Signor Marconi’s Magic Box: The invention that sparked the radio revolution

And so, without more ado, the thing was done. The Frenchmen might stare and chatter as they pleased, here was something come into the world to stay. A pronounced success surely, and everybody said so as messages went back and forth, scores of messages, during the following hours and days, and all correct.

For a while the makeshift Wimereux station was besieged by dignitaries of various kinds eager to see this extraordinary invention in action. Among them was a British Army officer, Baden Baden-Powell, brother of Robert Baden-Powell, later the hero of Mafeking and the founder of the Boy Scouts. A particular interest of Baden-Powell was the use of man-lifting kites for reconnaissance in battle, and he was devising models of these which were being tested on Salisbury Plain. Marconi had found them useful for raising a temporary aerial when there was no time to set up a wooden mast, and it was not long before Baden-Powell’s patented man-lifting ‘Levitor’ kites were to prove vital in the development of wireless.

Although he himself was clearly convinced that Marconi was not a charlatan, Cleveland Moffett had been told to doublecheck that there was no sleight of hand going on with the cross-Channel demonstration. Deceit would not have been all that difficult: there were cables under the sea by which messages could have been passed secretly, or there might have been some prearranged set of messages which gave the impression that the sending had been successful. Electricity was exciting, but its properties and potential remained mysterious and magical, and the layman was always in danger of being duped. Moffett continued his account:

On Wednesday, Mr. Robert McClure and I, by the kindness of Mr. Marconi, were allowed to hold a cross-channel conversation, and, in the interests of our readers, satisfy ourselves that this wireless telegraphy marvel had really been accomplished. It was about three o’clock when I reached the Boulogne station [actually Wimereux, about three miles from Boulogne], Mr. Kemp called up the other side thus: ‘Moffett arrived. Wishes to send message. Is McClure ready?’

Immediately the receiver clicked off: ‘Yes, stand by,’ which meant that we must wait for the French officials to talk, since they had the right of way. And talk they did, for a good two hours, keeping the sparks flying and the ether agitated with their messages and inquiries. At last, about five o’clock, I was cheered by this service along the tape: ‘If Moffett is there, tell him McClure is ready.’ And straightway I handed Mr. Kemp a simple cipher message which I had prepared to test the accuracy of transmission. It ran thus:

MCCLURE, DOVER: Gniteerg morf Ecnarf ot Dnalgne hguorht eht rehte. MOFFETT.

Read on the printed page it is easy to see that this is merely, ‘Greeting from France to England through the ether,’ each word being spelled backward. For the receiving operator at Dover, however, it was as hopeless a tangle of letters as could have been desired. Therefore was I well pleased when the Boulogne receiver clicked me back the following:

MOFFETT, BOULOGNE: Your message received. It reads all right. Vive Marconi, MCCLURE.

Then I sent this:

MARCONI, DOVER: Hearty congratulations on success of first experiment in sending aerial messages across the English channel. Also best thanks on behalf of editors MCCLURE’S MAGAZINE for assistance in preparation of article, MOFFETT.

And got this reply:

MOFFETT, BOULOGNE: The accurate transmission of your messages is absolutely convincing. Good-by. MCCLURE.

Then we clicked back ‘Good-by,’ and the trial was over. We were satisfied; yes, more, we were delighted.

9

The Romance of Morse Code

As a boy staying with his cousins in Livorno, Marconi had befriended an elderly blind man, a retired telegraph operator. Marconi would read aloud to him and in return he was taught the Morse code and the technique of tapping it out with a Morse key. This was a skill which had been acquired by thousands of young men, and some women, working in the telegraph business in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which of course required no specialist skills to operate, had not replaced the cable telegraph. Dots and dashes which spelled out letters and punctuation in all languages remained, in Marconi’s boyhood and for a very long time afterwards, universal. Morse messages could be sent much greater distances than any phone communication, and they could easily accommodate ciphers, which gave a degree of confidentiality.

It was quite by chance that Morse code proved to be ideally suited to Marconi’s primitive spark transmitters, which could only send messages in the form of long and short bursts of electromagnetic waves. In fact, had Morse code not been devised more than half a century before Marconi began to create his wireless system at the Villa Griffone, he would have had to invent something very like it. In all probability, he would not have had the idea of wireless telegraphy at all.

The man who gave his name to the code was Samuel Finley Breese Morse. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791 and studied at Yale University, where he took an interest in science. His ambition, however, was to be a great painter. He studied in Europe, and had some success with his landscapes and more dramatic canvases. In London he won prizes for his depiction of The Dying Hercules as well as for his sculpture. But in America he found it hard to earn a living. He had an unpaid academic post in New York, and got by painting portraits which fetched only about $15 each. On a trip back from Europe on the sailing packet Scully in 1837 he fell into conversation with fellow passengers about the uses of electricity, and conceived the idea of an electric telegraph. It was not an original idea, and Morse was not the man to turn it into a workable invention: he lacked the meticulous craftsmanship which was Marconi’s greatest talent. But it was his inspiration which led to the development of the telegraph code which would for ever after bear his name.

Morse’s original idea was to assign to hundreds of words a dedicated number, and to use electric current to activate a machine at a distance which would record a series of figures on paper. In September 1837 he set up a demonstration in a lecture theatre at New York University, with wires wound around the hall to give a distance of about a third of a mile. It was not a working system, but the prototype for something which with a bit of imagination might be made commercial. Morse and his brother Sidney were the publishers of the Journal of Commerce, which was read by, among others, the very inventive Vail family of Speedwell, New Jersey. Stephen Vail, the father, had turned a local blacksmith’s works into a thriving iron foundry which had built the steam engine for the SS Savannah, which in 1819 had become the first ship to cross the Atlantic powered by paddle-wheels as well as sail. His son Alfred had studied at New York University, and saw there by chance one of Morse’s telegraph demonstrations. He introduced himself, and with his father’s agreement subsequently offered to help develop the system.

Morse had no money, while the Vails had prospered from their steam engines and the casting of hundreds of miles of track for the railways which were beginning to spread out across America. An agreement was signed by which Alfred Vail and his brother George would share with Morse all the rights and rewards of a commercial telegraph system. The Vail brothers went to work on improving the technology, while Morse handled the publicity. A deadline was set for 1 January 1838, by which time Morse wanted to be able to offer the US government and businesses a workable system. It was a tall order: the only available electric cable was milliners’ copper wire, used to give a structure to the ‘skyscraper’ bonnets which were then fashionable. The Vails’ first batteries were made of cherry wood, with beeswax as insulation.

The local people in the Vails’ town of Speedwell thought Alfred and George had lost their minds as they worked long hours on what was regarded as a crazy venture. Meanwhile, Morse continued to compile his dictionary, assigning to each of five thousand words a specific number – England, for example, was ‘252’. However, devising a machine which could write ‘252’ proved too much for the Vails. They were close to despair when Alfred had the brainwave that a lever which had an up-and-down movement could more easily mark dots and dashes, and these, rather than whole numbers, could represent letters and numerals. Alfred and George had missed their deadline, but they had cracked the problem.

Alfred feverishly studied the letters of the alphabet, and found that ‘E’ was used more frequently than any other. He assigned it one dot. Other letters were then given their codes – ‘S’ became three dots, for example. It took until 1844 before the first commercial telegraphy system using what became known as ‘Morse code’ went into service in the United States. It was in truth Alfred Vail who devised it, but he allowed Samuel Morse to take the plaudits and enjoy the innumerable international honours which were showered upon him.

Operating Morse keys was an entirely new skill, as was the interpretation of the dots and dashes. With the invention of the telephone receiver a tape printer was no longer necessary, for the operator could simply listen to the urgent staccato of the Morse messages, translating them instantaneously from dots and dashes to letters and words. Very soon those with experience found they could recognise the styles of other individual Morse operators; some claimed they could tell the difference between the styles of men and women. Competitions were held to find the most skilful operators, and, ever attentive to the texture of contemporary life, McClure’s magazine sent a reporter to one such public demonstration held in New York at the turn of the century. It was a ‘fast sending competition’, held in a great hall in which ‘sets of shining telegraph instruments’ had been set up. Most of the audience were themselves telegraph operators, there to see which of the dozen young male contestants was adjudged the best. McClure’s described the scene:

One by one the contestants stepped to the test table, and manipulated the key. There was a tense stillness throughout the hall, broken when ‘time’ was called by a trill of metallic pulsations read by most of the audience as from a printed page. The text of the matter is of no concern, an excerpt from a great speech, a page of blank verse, or only the ‘conditions’ found at the top of a telegraph form. Speed and accuracy alone are vital. Forty, forty-five, fifty words a minute are rattled off, seven hundred and fifty motions of the wrist and still the limit is not reached. The contestants show the same evidences of strain that characterise the most strenuous physical contest – the dilating nostril, the quick or suspended breathing, the starting eye.

Presently a fair-haired young man takes the chair, self confidence and reserve force in every gesture. Away he goes, and his transmission is as swift and pure as a mountain stream … The audience, enthralled, forgets the speed, and hearkens only to the beauty of the sending. On and on fly the dots and dashes, and though it is clear that his pace is not up to that set by the leaders, nevertheless there is a finish – an indefinable quality of perfection in the performance that at the end brings the multitude to its feet in a spontaneous burst of applause; such an outburst as might have greeted a great piece of oratory or acting.

Marconi was at this time using exactly the same shining Morse keys as the contestants used for their New York sending competition. But he could not hope to match their speed, and certainly nobody would hearken to the beauty of his sending. Each dot and dash sent by wireless was created by a deafening spark – the operators soon took to wearing earplugs. At the receiving end, if the operator was using headphones, which was soon the regular practice, the noise of interference was also disturbing and uncomfortable. It was like listening intently to a station improperly tuned on the radio. There was no tuning in the modern sense of finding the exact point on the wave spectrum to receive a transmitter’s signal. And wireless telegraphy was painfully slow. When in 1897 Marconi returned briefly to Italy to fulfil his obligation to carry out his military service, he demonstrated his invention to the navy at La Spezia. On that occasion each Morse dot required the transmitting lever to be held down for five seconds, and each dash for fifteen seconds. The letter ‘H’ alone (dot, dash, dot, dot, dot) took more than half a minute to send. The messages relayed to and from the royal yacht Osborne were equally laborious.

Lack of speed was not, however, Marconi’s greatest concern. He needed to prove not only that his system worked, but that it could span distances which the leading scientists of the day insisted were unattainable. Unless he could send messages hundreds of miles, he could never compete with the cable telegraph, and wireless would have only a restricted value for ships at sea. The widely accepted view was that because the earth was round, a spark signal transmitted from any point on land would head off over the horizon, keep going until it reached the upper atmosphere and head out into space. There was no reason to believe that electro-magnetic waves would ‘hug’ the surface of land or sea. However high you raised your transmitting and receiving aerials, the signal could be picked up no further than the line of sight between the topmost points. Marconi, and those working with him, had no theory to contradict the received wisdom. All they could do was carry on blindly, in the hope of demonstrating that the theory was wrong.

The degree to which Marconi was able to inspire confidence in his assistants, most of whom were a good deal older than him – he was just twenty-five in 1899 – was remarkable. Quiet and modest though he was in his dealings with the press, Marconi evidently had a messianic quality in his workshops in the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight and the Haven Hotel in Poole. He led by example, often working into the night.

The detective writer turned wireless sleuth for McClure’s, Cleveland Moffett, visited both these stations in 1899, and chatted to Marconi and the engineers working with him. One of these was Dr Erskine Murray, based at the Haven Hotel, where he sometimes tuned up his cello to make up a trio with Marconi and his brother Alfonso. Moffett wrote:

… after a breezy ride across the Channel on the self-reliant side-wheeler ‘Lymington’, then an hour’s railway journey and a carriage jaunt of like duration over gorse-spread sand dunes, I found myself at the Poole Signal Station, really six miles beyond Poole, on a barren promontory. Here the installation is identical with that at the Needles, only on a larger scale, and here two operators are kept busy at experiments, under the direction of Mr. Marconi himself and Dr. Erskine-Murray, one of the company’s chief electricians. With the latter I spent two hours in profitable converse.

‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘this is a fine day for your work?’ The sun was shining and the air mild.

‘Not particularly,’ said he. ‘The fact is, our messages seem to carry best in fog and bad weather. This past winter we have sent through all kinds of gales and storms without a single breakdown.’

‘Don’t thunder-storms interfere with you, or electric disturbances?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘How about the earth’s curvature? I suppose that doesn’t amount to much just to the Needles?’

‘Doesn’t it though? Look across, and judge for yourself. It amounts to 100 feet at least. You can only see the head of the Needles lighthouse from here, and that must be 150 feet above the sea. And the big steamers pass there hulls and funnels down.’

‘Then the earth’s curvature makes no difference with your waves?’

‘It has made none up to twenty-five miles, which we have covered from a ship to shore; and in that distance the earth’s dip amounts to about 500 feet. If the curvature counted against us then, the messages would have passed some hundreds of feet over the receiving-station; but nothing of the sort happened. So we feel reasonably confident that these Hertzian waves follow around smoothly as the earth curves.’

‘And you can send messages through hills, can you not?’

‘Easily. We have done so repeatedly.’

‘And you can send in all kinds of weather?’

‘We can.’

‘Then,’ said I after some thought, ‘if neither land nor sea nor atmospheric conditions can stop you, I don’t see why you can’t send messages to any distance.’

‘So we can,’ said the electrician, ‘so we can, given a sufficient height of wire. It has become simply a question now of how high a mast you are willing to erect. If you double the height of your mast, you can send a message four times as far. If you treble the height of your mast, you can send a message nine times as far. In other words the law established by our experiments seems to be that the range of distance increases as the square of the mast’s height. To start with, you may assume that a wire suspended from an eighty-foot mast will send a message twenty miles. We are doing about that here.’

‘Then,’ said I, multiplying, ‘a mast 160 feet high would send a message eighty miles?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And a mast 320 feet high would send a message 320 miles;* a mast 640 feet high would send a message 1280 miles; and a mast 1280 feet high would send a message 5120 miles?’

‘That’s right. So you see if there were another Eiffel Tower in New York, it would be possible to send messages to Paris through the ether and get answers without ocean cables.’

‘Do you really think that would be possible?’

‘I see no reason to doubt it. What are a few thousand miles to this wonderful ether, which brings us our light every day from millions of miles?’

It was the universal belief among scientists at the time that light waves could not exist in a vacuum, but must travel through something, and so too with electro-magnetic waves. What that something was, nobody knew, but it was given the name ‘the ether’, and was conceived of as a very thin, colourless, odourless jelly, in which the whole of the universe was set. The most common way of explaining ‘wireless waves’ was with the analogy of throwing a stone into the still waters of a pond and watching the ripples spread out in ever larger circles. There was some popular confusion about the term ‘ether’, for it was also the name of a gas which was an early form of anaesthetic. When scientists referred to the ether it was sometimes imagined as a vapour, but really it made no differenece what it was. Marconi believed in its existence, and as far as he was concerned it had some special property which enabled the electro-magnetic waves he sent out to travel much further than they were supposed to.

After the triumph of his Channel transmissions, Marconi’s equipment was given a trial by the British Admiralty during naval manoeuvres in the summer of 1899, when the only rival method of long-distance communication was the carrier pigeon. At the same time the huge publicity afforded his experiments attracted the attention of the New York Herald’s flamboyant owner Gordon Bennett Jr, son of the famous newspaper proprietor of the same name who had built a reputation on being first with the news. Marconi, still surviving on the investment funds of his City backers and with precious little income, accepted an offer to cover for the Herald the America’s Cup yacht races, first held in 1851, which would take place in October 1899. When he set out for New York on the Cunard Line’s Aurania in September it was his first experience of the romance of the Atlantic liners which were to play such an important part in his life.

* There is an error in the original: this should read ‘640 miles’.

10

A New York Welcome

In 1899 the night-time spectacle of New York as the great liners were steered on taut hawsers towards their moorings was breathtaking. The Statue of Liberty was floodlit, and the Brooklyn Bridge a blaze of light. While many homes were still lit by gas, the electricity which illuminated public buildings and stores had in just a decade or so turned New York into a dazzling wonder of the modern world. If Guglielmo Marconi was to find real rivals in the exploitation of his new invention it would surely be here, in a land apparently obsessed with electrical power. And yet he was greeted like a conquering hero by American newspapermen when the Auratiia docked in New York on 21 September. They all wanted to know who this young man was, and were struck by how much he differed from the inventive genius of their lively imaginations. In a report Marconi gave to the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company back in London he wrote that he had to ‘run the gauntlet’ of reporters and photographers as soon as he went down the gangway. ‘For some reason or other it seemed to come as a shock to the newspapers that I spoke English fluently, in fact “with quite a London accent” as one paper phrased it, and also that I appeared to be very young and did not in the slightest resemble the popular type associated with an inventor in those days in America, that is to say a rather wild haired and eccentrically costumed person.’ He did however for a while lose his legendary cool: half his luggage had by mistake been diverted to Boston. In its report of 22 September 1899 the New York Tribune, which noted that Marconi explained about his missing luggage in ‘good English’, commented: ‘He is a slight young man of light complexion and nervous temperament, and he is a bit absent-minded. He is evidently more concerned about his scientific studies and inventions than about conventionalities and dress. He has clear blue eyes, and his face is clean shaven, except for a small moustache.’ The Tribune man had clearly caught Marconi off his guard: it was rare for him to be described as anything but well dressed when he made his public appearances.

No sooner had Marconi and his engineers begun to establish a shore station for the coverage of the America’s Cup than his extraordinary celebrity was eclipsed by the return from the Far East of a real American conquering hero. In 1898 the United States had gone to war with Spain. Cuba was then still a Spanish colony, but was being torn apart by a nationalist rebellion which America supported. The United States also coveted the Spanish colonies in the Philippines. When the American battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbour the Spanish were ordered out of Cuba. Under the command of Admiral George Dewey, the American fleet had taken on the Spanish in the Philippines, and at the battle of Manila routed them without losing a single life. In September 1899 Admiral Dewey was on his way back to New York, where he would receive a tumultuous reception. The America’s Cup was delayed a few days so that the Governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt, could stage the most spectacular ‘welcome home’ ever witnessed in the United States.

When Dewey and his fleet steamed into New York the Brooklyn Bridge blazed ‘WELCOME DEWEY’ in lightbulb letters thirty-six feet high and 370 feet across. One thousand bulbs were used for the letter ‘W’ alone. On Manhattan a victory parade a mile and a half long was lined with wood and plaster statues leading to a Dewey Arch. A two-day holiday was declared, and fireworks cracked in the bright electric air for several nights. Not wanting to be upstaged, the New York Herald asked Marconi to throw his wireless equipment on a tug and go out to greet Dewey before he docked. Back in the 1830s James Gordon Bennett Sr had made his name by beating rivals to the European stories arriving on Atlantic ships. As the sailing packets and later the steam liners approached Staten Island, despatch boats were sent out to collect the news and carry it to the New York Herald office so that it could be published before the ships docked. Gordon Bennett Jr was the man who sent Henry Stanley to seek out Dr Livingstone in Africa, and Stanley’s celebrated formal greeting, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume,’ had entered the language. He was also the promoter of a company which was involved in laying the first telegraph cables across the Atlantic. Though the younger Bennett now spent most of his time on his lavish yacht in the Mediterranean, the Herald had not lost its competitive edge.