The scepticism of his father lessened somewhat when, the following year, Marconi succeeded in transmitting messages by Morse code between receivers and transmitters more than one mile apart. Marconi had drawn on the work of Professor Righi and that of Oliver Lodge of Liverpool University to achieve his success. In this he was following experimental work being conducted round the world. Oliver Lodge had demonstrated a radio telegraph at the 1894 meeting of the British Association at Oxford. In contrast to Marconi, Lodge was more concerned with theory than in practical applications of his work, to the extent that he had not even bothered to patent his equipment.⁶⁰
Marconi, on the other hand, clearly foresaw the commercial possibilities. Supported by his mother, he travelled to London to meet William Preece, the chief engineer of the British General Post Office (GPO). The GPO had a monopoly of the telegraph system and was interested in Marconi’s demonstration of wireless telegraphy. Preece was sufficiently impressed to obtain an assistant for Marconi to help with his work. The assistant, George Kemp, was to remain with Marconi throughout his working life.
Spurred by this early success, Marconi obtained a patent for his work in 1896 and returned to Italy to demonstrate his equipment to the Italian Navy in 1897. Later that year, his cousin Henry Jameson Davis helped him form the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, which owned his patents and was set up to develop and market his equipment. The company was incorporated with capital of £100,000 ($37m), while Marconi received £15,000 ($5.5m) in cash, and £60,000 ($22m) in paid-up shares, as consideration for his patents. In 1900 this company changed its name to the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. Several things enabled Marconi to push his work forward at such speed. Other than his own ability, the most important one was the support of his family. Marconi was not only free from financial constraints. He also had the advantage of his family’s business contacts. Perhaps as importantly, he also had the constant encouragement of his mother.
From wire to wireless – the technology in context
The transmission of information had taken massive leaps forward in the preceding 50 years. The telegraph had rapidly become a vital means of communication after the Civil War in America. It spawned Western Union, the industry giant which enjoyed virtual monopoly powers. More recently, the Bell Companies had made big inroads into the traditional telegraph business with their new device, the telephone, which created a brand new market, linking businesses and increasing numbers of households. Both these mediums were bound by one constraint. They required users to be connected by physical links. This made them unsuitable for many groups of would-be users, for whom rapid information transfer and communication were of the utmost importance.
By virtue of its maritime pre-eminence, the largest potential customer for the radio was the British Navy. At that time, Britain had the largest naval fleet in the world, and was desperately seeking the solution to the communication problems which had been created by recent advances in shipbuilding. Before the advent of the ironclad, signalling between ships of the fleet was conducted by semaphore from the admiral’s vessel, sailing in the van. However, ironclad ships – those of the ‘Dreadnought’ class – were so large and powerful that they had to sail at least half a mile apart. A fleet of a dozen ships could therefore easily stretch over at least six miles of water, which threatened to make semaphore redundant. The maritime market was wide open for a technology that could resolve this growing communication problem. In the tense political conditions of the time, Europe’s arms race showed little signs of slackening. Both the size and capabilities of navies were key issues for the major European powers.
As the biggest and potentially most important customers were in the UK, Marconi concentrated on sea trials with the Royal Navy through much of 1898. Britain was not alone in conducting wireless trials. The Russian Imperial Navy, for example, was experimenting on similar lines. The association with the Royal Navy was a help to Marconi in his developmental work, but not the only arm of government in his sights. The General Post Office, which held the monopoly of cable-based information transmission in Britain, was also a target. Marconi believed he had a strong relationship with Preece, its chief engineer. It was only later that he began to realise that Preece’s interest in his efforts was far from even-handed, given the latter’s own scientific aspirations in the radiography field.
Whatever the relationship, the British government proved to be both slow and intransigent, and as a consequence Marconi was compelled to explore more actively the commercial potential in America. The market Marconi was addressing was conditioned by the most obvious needs of the time. These needs were principally maritime, with ships needing to communicate with each other and with land. The other important market was that for long-distance communication, and in particular the lucrative transatlantic route, where a small number of telegraph companies dominated traffic, effectively acting as a cartel. Both these target markets shared a common characteristic: they involved the transfer of information from one single point to another.
Marconi courts the press
During this frustrating period in Britain, and the subsequent failure of his attempts to gain financial backing from the government, Marconi sought to generate interest and support for his work by providing public trials of his equipment. These were designed to garner the maximum publicity. Just as Edison and Bell before him had mounted eye-catching public demonstrations and courted the press, so Marconi followed the same path. This included linking up the Royal Yacht with Queen Victoria’s residence on the Isle of Wight and later, in 1899, sending messages 30 miles across the English Channel to France. The main publicity effort, however, was reserved for the United States and the America’s Cup yacht race. This was a very popular event in America. Thousands avidly followed its progress. Teaming up with the New York Herald, Marconi supplied virtually instantaneous reports on the progress of the race by radio. For the New York Herald, the fact that the newspaper had gained exclusive use of the new wireless technology to report the race was a news item of almost equal importance to the race itself.
Marconi found himself a news item in his own right and proved remarkably adept at managing his relationship with the newspapers and journals of the time. He was helped by the antagonism of the press towards the telegraph companies, and Western Union in particular. This was an age when America’s largest corporations were frequently vilified in the press and attacked for their trust activities. For the newspapers, this was an especially sensitive point given their reliance on the telegraph companies for their own rapid communication needs. This reliance was particularly marked for transatlantic messages, where the companies exerted a near monopoly through their control of both the cables and telegraph prices.
Whatever justification the arguments against the telegraph companies and their transatlantic rates might have had, there was also self-interest in the condemnations by the press and their overt support of Marconi. Enthusiasm for the radio encouraged journalistic licence, and raised expectations far beyond what the technology had so far been able to deliver. This produced two quite natural reactions. First, the scientific community felt compelled to issue warnings about the limitations of radio, and of Marconi’s work in particular. Secondly, at a time of general stock-market buoyancy, stock promoters were more than happy to try and meet the less-discriminating demand stimulated by the press reports.
7.1 – The first exclusive: wireless reports on the America’s Cup 1899
Source: New York Times, 4 October 1899.
Scientific scepticism
Although Marconi basked in the adoration of the American press and skillfully responded to their requests, his fame was of a populist nature. He was not universally respected by the academic scientific community. Like Edison, he attracted criticism rather than acclaim from his classically schooled university counterparts. Marconi’s critics had a substantial list of areas to attack. The first wave of criticism focused on whether he had actually achieved anything by himself, pointing out tha
t ‘all’ he had done was assemble known instruments. The second wave was somewhat contradictory, suggesting that Marconi’s invention was rudimentary and impractical. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the negative criticism owed much to academic pique that a non-theoretical scientist should presume to encroach on an area in which he was substantially less qualified than they.
In 1899, a lot remained to be done to turn radio into a commercial activity. Marconi’s radio could not transmit reliably over any distance greater than 35 miles. The radio sent all its messages on the same frequency, so only one radio could operate within a given radius at any particular time if interference was to be avoided. The waves produced by the radio could be picked up by anyone with a receiver. Given that a large part of the potential client base was military and naval, this was a serious problem. The equipment itself could only operate at a slow speed and was prone to interference from outside influences. The telegraph could transmit Morse code 20 times faster. Finally, there was a common consensus in the scientific community that transmission range was ultimately limited by the size of aerial that could be constructed. As a consequence, transatlantic communication was deemed to be impractical.
Chief among the critics of Marconi’s work were his peers in the scientific community. In late 1899, Professor Reginald Fessenden presented a paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Fessenden noted how he had turned down an invitation to cover the yacht races by the New York Herald, which had then turned to Marconi instead. Fessenden had first developed an interest in Hertzian waves when he was working as an assistant to Thomas Edison, and continued this interest in his academic posts. He outlined the shortcomings of the apparatus that had been constructed by Marconi and the method by which the trials had been implemented. The method of creating the electromagnetic wave was poor, he said, as unwanted signals would be created and diminish the strength of the main signal. So far as receiving was concerned, there was no known way of tuning the receiver to the correct frequency and so eliminate irrelevant signals. Finally, Fessenden alleged that Marconi had conducted his research in a haphazard manner and made little or no measurements and records of his work to which reference could be made. Anyone attempting to construct a working, practical model of wireless telegraphy would be stumbling in the dark without a frame of reference.
Whatever his motivation, the majority of Fessenden’s points proved to be entirely accurate. Whether Marconi was concerned or not is another issue. Most likely his view followed that of Edison in similar circumstances. Marconi’s aim was to produce a commercially viable method of doing what the telegraph did without the need for cables. This would allow its deployment in places where fixed links were impossible. His approach was to use trial and error on the technology of the time and, where problems arose, to solve them in a practical rather than a theoretical way. He was open-minded about the value of academic contributions. His only concern was whether these could be harnessed in a commercial environment.
From demonstration to practicality
Marconi was not blind to the problems and sought to address them by hiring the necessary expertise. He employed John Ambrose Fleming, first as a consultant, then subsequently as an employee. Fleming was a former colleague of Maxwell’s and later professor of electrical engineering at the University of London. He was also a former adviser to the Edison and Swan Electric Company in Britain, for whom he had conducted experiments on incandescent lamps with carbon filaments. Fleming set out the theoretical properties of the waves used in radio transmission and hence provided a scientifically robust underpinning for the practical work of Marconi. Fleming’s theoretical knowledge and his practical experience of carbon filament lamps were to prove invaluable to Marconi.
As well as hiring Fleming, Marconi himself also worked hard to remedy the problems of transmission and reception. On the former he extended the work completed by Oliver Lodge, effectively building a working tuner using matching inductance in the transmitter and receivers. In this he removed the problems of relying on the aerials. Once completed, he applied for and was granted a patent. This patent, number 7777, was to prove vitally important and as such was heavily litigated against. The problem of reception was solved, building on previous work by Lord Rutherford, to create a receiver to replace the device known as the ‘coherer’ which was both slow and unreliable. Using the demagnetising properties of electromagnetic waves discovered by Rutherford, Marconi was able to build a receiver to create sounds which could be heard through headphones when signals were received. Rather than recording messages directly onto paper strips, the apparatus would now rely on operators trained to distinguish the different tones.
At the same time Marconi set out to conquer the third main problem with his work, that of long-distance transmission. His target was to confound his critics by transmitting a signal across the Atlantic. There were many eminent scientists who disputed that such a task was theoretically possible. A popular response to the idea of long-distance transmission was that the curvature of the earth would prevent radio signals being received beyond the horizon. The only way a broadcast could be made across the Atlantic, therefore, was to build impractically tall transmitters. This represented the existing body of knowledge at the time. Like other contemporary scientists, Marconi had no theoretical solution to this proposition. His approach mirrored that of Edison; he simply chose to ignore such inconvenient theories. His subsequent practical success was shown to be possible because of the impact of the ionosphere in reflecting high-frequency waves. Marconi continued to experiment until he had transmitted signals sufficient distances to justify the expenditure of a full trial between the two continents.
The market starts to develop
Marconi was not alone in his quest for wireless telegraphy, but he was probably the one most focused on its commercial application. His early competitors were scientists first and businessmen second, although undoubtedly all would have been influenced by the fortunes created by the success of Western Union and more recently AT&T and GE. These companies offered investors a new type of investment. Investors had typically relied on the railroads and bonds as ‘reliable’ investments, while viewing industrial companies as high-risk speculative vehicles. This was ironic, given the scandals associated with the railroads, but the stormy economic and market conditions of the 1890s convinced many investors of the long-term viability of the new industrial concerns. Once convinced, it did not take long for an appetite to develop. The optimism that accompanied this change in perception was magnetically drawn towards the new and exciting medium of the radio. Attracted by the potential rewards, pecuniary or otherwise, a number of American scientists challenged the path Marconi had travelled. Professor Reginald Fessenden was perhaps Marconi’s most dedicated competitor, but other notable pioneers included Professor John Stone Stone, who had worked in the Bell Research Laboratories, and Lee de Forest from Western Electric’s experimental laboratory. The competition between these various parties to raise funds was particularly intense, as detailed in a fascinating exposé written by a journalist named Frank Fayant some years later.
Professor Reginald Fessenden
Professor Fessenden had started his career as an academic, but later fulfilled an ambition to work for one of Edison’s companies. From there, he moved to the new West Orange research laboratory to become Edison’s chief chemist. After three years of working with Edison and Arthur Kennelly, his chief electrician, Fessenden gained permission to work on Hertzian waves. Unfortunately, this coincided with the cash flow problems which forced Edison to merge Edison Electric to form Edison General Electric, under the majority ownership of Deutsche Bank and Siemens-Halske, the backers of Henry Villard.⁶¹ Subsequently, as Villard himself suffered financial problems stemming from his involvement in the Northern Pacific Railroad, the new combination of General Electric was formed in 1892 from the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston under the financial guidance of J. P. Morgan.
For Fessenden, the fi
rst of these mergers resulted in a cost-reduction programme that forced him to leave. He then joined a subsidiary of Westinghouse where he became involved with the ongoing research work on AC motors. The contract was short-term, and with the knowledge he had gained from his exposure to AC he found employment with a power plant company that sent him to Britain to examine the power generation work of Charles Parsons and Sebastian de Ferranti. After further career changes, Fessenden, with the assistance of George Westinghouse, obtained the position of professor of electrical engineering at what was to become the University of Pittsburgh. While at Pittsburgh, Fessenden continued his work on Hertzian waves but did so along fundamentally different lines from Marconi. While Marconi had generated a signal through use of a spark, Fessenden’s exposure to AC generation helped condition his view of Hertzian waves as high-frequency alternating currents. For Fessenden the challenge was to find a method of producing and detecting high-frequency continuous waves. The difference between spark and continuous wave technology was fundamental, as much so as the difference between the potential of the telegraph and the telephone. In an attempt to follow this challenge through to its conclusion, Fessenden accepted a position with the US Weather Bureau to further his work on wireless telegraphy.
Engines That Move Markets (2nd Ed) Page 32