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In the Heart of the Empire

London, the heart of the British Empire, was a huge metropolis in the last decade of the nineteenth century, with a population of more than six million. The smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys filled the air with the sooty haze that so attracted Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, who captured on canvas the strange light that hung about the Thames, the great railway stations and the Houses of Parliament. London had had a steam-driven underground railway since the 1860s, and the first of the new electric underground lines had been opened between the suburb of Stockwell and the City in 1890. But the open-topped buses, carriages and goods wagons were still horse-drawn, as were the trams which provided cheaper fares out to the new working-class suburbs. Though gas and petrol engines had been devised, and the first imported motor-car had made a brief appearance on the streets in 1894, the only familiar motorised road transport was steam-driven. These lumbering, steam-engine-like vehicles were kept to a speed limit of four miles per hour in the countryside, and two miles per hour in London and other towns, and were required to have a man walking twenty yards ahead of them; the stipulation that he carry a red flag, first made law in 1865, was dropped in 1878.

Most of the metropolis was still gas-lit, though electric light in one form or another had been around for a number of years. The first experimental electric street lights had been of the carbon arc variety: a fierce, crackling white glow was produced by passing a current through two carbon rods separated by a small gap. These had been used as early as 1878 to floodlight a football match in the northern town of Sheffield, an experiment that was abandoned when the players complained that they were blinded by the glare and could not see the ball. The little town of Godalming in Surrey, to the south of London, had been the first in the world to have public electric street lighting in 1881, but the electric supplier found it uneconomical, and Godalming returned to gas. The façades of one or two London theatres, such as the Gaiety, were brilliantly lit with arc lamps, which were described as like ‘half a dozen harvest moons shining at once in the Strand’.

The forerunner of the modern electric lightbulb had been invented simultaneously in the 1870s by Thomas Edison in the United States and Joseph Swan in England, and in 1879 they joined forces as ‘Ediswan’ and were turning them out in their thousands. But only large institutions and the grander private houses could afford to have a generator installed, whether it was steam-driven or water-powered – the first hydro-electric system was fitted by Edison in Cragside, the stately home of the English arms magnate William Armstrong, in 1880. There were no large power stations in Britain – nothing to compare with the massive turbines driven by Niagara Falls in the United States – and only a handful of people in London could flick a switch to turn on domestic lights. In fact, so unfamiliar were light switches that notices were sometimes placed next to them, warning that no attempt should be made to ignite them with a match.

It was in February 1896 that Guglielmo Marconi and his mother Annie left Bologna and travelled by steam train across Europe, then by ferry to England, arriving at Victoria station in London where the air was thick with the reek of coal-smoke and horse-dung. Henry Jameson-Davis, the son of one of Annie’s sisters, who had known Guglielmo as a boy, agreed to find them a place to stay, and was intrigued by his young cousin’s wireless equipment.

Jameson-Davis was an engineer himself, specialising in the design of windmills, and invited his friends to see Marconi’s invention. One of them, A.A. Campbell Swinton, knew William Preece, Chief Electrical Engineer at the Post Office, and agreed to give Marconi a letter of introduction. Dated 30 March 1896, the letter stated:

I am taking the liberty of sending to you with this note a young Italian of the name of Marconi, who has come over to this country with the idea of getting taken up a new system of telegraphy without wires, at which he has been working. It appears to be based upon the use of Hertzian waves, and Oliver Lodge’s coherer, but from what he tells me he appears to have got considerably beyond what I believe other people have done in this line. It has occurred to me that you might possibly be kind enough to see him and hear what he has to say and I also think that what he has done will very likely be of interest to you. Hoping that I am not troubling you too much …

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.