Читать книгу Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: The invention that sparked the radio revolution - Gavin Weightman - Страница 12

In 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.

In January, 1897, when the news of Marconi’s first successes ran through the newspapers, I myself was earnestly occupied with similar problems. I had not been able to telegraph more than one hundred metres through the air. It was at once clear to me that Marconi must have added something else – something new – to what was already known, whereby he had been able to attain to lengths measured by kilometres. Quickly making up my mind, I travelled to England, where the Bureau of Telegraphs was undertaking experiments on a large scale. Mr. Preece, the celebrated engineer-in-chief of the General Post-Office, in the most courteous and hospitable way, permitted me to take part in these; and in truth what I there saw was something quite new. Marconi had made a discovery. He was working with means the entire meaning of which no one before him had recognised. Only in that way can we explain the secret of his success.

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.

Having returned to my home, I went to work at once to repeat the experiments with my own instruments, with the use of Marconi’ s wires. Success was instant … Meantime the attention of the German Emperor had been drawn to the new form of telegraphy … For carrying out extensive experiments, the waters of the Havel River near Potsdam were put at my disposal, as well as the surrounding royal parks – an actual laboratory of nature under a laughing sky, in surroundings of paradise! The imperial family delight to sail and row on the lakes formed by the Havel; therefore a detachment of sailors is stationed there during the summer, and I was permitted to employ the crews as helpers.

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:

I met two American gendemen who are willing to acquire my patent rights for the United States of America … I understand they would give me £10,000 divided as follows: four thousand immediately and six thousand when the patent is granted by the American Government … I believe it may be better for me to accept one of these early offers … even in the case something goes wrong with the other applications I would still have made a considerable profit.

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.

Marconi’s blood had run cold when in 1896 he met on Salisbury Plain a companionable young man, Captain Henry Jackson of the Royal Navy, who told him that he too had been experimenting with Hertzian waves, and had actually built and operated a wireless telegraphy system which had been given a trial run on a battleship, with some success. According to Captain Jackson, as Marconi listened he became crestfallen, and it was only when the naval officer assured him that this work was top secret, and there were no plans to apply for a patent, that he cheered up. William Preece, during his brief honeymoon with Marconi, would insist on basking in the reflected glory of having ‘discovered’ the Italian inventor, and continued to lecture to audiences around the country on the great value this new sort of wireless telegraphy might have for lightships and lighthouses. Preece’s promotion of Marconi infuriated one of the leading English scientists of the day, Professor Oliver Lodge of Liverpool University.

Preece and Lodge had a longstanding feud about the best way to erect lightning conductors – the Post Office had hundreds of them, to protect the telegraphy system from storms – and Lodge could not abide what he regarded as Preece’s ill-informed recounting of the miraculous Marconi invention. An undignified spat broke out on the pages of The Times. ‘It appears that many persons suppose that the method of signalling across space by means of Hertzian waves received by a Branly tube of filings is a new discovery made by Signor Marconi,’ Lodge wrote in a letter to The Times in June 1897. ‘It is well known to physicists, and perhaps the public may be willing to share the information, that I myself showed what was essentially the same plan of signalling in 1894. My apparatus acted vigorously across the college quadrangle, a distance of 60 yards, and I estimated that there would be a response up to a limit of half a mile.’

By that time Marconi had already demonstrated that the range of wireless waves was not as limited as Lodge claimed. Lodge protested that he did not mean that half a mile was the absolute limit, and commended Marconi for working hard ‘to develop the method into a commercial success’. In the same letter he continued: ‘For all this the full credit is due – I do not suppose that Signor Marconi himself claims any more – but much of the language indulged in during the last few months by writers of popular articles on the subject about “Marconi waves”, “important discoveries” and “brilliant novelties” has been more than usually absurd.’

While this storm was brewing between his bearded benefactor and the piqued professor, the Jameson family freed Marconi from Preece’s patronage. His father Giuseppe was persuaded to put up the £300 necessary to pay for legal expenses in procuring patents. Then his cousin, the engineer Henry Jameson-Davis, raised £100,000 in the City, mostly from corn merchants connected with the Jameson whiskey business. The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company was set up with this substantial investment, equivalent to more than £5 million in today’s money. It was a commercial venture, the sole purpose of which was to buy the patents and give Marconi the money he needed to continue his experiments. He got sixty thousand of the £1 shares, £15,000 for his patents and £25,000 to spend on research. It was a massive vote of confidence from his mother’s family and their business associates.

Henry Jameson-Davis was not acting in a sentimental fashion by raising this huge sum for his cousin. Jameson-Davis was the archetypal Victorian gendeman, a keen foxhunter who would be out with the hounds in Ireland and England as often as six times a week in the winter hunting season. He would not gamble family money on a twenty-three-year-old with an intriguing but largely untried gadget without good reason. He and the other investors hoped to make a fortune when in July 1897 the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company opened its offices at 28 Mark Lane in the City. By buying the patent rights as soon as they were awarded, the company put William Preece and the British Post Office out of the picture, and left Marconi to get on with the work of demonstrating what a valuable invention the newly formed company owned.

Marconi anticipated that Preece would not take kindly to being supplanted by a family concern, and on 21 July 1897 he wrote to him from the Villa Griffone explaining his position. All the governments of Europe, he said, wanted demonstrations of his equipment, his patents were being disputed by the likes of Professor Oliver Lodge in England and others in America, and he needed money to refine his equipment, take out new patents and fund more ambitious experiments. His letter concluded: ‘Hoping that you will continue in your benevolence towards me I beg to state that all your great kindness shall never be forgotten by me in all my life. I shall also do my best to keep the company on amicable terms with the British Government. I hope to be in London on Saturday. Believe me dear Sir, yours truly G. Marconi.’

Naturally enough, Preece replied that the patronage of the British Post Office could no longer be continued. He showed little concern over the loss of control of the new invention, evidently taking the view that it was not going to be of much practical use anyway.

Privately, Preece was pouring cold water on Marconi’s spark transmitter in confidential memoranda to the Post Office and the government, suggesting that really there was not much future in it, and in any case the patent was probably not secure, as Oliver Lodge had a prior claim to it. In his Toynbee Hall lecture Preece had said, to the cheers of the audience, that he would see to it that the Post Office would fund Marconi. But the promised £10,000 had not been forthcoming. With his family firm, Marconi now had the funds and the freedom to set up whatever experiments he wished. As he had become convinced that the most promising practical use of wireless was sending messages from ships to shore, he headed for the coast to test the range and flexibility of wireless telegraphy.