by Erik Larson
Marconi was stung. He believed he had demonstrated without doubt that wireless was a practical technology, ready for adoption. In December 1897 he and Kemp had erected a wireless mast on the Isle of Wight, on the grounds of the Needles Hotel at Alum Bay—the world’s first permanent wireless station—and established communication between it and a coastal tugboat at a distance of eleven miles. In January 1898 they had erected a second station on the mainland, at another hotel, Madeira House in Bournemouth, fourteen and a half miles west along the coast. The two stations had been in communication ever since.
Seemingly blind to Preece’s changed attitude, Marconi offered to sell the post office rights to use his technology within Britain for £30,000—an exorbitant price, equivalent to about $3 million today. The offer smacked of impudence. The government rejected the offer.
Now Preece struck again. In February 1899 he turned sixty-five, the post office’s mandatory retirement age, but instead of retiring, he wrangled an appointment as Consulting Engineer to the Post Office, where circumstances contrived to make him an even more dangerous adversary. His superiors asked him to compile a report on Marconi’s technology with an eye to determining whether the government ought to grant Marconi a license that would permit his stations to begin handling messages turned in at telegraph offices operated by the post office. Existing law, which gave the post office a monopoly over all telegraphy in the British Isles, forbade such use.
In his report of November 1899 Preece advised against granting the license. Marconi had yet to establish a viable commercial service anywhere, he argued. To grant a license now would merely enrich Marconi and his backers by causing an “ignorant excitement” among investors. “A new company would be formed with a large capital, the public would wildly subscribe to an undertaking endorsed by the imprimatur of the Postmaster-General and the Government would encourage another South Sea Bubble.”
Later Preece wrote to Lodge, “I want to show you my Report. It is now with the Attorney General. It is very strong and dead against Marconi on all points.”
LODGE WAS PLEASED. He wrote to Sylvanus Thompson about what he called “Preece’s attempt to upset their applecart.”
He wrote: “I can’t help thinking it is a bit well deserved and just, though rather belated.”
MARCONI CAME TO RECOGNIZE that he needed his own allies, both to neutralize the opposition of Lodge and to help dispel the still-pervasive skepticism that wireless telegraphy would ever be more than a novelty.
First he courted one of Britain’s most revered men of science, Lord Kelvin. Early on Kelvin had declared himself a skeptic on the practical future of wireless, stating—famously—“Wireless is all very well but I’d rather send a message by a boy on a pony.”
In May 1898 Kelvin stopped by Marconi’s offices in London, where Marconi himself demonstrated his apparatus. Kelvin was impressed but remained skeptical about its future value. At this point Marconi and Lodge both were developing methods of tuning signals so that messages from one transmitter would not distort those from another, but Kelvin deemed interference a problem that would only grow worse as power and distance increased. Kelvin wrote Lodge, “The chief objection I see to much practical use at distances up to 15 miles is that two people speaking to one another would almost monopolize earth and air for miles around them. I don’t think it would be possible to arrange for a dozen pairs of people to converse together by this method within a circle of 10 miles radius.”
A month later Kelvin and his wife visited Marconi’s station at the Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, where Marconi invited Kelvin to key in his own long-distance message. Now at last Kelvin seemed to awaken to the commercial potential of wireless. He insisted on paying Marconi for his message, the first paid wireless telegram and, incidentally, the first revenue for Marconi’s company.
Marconi asked Kelvin to become a consulting engineer. On June 11 Kelvin agreed tentatively to do so, and the value of his support immediately became evident. That same day Kelvin wrote to Oliver Lodge, “I think it would be a very good thing if you would write direct to Marconi an olive branch letter.” He told Lodge that after spending two days with Marconi, “I formed a very favorable opinion of him. He said I might write to you…. I know he would like your cooperation and I think it would be in every way right that you should in some way be connected with the work.” He informed Lodge of his own decision to join with Marconi as consulting engineer and wrote, “I suggested that you also should be asked to act in the same capacity and he thoroughly approved of my suggestion. But before I had any idea of taking part myself I wished to promote the olive branch affair and I hope (indeed feel sure) you will take the same view of it as I do.”
He added an enthusiastic postscript about his time at Marconi’s Needles station: “I saw (and practiced!) telegraphing thence through ether to & from Bournemouth. Admirable. Quite practical!!!”
Kelvin seemed all but certain to join the company, when suddenly he expressed qualms that had nothing to do with Marconi or his technology. What troubled him was the idea that in allying himself with Marconi, he would be joining an enterprise devoted not just to exploring nature’s secrets but to making as much profit as possible. On June 12, the day after his letter to Lodge, Kelvin wrote again. “In accepting to be consulting engineer, I am making a condition that no more money be asked from the public, for the present at all events; as it seems to me that the present Syndicate has as much capital as is needed for the work in prospect…. I am by no means confident that this condition will be acceptable to the promoters. But without it I cannot act.”
For Marconi, this was an untenable condition, and Kelvin never did become consulting engineer.
Now Marconi concentrated on Lodge.
LODGE REVELED IN HIS NEW POWER to command Marconi’s attention. For help in dealing with Marconi, Lodge recruited a friend, Alexander Muirhead, who ran a company that manufactured telegraphic instruments of high quality. Muirhead met Jameson Davis at the Reform Club in London and immediately afterward wrote to Lodge, “Today was only the beginning of the game. I feel sure now that they want to combine with us. Have patience it will come about.”
In July Muirhead offered to sell Lodge’s tuning technology to Marconi—for £30,000, the same steep price Marconi had quoted to the post office for his own patent rights. In a letter to Lodge dated July 29, 1898, Jameson Davis wrote, “This struck me and my directors as being exceedingly high, more especially, as we are without any information as to what the inventions may be.” He wanted specifics, but so far none had been forthcoming. “As we are very anxious to have you with us, I should be very glad if we could have this matter cleared up, and come to some good business arrangement.”
Now Marconi himself wrote to Lodge and, in an apparent attempt to advance the courtship by demonstrating his own rising prominence, included an intriguing return address:
ROYAL YACHT OSBORNE COWES ISLE OF WIGHT
ANYONE WHO COULD READ a newspaper knew that at that moment Edward, the Prince of Wales, was aboard the royal yacht recuperating from injuries to his leg caused when he fell down a staircase during a ball in Paris. His mother, Queen Victoria, would have preferred that he spend this time at the royal estate, Osborne House, where she herself was staying, but Edward preferred the yacht, and a little distance. The vessel was moored about two miles away in the Solent, the channel between the Isle of Wight and the mainland. In any preceding age this distance would have assured Edward as much privacy as he wished, but his mother had read about Marconi and now asked him to establish a wireless link between the house and the Osborne.
Ever mindful of opportunities to draw the attention of the press, Marconi agreed. At his direction workers extended the Osborne’s mast and ran wire along its length to produce an antenna with a height above deck of eighty-three feet. He installed a transmitter whose spark flushed the sending cabin with light and caused a burst of miniature thunder that required him to fill his ears with cotton. On the grounds of Osborne H
ouse at an outbuilding called Ladywood Cottage, Marconi guided construction of another mast, this one reaching one hundred feet.
At one point, while adjusting his equipment, Marconi sought to cut through the Osborne House gardens, at a time when the queen herself was there in her wheeled chair. The queen valued her privacy and commanded her staff to guard against uninvited intrusion. A gardener stopped Marconi and told him to “go back and around.”
Marconi, by now all of twenty-four years old, refused and told the gardener he would walk through the garden or abandon the project. He turned and went back to his hotel.
An attendant reported Marconi’s response to the queen. In her mild but imperious way she said, “Get another electrician.”
“Alas, Your Majesty,” the attendant said, “England has no Marconi.”
The queen considered this, then dispatched a royal carriage to Marconi’s hotel to retrieve him. They met and talked. She was seventy-nine years old, he was barely out of boyhood, but he spoke with the confidence of a Lord Salisbury, and she was charmed. She praised his work and wished him well.
Soon the queen and Edward were in routine communication via wireless. Over the next two weeks Queen Victoria, Edward, and his doctor, Sir James Reid, traded 150 messages, the nature of which demonstrated yet again that no matter how innovative the means of communication, men and women will find a way to make the messages sent as tedious as possible.
August 4, 1898. Sir James to Victoria:
“H.R.H. the Prince of Wales has passed another excellent night, and is in very good spirits and health. The knee is most satisfactory.”
August 5, 1898. Sir James to Victoria:
“H.R.H. the Prince of Wales has passed another excellent night, and the knee is in good condition.”
There was this heated exchange, from a woman aboard the Osborne to another at the house, “Could you come to tea with us some day?”
A reply came rocketing back through the ether, “Very sorry cannot come to tea.”
THIS NEW TECHNOLOGY intrigued Edward, and he was delighted to have Marconi aboard. By way of thanks he gave Marconi a royal tie pin.
While on the yacht, Marconi wrote to Lodge about his success in establishing communication between the queen and her son. “I am glad to say that everything has gone off first rate from the very start, having sent thousands of words both ways without having had once to repeat a word.” He noted that although the distance was less than two miles, the two locations were “out of sight of each other, a hill intervening between.”
He closed, “I am in great haste,” and underlined his signature with a bold black slash of his pen, something he would do forever after.
IN THE MIDST OF COURTING Lodge, Marconi’s company experienced its first fatality, though the death had nothing to do with wireless itself.
One of Marconi’s men, Edward Glanville, traveled to remote Rathlin Island, seven miles off the coast of Northern Ireland, to help conduct an experiment for Lloyd’s of London, for which he was to help install wireless transmitters and receivers on Rathlin and on the mainland at Ballycastle, for use in reporting the passage of ships to Lloyd’s central office in London. A tempestuous stretch of sea separated Rathlin and Ballycastle and up until now had made communication problematic.
In Ballycastle, where George Kemp managed the mainland portion of the work, the apparatus was placed in a child’s bedroom in “a lady’s house on the cliff,” and the wires to the antenna were run out the child’s window. If all went well, messages from Rathlin would be transmitted to Ballycastle by wireless, regardless of fog and storms, and relayed from there by conventional telegraph to Lloyd’s.
One day Glanville disappeared. Searchers found his body at the base of a three-hundred-foot cliff.
Ever since joining Marconi, George Kemp had found himself called upon to perform diverse duties, but none so sad as now. On August 22, 1898, Kemp wrote in his diary, “I wired to London and arranged for the despatch of a coffin and the arrival of the coroner and steamer and, at 6 P.M. I went to Rathlin and examined the body with a doctor. I washed the body and placed it in the coffin. An inquest was held and the coroner returned ‘death by accident.’ It appeared that the people on the Island had often seen him climbing over the cliffs with a hammer with which he examined the various strata of the earth, and this was no doubt the cause of the accident.”
Glanville’s death briefly derailed the ongoing conversation between the Marconi company and Lodge, but now the courtship renewed. Lodge resisted, and declined even to give Marconi a demonstration of his technology.
Marconi grew impatient. On November 2, 1898, he wrote, “I sincerely hope you will be able to make us this exhibition or in some way arrange that we may work together rather than in opposition, which I am certain would be to the disadvantage of us both.” In the meantime, he added, “It might…facilitate matters if you would kindly let us have an answer to the following questions.” He then asked Lodge how many of his transmitters could operate in a given area without interference, what distance he so far had achieved, and what distance might be possible in the future.
Here again Marconi demonstrated his social obtuseness. He was asking Lodge to reveal his technology, yet just a couple of weeks earlier he himself had refused to do likewise for Lodge, stating: “I much regret that commercial considerations prevent me (at least at present) from mutually communicating the results we are obtaining.”
This was exactly the wrong thing to say to Lodge, for whom the intrusion of commerce into science was so distasteful, but Marconi appeared not to register his antipathy.
In the same letter Marconi blithely asked Lodge if he would serve as one of the two sponsors required for his application to become a member of Britain’s prestigious Institution of Electrical Engineers.
Lodge refused.
ANOTHER ENEMY NOW RAISED its standard—weather. Marconi saw that wireless likely would have its greatest value at sea, where it might end at last the isolation of ships, but achieving this goal required conducting experiments on the ocean and along coasts exposed to some of the most hostile weather the world had to offer. The more ambitious the experiment, the more weather became a factor, as proved the case at the end of 1898 when Trinity House, keeper of all lighthouses and lightships in Britain, agreed to let Marconi conduct tests involving the East Goodwin lightship, the same ship where William Preece’s induction experiments had failed—a fact that could not have escaped Preece’s increasingly jaundiced attention.
Marconi dispatched George Kemp to the ship to direct the installation of an antenna, transmitter, and receiver. Kemp chronicled the subsequent ordeal in his diary.
At nine A.M. on December 17, 1898, Kemp set out by boat from the beach at the village of Deal, notorious in the history of shipwreck both for the number of corpses routinely washed ashore after ships foundered on the Goodwin Sands and for the vocation of certain past residents who, as once chronicled by Daniel Defoe, had seen each new wreck as an opportunity for personal enrichment. Kemp’s boat took three and a half hours to reach the lightship, which was moored at sea at a point roughly twelve miles northeast of the South Foreland Lighthouse, near Dover, where Marconi had erected a shore station for the trials.
Kemp arrived to find the lightship “pitching and rolling” in heavy seas. Nonetheless, Kemp and the lightship crew managed to erect a twenty-five-foot extension to one of the ship’s tall masts, yielding an antenna that rose ninety feet above deck. “Beyond this,” he wrote in his diary, “very little work was done as everyone appeared to be seasick.” He left the lightship at four-thirty in the afternoon in an open boat, which he identified as a Life Boat Galley, and did not arrive at Deal until ten that night. He noted, with a good deal of understatement, “This was[a] rough experience in an open boat.”
He returned to the ship on December 19, this time to stay awhile. He brought provisions for one week and immediately went to work installing equipment and running wire through a hole in a skylight. In his
diary he noted that waves were crashing over the lightship’s deck.
After a brief calm on December 21 and 22, the weather grew far worse. Late in the afternoon of December 23 “the wind increased and the Lightship began to toss about,” he wrote. By evening “it was almost unbearable.” He soldiered on and on Christmas Eve signaled greetings to Marconi, who was comfortably ensconced at South Foreland. That night Kemp volunteered to take watch over the ship’s beacon so the crew could celebrate, which they did “until the early hours of the morning.”
On Christmas Day, after Kemp and crew “managed to get over our Christmas dinner,” a gale arose and the ship began to rise and plunge. Moored to the sea floor, it could not maneuver the way an ordinary ship could. “It was very miserable onboard,” Kemp wrote, especially when the wind and tide conspired to hold the lightship broadside to the waves.
Over the next two days the sea continued to overwash the lightship. Water sluiced down hatchways. Kemp continued signaling. “Everything between decks was as wet as those on deck,” he wrote on December 27.
The next day brought more of the same: “The weather was still bad and I told them at the Foreland that I was feeling ill, but I managed to send the 3 c.m. spark.” Despite the increasingly awful conditions, Kemp recorded “splendid results,” though it is hard to imagine how he achieved anything. “The waves were still breaking over the ship and I could not get on deck for fresh air. I was very cold, wet and miserable and had very little sleep.”