Signor Marconi's Magic Box (23 page)

In August Luigi Solari, the Marconi Company representative at a Berlin conference called by the Germans, stormed out in protest at attempts by the host country to get an international agreement about communication between rival systems of wireless. The Kaiser, still fuming about the affair of the
Deutschland
, wanted to bring diplomatic pressure to bear on Marconi to force him to tune in to German wireless. Brushing this challenge aside, Marconi and Solari fitted out the Cunard liner
Lucania
with wireless and sailed for New York on 28 August, demonstrating to passengers and to officers from both the British and Italian navies that he could receive signals either from Poldhu or Glace Bay all the way across
the Atlantic. With the help of these signals he began publication of the first ever regular mid-Atlantic daily newspaper.

While they were in New York Marconi and Solari paid a visit to Thomas Edison, and were amused when he found he had nothing to offer them for lunch: his wife was away and the cupboard was bare. Edison did, however, make them a present - he transferred some of his patents to Marconi. These were of no practical value except as a safeguard against possible scurrilous litigation in America. In October Marconi was again aboard the
Lucania
, steaming for Southampton, all the while testing his equipment. On this journey he enjoyed another shipboard romance, this time with a very remarkable young woman. Inez Milholland was easily a match for the famous Marconi, despite the fact that she was barely eighteen years old. The daughter of a
New York Tribune
reporter who had made a fortune from the invention of a pneumatic tube to send messages around offices and stores, Inez was well educated, an amateur actress and a fine athlete - at Vassar College she had set records for the shotput and basketball throw. Her frustration at being barred from male colleges and her concern for the rights of the underdog led her to become a staunch suffragette. As Marconi’s daughter Degna would remark, Inez was not really her father’s type. Nevertheless, by the time the
Lucania
docked they were engaged.

At the end of this momentous year of 1903, Marconi was back at Table Head on Cape Breton. In November he visited Richard Vyvyan’s wife in hospital, and took a fancy to the matron. When Cuthbert Hall, a Marconi Company director back in London, heard that Marconi had shown the matron round the Glace Bay station he sent a stern rebuke about the need to maintain security, accusing the man who had made wireless history of being the ‘chief sinner’ when it came to breaking the rules about keeping out prying eyes. At this point in Marconi’s life it is almost impossible to keep up with him. His companies were operating around the world, while he barely paused except for the occasional few days at the Haven Hotel in Poole.

He had not long returned from America, again on the
Lucania
, when he joined his old British Navy friend Captain Henry Jackson on HMS
Duncan
en route to Gibraltar. Jackson had risen through the ranks, and now had command of his own ship, which he put at Marconi’s disposal to test the possibilities of communication between Poldhu and the Mediterranean. The Marconi Company was about to sign a long-term agreement with the Royal Navy to supply them with equipment and expertise, a contract that was to run until 1914. When he left Jackson Marconi went to Italy to set up a wireless service with the Balkans, and to discuss the building of a powerful station at Coltano, near Pisa. And then there was a new station in Scotland to test overland transmissions from Poldhu.

It is hardly surprising that, with all his other activities, at the end of 1903 Marconi was pipped at the post in a novel use of wireless. Marconi engineers had taken equipment to the Boer War in 1900, but it had not worked well and was not used by journalists. Soon a conflict on the far side of the world would offer the first real opportunity for wireless to prove its value to war correspondents as well as to the belligerent armies and navies. Of the companies then operating, Marconi’s was far and away the most able to offer expertise and equipment to journalists. But the closed social world of a transatlantic liner robbed Marconi of the opportunity to enjoy another historic first. Instead it fell into the lap of his American rival Lee de Forest.

L
ate in December 1903 the White Star Line’s
Majestic
, which had recently been refitted after serving as a troopship in the Boer War, eased out of Liverpool docks en route for New York. Among the first-class passengers were the two men who regarded themselves as the foremost exponents of wireless telegraphy in the United States, Professor Reginald Fessenden and Lee de Forest. They were not on speaking terms, as Fessenden was suing de Forest for infringement of his patent on the new electrolytic detector, or barreter. Both were returning home after exploring the possibility of establishing their wireless systems in Britain. Fessenden had been looking for a site to set up a station for his transatlantic venture, while de Forest had been taking part in a competitive demonstration of wireless for the General Post Office. Neither man was in a very happy mood: Fessenden was being offered a remote site in Scotland by the Post Office, and de Forest felt he had been rejected by British ‘hauteur’, as he had received no orders for his equipment.

However, de Forest’s mood changed when he met aboard ship a British war correspondent, Captain Lionel James, who was on the first leg of a journey out to the Far East, where war was brewing between Russia and Japan over disputed territories in Manchuria and Korea. Captain James was a classic product of the British Raj, a former tea-planter and racehorse-owner. Four years earlier he
had taken a gamble by offering himself as a special war correspondent for
The Times
. He had reported on the Boer War and had been with General Kitchener in the Sudan, where he had made a name for himself as a front-line trooper in the world’s press corps.

Though both de Forest and James liked to claim credit for having the idea of using wireless to report the Russo-Japanese War, it is most likely the plot was hatched by chance on the
Majestic
when the two met and fell into conversation. James had heard of de Forest that October when he had been in New York, and had been given the impression, probably by Abraham White, that the American was way out in front when it came to wireless telegraphy. De Forest, in his autobiography, claims to have heard of James, and to have persuaded him to use his wireless in the Far East. On the voyage to New York it was agreed that if James could persuade
The Times
to put up the money, de Forest would provide wireless equipment and engineers to establish a station somewhere on the China coast. James anticipated that if war broke out much of the naval action would take place in the Yellow Sea, which is enclosed by the coastlines of Manchuria, Korea and China. To the north was the Russian naval base of Port Arthur. If he could charter a reasonably swift steamer and get permission from the Japanese navy to cruise among its ships, there was a good chance that with de Forest’s wireless equipment he could beat by hours - even days - his fellow correspondents, who would have to find cable stations from which to send their reports.

From New York James cabled London, and a reluctant
Times
accountant agreed to pay £1000 for de Forest’s men and equipment, and to put up a further sum for the hire of a suitable steamer. James gave the responsibility of finding the site for a shore station to a junior reporter, David Fraser, who had travelled with him on the
Majestic
as his ‘valet’, a ruse to conceal from other journalists the purpose of their voyage. James and Fraser took the train across America and shipped from San Francisco on the
Siberia
, hoping that they would reach the Yellow Sea before war broke out. As it
was, they saw no signs of any action as they approached Yokohama in Japan at the end of January 1904.

Once James had secured the agreement of
The Times
to pay for all the necessary equipment and a ship, de Forest was in a quandary. The only transmitters and receivers he had were in Ireland, and he had to beg and bribe his motley crew of helpers to pack them up and ship them to New York. He then had to find volunteers to take them out to the war zone. Two of these, ‘Pop’ Athern and Harry Brown, caught the train to Seattle, from where they boarded the last ship to Yokohama that would give them time to set up a simple shore transmitter and fit out whatever steamer James had been able to lay his hands on. From that point onward, de Forest could only wait and hope that all went well, and that for once he might really make history and attract the admiration and credit he craved.

While Captain James negotiated with the Japanese authorities in Yokohama for permission to cover any future conflict, David Fraser was instructed to stay aboard the
Siberia
. In his pocket he had a telegram which read: ‘Shantung Peninsula best erect mast 180 feet high 30 feet from water’s edge. De Forest.’ Though he could see on his map that the Shantung Peninsula was on the eastern coast of China, in a very favourable position for scouting the Yellow Sea, Fraser was otherwise very much in the dark. ‘Of wireless telegraphy and all that pertained to it I was completely ignorant,’ he wrote in
A Modern Campaign
, an account of his adventures. ‘My orders were to proceed to Shantung and there prepare for the plant and operators which were coming from America. Where to establish the station I had to decide; and how to place so mighty a mast, the cable told. But how to get the thing to stand up, how to procure the materials, where to find the lunatics mad enough to climb the mast when it was up, were problems which refused to solve themselves.’

It was with some apprehension that Fraser approached Shantung, which to him ‘suggested missionary-eating natives and other vague horrors. The little red dot on the map, not far from the
Promontory, was obviously the place upon which to base operations. ’ This ‘red dot’ was a far-flung and isolated outpost of the British Empire, the naval base of Wei-hai-Wei, a kind of northern Hong Kong leased from the Chinese. Here Fraser found his own people, and an engineer to supervise the erection of the mast. He was loaned a horse to search for a suitable site. The Chinese would not allow him to use their territory, so a place had to be found on the bleak coast of little Wei-hai-Wei itself, far from the conviviality of the British clubhouse and expatriate community. Before he had settled on a suitable spot, Fraser received a cable from James which read: ‘Expedite forestry scrap imminent.’ In other words, ‘Get the de Forest station set up: the war is about to begin.’ In fact the conflict had already begun by then, without either side formally declaring it. Two days after Fraser had arrived in Wei-hai-Wei, on 8 February 1904, Japanese torpedoes had sunk three Russian battleships as they lay in the harbour of Port Arthur.

The engineer Fraser had seconded to him, a man called Griffin, solved the problem of materials for the great aerial pole by buying old masts from Japanese junks. Permission to put it up was granted through the old-boy network, as one of the British officials in Wei-hai-Wei had known Fraser’s brother Tim out in India. Fraser received another telegram from James, which said he had chartered a steamer called the
Haimun
, which would be arriving in about ten days’ time. He repeated the command ‘expedite forestry’.

Raising the mast involved the labour of ‘fifty Chinamen’, according to Fraser, plus a hundred naval ratings he had managed to borrow from a sympathetic British officer. After ten days of hauling and heaving it was almost up when it snapped, throwing 150 men this way and that like defeated contestants in a tug-of-war. The mast was still not in place when the
Haimun
hove to. The ship’s regular crew had disappeared when they learned the dangerous nature of the voyage, and had been replaced by a makeshift assembly of ‘rickshaw drivers and coolies’, according to Fraser. However, an experienced captain had remained in command, and there were six British officers aboard, as well as a lady interpreter.

When the other war correspondents learned what James was up to they set up a chorus of protest. The British Minister in Tokyo, Sir Claud Macdonald, told James he was wasting his time with wireless. Any attempt to get permission from Japan to steam among its battleships would be a flagrant breach of neutrality, and James was warned by a British admiral that the Japanese navy would sink the
Haimun
. But for James headlines were more important than international diplomacy, and he came to an agreement with the Minister of State for the Japanese navy that the
Haimun
would offer naval intelligence exclusively to them in return for the freedom to send reports back to
The Times
in London. The fact that he had offered to spy on the Russians was only revealed twenty-five years later in his memoirs. The Wei-hai-Wei station and the receiver on the
Haimun
picked up both Russian and Japanese wireless signals, and James fulfilled his bargain with Japan by reporting the position of a Russian station, which was quickly attacked and put out of action.

James was able to report from the Yellow Sea between March and June 1904, and to outdo his rivals with his first-hand accounts of naval manoeuvres. Inadvertently, the very British Captain James and
The Times
had given Marconi’s American rival de Forest the publicity he so desperately wanted.

When the Marconi Company got wind of James’s plan to use de Forest wireless in the Far East they tried to beat him to it. Marconi and Solari sounded out the Italian navy about the possibility of a ship to take equipment and operators to the Yellow Sea, and Alfred Harmsworth, proprietor of the
Daily Mail
, offered to put up the money if they thought they could beat de Forest. But they were too late. To rub salt into their wounds, Captain James effectively shanghaied the
Daily Mail
correspondent, F.A. McKenzie, whom he found under Japanese house arrest in the port of Chinampo. McKenzie had been with the Japanese troops when they had first encountered the Russian Cossacks at a battle on the Manchuria-Korea border in May 1904, and he told James he had ‘the story of the war’. Now he was stranded, unable to get to a
cable station and forbidden by the Japanese to file any stories at all.