial pressure to claim success, as this would undoubtedly push up Marconi company shares, and help to recoup some of the £50,000 invested in the project.

With help, Kemp had managed to fly the Levitor kite to a height of over five hundred feet, and in worsening weather he tried many times to repeat what he and Marconi believed was their success in receiving the signal from Poldhu. At one point they took the aerial down the cliff and attached it to an iceberg which had become marooned in the harbour. To Kemp’s disappointment they never got to try this aerial, which he felt would ‘probably give us better harmony with the earth’s electric medium and the transmitter at Poldhu’. Whatever this theory of the propagation of wireless signals was based on, it was soon forgotten, and Marconi frankly admitted that he had no idea how a signal had got from Poldhu to St John’s.

Had Marconi been more confident, he would have called in others to witness the reception of the Cornish signals. But he felt that would be too risky. He prepared a telegram to send to the company’s London office in Finch Lane: ‘Signals are being received. Weather makes continuous tests very difficult. One balloon carried away yesterday.’ But he did not dare send it straight away. On Friday the thirteenth he and Kemp satisfied themselves that they had again received the signal, and the following day Marconi sent the telegram to London. He then told the Governor of Newfoundland, Sir Cavendish Boyle, who sent an official telegram to the British government and King Edward VII, who had succeeded his mother Queen Victoria in January that year.

The story broke in the newspapers on Sunday, 15 December, and caused a sensation. That day Marconi, Kemp and Paget went to the Roman Catholic church in St John’s and sat close to the organ, next to the choir. The Non-Conformist Kemp noted disapprovingly in his diary that the service was ‘more like a concert’. They were invited to lunch by Sir Cavendish, and a bottle of champagne which had been salvaged from a wreck after years lying on the seabed was served, a wrecker’s reward for the man whose invention was to be the saviour of ships at sea. Kemp went to the
Presbyterian church in the evening, then stayed up all night writing telegrams.

While Marconi and his assistants were being fêted in St John’s, they awaited news of the reaction around the world. Thomas Edison in the United States and Oliver Lodge in England were sceptical about whether a signal from the other side of the Atlantic could actually have been received. Newspapers, on the other hand, were inclined to believe Marconi. He had such a high reputation with journalists, and struck them as so unassuming, that they gave him the benefit of the doubt, and congratulations poured in.

But almost immediately the Anglo-American Cable Company, which was handling all the dots and dashes of adulation arriving in Newfoundland, let Marconi know that they regarded his wireless experiments as in breach of their fifty-year monopoly, which would not expire until 1904. If he did not cease his experiments, they informed him, they would sue. He sent a reply assuring them that his tests would not continue. The newspapers in St John’s were furious, accusing the cable company of taking a dog-in-the-manger attitude and holding up the march of scientific exploration. Newfoundland wanted Marconi to stay: he had put it on the world map.

Newspaper reporters began to make their pilgrimage to St John’s to seek out the wireless wizard. Gordon Bennett’s
New York Herald
, which had first established Marconi’s reputation in the United States with the America’s Cup coverage, printed a long interview on 16 December headlined ‘Mr Marconi Answers his Critics with Details’. The sceptics’ view that all he had really heard was ‘atmospheric disturbances’ was put to him, and he replied that he expected such criticisms, and that many people would find it hard to believe what he claimed. But he protested that he was experienced enough in wireless work to be certain that he had not been mistaken. Thomas Edison was quoted as saying: ‘I told the
Herald
last night that I doubted this story and I haven’t changed my opinion. I don’t believe it. Mr Marconi is a practical business man and is striving to perfect his scheme for wireless maritime telegraphy. I do not
believe he has succeeded as yet, and if he had accomplished his object I believe he would make the matter public himself in an authoritative manner, over his own signature.’