Читать книгу Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: The invention that sparked the radio revolution - Gavin Weightman - Страница 14
ОглавлениеOn 8 August 1898 the airwaves crackled with one of the first text messages in history: ‘Very anxious to have cricket match between Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers. Please ask the Queen whether she would allow match to be played at Osborne. Crescent goes to Portsmouth, Monday.’ It was sent from the royal yacht Osborne, off the Isle of Wight, to a small receiving station set up in a cottage in the grounds of Osborne House. Queen Victoria’s reply was tapped back across the sea: ‘The Queen approves of the match between the Crescent and Royal Yachts Officers being played at Osborne.’
The Queen, then seventy-nine years old, had spent much of the summer at Osborne, and could not fail to notice that something intriguing was going on a few miles to the south at the Royal Needles Hotel. Guglielmo Marconi was not only becoming something of a local figure, he had won tremendous acclaim in the press for one of the first commercial tests of his wireless telegraphy, when the Dublin Daily Express had asked him if he could cover the Kingston Regatta in Dublin Bay that July. The newspaper had been impressed by some experiments one of Marconi’s engineers had carried out on a treacherous part of the Irish coast for the shipping underwriters Lloyd’s of London. To cover the Kingston Regatta Marconi fitted up a tug, the Flying Huntress, with his equipment, and followed the yacht races at sea, sending back the latest news and positions to a receiving station on shore which then cabled the up-to-the-minute accounts to the Express’s sister paper, the Evening Mail.
The Flying Huntress was an old puffer, and looked comical with its makeshift aerial mast and a roll of wire rabbit-netting rigged up to exchange signals with the shore station in the gardens of the Kingston habourmaster’s home. In contrast to the bizarre sight of ‘Marconi’s magic netting hanging from an impromptu mast’, the Dublin Daily Express reporter found the inventor himself captivating.
A tall, athletic figure, dark hair, steady grey blue eyes, a resolute mouth and an open forehead – such is the young Italian inventor. His manner is at once unassuming to a degree, and yet confident. He speaks freely and fully, and quite frankly defines the limits of his own as of all scientists’ knowledge as to the mysterious powers of electricity and ether. At his instrument his face shows a suppressed enthusiasm which is a delightful revelation of character. A youth of twenty-three who can, very literally, evoke spirits from the vasty deep and despatch them on the wings of the wind must naturally feel that he had done something very like picking the lock of Nature’s laboratory. Signor Marconi listens to the crack-crack of his instrument with some such wondering interest as Aladdin must have displayed on first hearing the voice of the Genius who had been called up by the friction of his lamp.
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.
Is it the Irish characteristic, or is it the common impulse of human nature, that when we find ourselves in command of a great force, by means of which stupendous results can be produced for the benefit of mankind, our first desire is to play tricks with it? No sooner were we alive to the extraordinary fact that it was possible, without connecting wires, to communicate with a station which was miles away and quite invisible to us, than we began to send silly messages, such as to request the man in charge of the Kingston station to be sure to keep sober and not to take too many ‘whiskey-and-sodas’.
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 textmessaging 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,* 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.
*Marconi’s name was added to the company name in February 1900. Very rapidly other Marconi companies were formed, including the Marconi International Marine Company and the American Marconi Company, both also in 1900.
