by Erik Larson
Marconi carried two large bags of equipment. He set out his induction coil, spark generator, coherer, and other equipment, but apparently he had not brought with him a telegraph key. One of Preece’s assistants, P. R. Mullis, found one and together he and Marconi set up sending and receiving circuits on two tables. At this point Preece pulled out his watch and said quietly, “It has gone twelve now. Take this young man over to the refreshment bar and see that he gets a good dinner on my account, and come back here again by two o’clock.”
Mullis and Marconi had lunch and sipped tea, then strolled along Farringdon Road, where Marconi took particular interest in the wheelbarrows of street traders “with their loads of junk, books, and fruit.” By Mullis’s description, this lunch was one of relaxation and ease. Marconi would have described it differently. Ever anxious that someone would beat him to his goal, he now found himself dining and walking for two hours as his apparatus lay in Preece’s office open to inspection by anyone.
At two they returned and rejoined Preece. Marconi was young, thin, and of modest height, but his manner was compelling. He spoke perfect English and dressed well, in a good suit with razor creases. His explanations of the various components of his apparatus were lucid. He did not smile. Anyone happening to glance at him would have gotten the impression that he was much older, though on closer inspection would have noted the smooth skin and clear blue eyes.
Marconi adjusted his circuits. He pressed the telegraph key. A bell rang on the opposite table. He tapped the coherer with his finger and pressed the key again. Again the bell rang.
Mullis looked at his boss. “I knew by the Chief’s quiet manner and smile that something unusual had been effected.”
PREECE LIKED MARCONI. He recognized that Marconi’s coherer was a modification of devices already demonstrated by others, including Lodge, but he saw too that Marconi had put them together in an elegant way, and if the man—this boy—were to be believed, he had succeeded at something that Lodge and the Maxwellians considered impossible, the sending of legible signals not just over long distances but to a point out of optical range.
Preece and Marconi were kindred spirits. Both understood the power of work and everyday practice to reveal truths—useful, practical truths—about the forces that drove the world. In the battle of practice versus theory, Marconi held the promise of becoming Preece’s secret weapon. Marconi was an inventor, an amateur, hardly even an adult, yet he had bested some of the great scientific minds of the age. Lodge had said that half a mile was probably the farthest that electromagnetic waves could travel, yet Marconi claimed to have sent signals more than twice as far and now, in Preece’s office, forecast transmissions to much greater distances with a confidence that Preece found convincing.
Preece recognized that his own efforts to use induction to produce a crude form of wireless communication had reached their practical limits. Most recently he had attempted to establish communication with a lightship guarding the notoriously deadly Goodwin Sands off the English coast. He had strung wire around the hull of the ship and laid a spiral of wire on the sea floor large enough that no matter where the wind, tide, and waves moved the ship, it always was positioned over part of the spiral. By interrupting the current in the spiral, he hoped to induce matching interruptions in the coil on the ship, and in so doing send Morse messages back and forth. The experiment failed. Later Preece would state that Marconi “came to me at a very fortunate time for myself, for I was just then smarting under the disappointment of having made a failure in communicating with the East Goodwin lightship.”
Two years from retirement, Preece understood that his discovery of Marconi might be the last shining thing that history would remember about his long tenure at the British Post Office. Far better to exit as the man who helped introduce the world to a revolution in communication than as an engineer whose own attempts at telegraphy without wires had failed.
The day came to an end when Preece’s coachman appeared and Preece set out in his brougham for his home in Wimbledon, the beat of hooves keeping time in the cool spring air.
IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER Marconi wrote about the meeting and disclosed a bit of news that must have amazed the elder Marconi, who only a year earlier had been so skeptical of his son’s electrical adventures. “He promised me that, if I wanted to perform experiments, then he would allow me the use of any necessary building belonging to the telegraphic administration in any city or town in the whole of the United Kingdom, as well as ensuring the help (at no cost, of course) of any personnel employed by the administration mentioned above that I might need. He added that he has ships on which I could install and try my equipment in case I wanted to perform an experiment between vessels at sea.”
Preece assigned engineers from his staff to assist Marconi and recruited instrument-builders in the post office mechanics’ shop to modify Marconi’s equipment to make it more robust. Immediately Preece began arranging demonstrations for other government officials.
Soon Marconi found himself on the roof of the post office, sending signals from one rooftop to another, the spark of his transmitter snapping so loudly as to be audible on the street below. In July 1896 he achieved a distance of three hundred yards, well short of what he had done at the Villa Griffone but still impressive to Preece and his engineers.
Preece arranged the most important demonstration yet, one for observers from the army and navy, to take place on the military proving ground Salisbury Plain, near Stonehenge. By day’s end he managed to transmit legible signals to a distance of one mile and three quarters.
The success of the demonstration raised Marconi onto another plane. The War Office wanted more demonstrations; Preece, nearly as delighted as Marconi, reiterated his pledge to provide as much assistance and equipment as Marconi needed. Until this point the intensity with which Marconi pursued his idea had been stoked only from within; now, suddenly, there were expectations from the outside.
“La calma della mia vita ebbe allora fine,” he said—The calm of my life ended then.
MARCONI REALIZED IT WAS NOW crucial to file for a patent for his apparatus. The number of people who had seen his invention was multiplying, and his fear that another inventor might come forward increased in step. He filed a “provisional specification” that established the date of filing and asserted that he was first to achieve the things he claimed. He would have to submit a more complete filing later.
Convinced now that Marconi truly had accomplished something remarkable, Preece decided to announce Marconi’s breakthrough to the world.
In quick succession he gave a series of important lectures, during which he introduced Marconi as the inventor of a wholly new means of communication. He gave the first in September 1896 before a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, known best simply as the British Association, during which he revealed that “an Italian had come up with a box giving a quite new system of space telegraphy.” He gave a brief description and disclosed that it had proven a great success at Salisbury Plain. In the audience were many of Britain’s most famous scientists and, of course, Oliver Lodge and some of his Maxwellian allies, including a prominent physicist named George FitzGerald. Even in the best of circumstances Lodge and FitzGerald found the experience of listening to Preece to be the intellectual equivalent of hearing a fingernail scrape across a blackboard, but now they heard him describe Marconi as if he were the first man ever to experiment with Hertzian waves, and they were outraged. Both believed Lodge had done as much in his June 1894 lecture on Hertz at the Royal Institution.
FitzGerald wrote to a friend, “On the last day but one Preece surprised us all by saying that he had taken up an Italian adventurer who had done no more than Lodge & others had done in observing Hertzian radiations at a distance. Many of us were very indignant at this overlooking of British work for an Italian manufacturer. Science ‘made in Germany’ we are accustomed to but ‘made in Italy’ by an unknown firm was too bad.” Lodge wrote to Preece an
d complained, “There is nothing new in what Marconi attempts to do.”
The news may have been stale to Lodge and his friends, but it was not to the world at large. Word spread rapidly about this Italian who had invented wireless telegraphy. Newspapers referred to “Marconi waves,” which to Lodge and his allies represented a cruel slight to the memory of Hertz. This Italian had invented nothing, they argued. If anyone could claim to be the inventor, it was Lodge.
Preece knew he had angered the Maxwellians, and he likely reveled in the fact, for he did not back off. Far from it—he resolved to devote his next big lecture entirely to Marconi and his wireless. It was scheduled for December 12, 1896, at London’s Toynbee Hall, a settlement house dedicated to social reform based in London’s impoverished East End, in Jack the Ripper’s old hunting ground. Here, Preece knew, his lecture would draw not just scientists but a broad swath of the city’s intellectual community and representatives of the daily press. The British Association had been mere preamble.
As the date approached, Preece roughed out his lecture. He sought maximum effect. Physicists had become increasingly knowledgeable about Hertzian waves, but not the public. A demonstration of telegraphy without wires was likely to strike the Toynbee audience as so magical as to verge on the supernatural.
Marconi agreed to a demonstration but expressed concern about revealing the secrets of his apparatus. His outlook was more that of a magician protecting his tricks than a scientist unveiling a new discovery to peers. He wrote, “I think it desirable just now that no explanation be given as to the means which I employ for obtaining the effects, as I fear it may give rise to discussions which I would rather avoid until my whole study can be laid before some scientific society.”
Marconi satisfied his need for secrecy by concealing his apparatus. He constructed two boxes and painted them black. In one he installed his transmitter, in the other his receiver, with a bell attached. At the start of the lecture one box was at the podium, the other at the far side of the room.
Preece began the lecture with a brief summary of his own efforts to harness induction to signal across bodies of water. But tonight, he said, he would reveal a remarkable discovery made by a young Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi. And then, in the finest tradition of late-nineteenth-century scientific lectures, the demonstration began.
First Preece pressed the key at the box that housed the transmitter. The audience heard the loud crack of a spark. At the same instant, the bell in the receiver box rang.
Nearly everyone in the audience had seen magic acts, and many doubtless had attended at least one of the famed shows at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, “England’s Home of Mystery,” directed by a magician named Nevil Maskelyne. Compared to women sawn in half or men levitated to the ceiling, this at first glance was nothing special. It took a moment or two for the audience to absorb the fact that what they were witnessing was not a magic trick but a scientific effect conjured by the great William Preece of the British Post Office, who stood before them exuding as always absolute credibility, his eyes large behind thick glasses, his great beard marking each motion of his head with a tangled whoosh of gray-white whiskers. Still, many in the audience reacted the way Marconi’s father once had, wondering by what clever means Marconi had hidden the wire connecting the two boxes.
Now Preece and Marconi launched a second phase of the demonstration, meant to quash any lingering skepticism. On a cue from Preece, Marconi picked up the black box that housed his receiver and walked with it through the lecture hall. The spark cracked, the bell rang, over and over, but now the audience could see, clearly, that no wire trailed Marconi as he moved. The audience also saw that Marconi was barely an adult, which only increased the wonder of the moment. No matter where Marconi walked, the bell rang.
FAME CAME SUDDENLY. The lay press sought a name for Marconi’s technology and called it space telegraphy or aetheric telegraphy or simply telegraphy without wires. The Strand Magazine sent a writer, H.J.W. Dam, to interview Marconi at his home.
Dam wrote, “He is a tall, slender young man, who looks at least thirty and has a calm, serious manner and a grave precision of speech which further gives the idea of many more years than are his.”
Marconi told Dam that it was possible that he had discovered a kind of wave different from what Hertz had found. Asked to explain the difference, Marconi said, “I don’t know. I am not a professional scientist, but I doubt if any scientist can tell you.”
He declined to talk about the components of his apparatus, but he did tell Dam that his waves could “penetrate everything,” including the hull of an ironclad battleship. This caught the interviewer’s attention. “Could you not from this room explode a box of gunpowder placed across the street in that house yonder?”
“Yes,” Marconi said, as matter-of-fact as always. He explained, however, that first he would need to insert two wires or metal plates into the powder to produce the spark necessary for detonation.
Reports of Marconi’s feats now circulated abroad. Military representatives from Austria-Hungary asked for, and received, a demonstration. In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm also took notice and, as soon would be apparent, resolved that this technology needed further, deeper investigation. The Italian ambassador to England invited Marconi to dinner, after which the ambassador and Marconi traveled in an embassy coach to the post office for a demonstration. In a letter to his father, Marconi reported that the ambassador “even apologized a little for not having dedicated his attention to the matter sooner.”
Lodge and his allies of course were enraged, but more broadly, within Britain’s higher social tiers and within the scientific establishment as a whole, there were many others who looked upon Marconi with suspicion, even distaste. He was a troubling character, and not just because he had laid claim to apparatus that Lodge and other scientists had used first. He was something new in the landscape. As he himself had admitted, he was not a scientist. His grasp of physical theory was minimal, his command of advanced mathematics nonexistent. He was an entrepreneur of a kind that would become familiar to the world only a century or so later, with the advent of the so-called “start-up” company. In his time the closest models for this kind of behavior were unsavory—for example, the men who made fortunes selling quack medicines, immortalized in H. G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay.
His obsession with secrecy rankled. Here he was, this young Italian, staking claim to a new and novel technology yet at the same time violating all that British science held dear by refusing to reveal details of how his apparatus worked. Marconi had succeeded in doing something believed to be impossible, but how had he done it? Why was he, a mere boy, able to do what no one else could? And why was he so unwilling to publish openly his work, as any other scientist would do as a matter of course? Lodge wrote, with oblique malice, that “the public has been educated by a secret box more than it would have been by many volumes of Philosophical Transactions and Physical Society Proceedings.”
To add insult to injury, Marconi was a foreigner at a time when Britons were growing concerned about the increasing number of anarchists, immigrants, and refugees on British soil.
In the face of all this, Marconi remained confident. His early letters to his father were full of cool calculation. Somehow he had developed a belief in his vision that nothing could shake. His chief worry was whether he could develop his wireless quickly enough to outstrip the other inventors who, now that the news of his success was circling the globe, surely would intensify their own work on electromagnetic waves.
In this race he saw no room for loyalty, not to Preece, not to anyone.
ANARCHISTS AND SEMEN
CRIPPEN FOUND QUARTERS IN ST. JOHN’S WOOD, near Regent’s Park. His Munyon’s office was a distance away on Shaftesbury Avenue, which ran a soft serpentine between Bloomsbury and Piccadilly Circus among shops, offices, and restaurants and past side streets inhabited by actors, musicians, French and German émigrés, and other “foreigners,” as well as a few prost
itutes. The avenue was home also to three of London’s best-known theaters, the Palace, the Shaftesbury, and the Lyric. The Munyon’s office stood opposite the Palace.
Crippen made sure his wife had all the money she needed to live well in New York and to pursue her opera lessons. But Cora was growing disenchanted with opera, acknowledging at last what her teachers had recognized long before, that she had neither the voice nor the stage presence to succeed in so lofty a pursuit. She wrote to Crippen that she now planned to try making a career doing “music hall sketches.” In America it was known as Vaudeville; the British called it Variety.
This troubled Crippen. Vaudeville seemed tawdry compared to opera, and even compared to variety, which as Crippen knew was popular in London and becoming increasingly respectable. Even the Prince of Wales was said to enjoy a good night of variety turns. Though some music halls still served as points of commerce for prostitutes and pickpockets, most had become clean and safe. Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley did turns, and within a decade so too would Anna Pavlova and the Russian ballet, first introduced to Britain at the Palace.
Crippen wrote to Cora and urged her to reconsider. He recommended that she come right away to London. Here at least she could perform variety without taint.
She agreed to join him, though probably neither love nor Crippen’s plea had much to do with her decision. More likely her career doing musical sketches in New York had also been a failure, and now she wanted to try her hand in London, where she could sing before a sophisticated audience more appreciative of her true talent. Her impending arrival meant that Crippen had to find new lodgings that were large enough and luxurious enough to accommodate a wife with so swollen a sense of self-regard and need. He chose an apartment in Bloomsbury on a pretty street in the shape of a half-circle, one of London’s many “crescents.” This was South Crescent, off Tottenham Court Road, one block from the British Museum and an easy walk to the Munyon’s office on Shaftesbury.