‘Magic’ messages made a young Marconi famous
Eugene Byrne celebrates the 125th anniversary of an experiment in the Bristol Channel which would go on to change the world
THE telegraphic invention of M. Guglielmo Marconi is said to be on the point of revolutionising electric communication, and linking the whole world together without so much as a bit of wire to do it with.
His messages will simply fly through space like thought; going through stone walls, iron doors or even the hardest heads, as easily as through empty air.
On the invitation of the British Government, M. Marconi, who is a young Italian, will proceed to Cardiff and communicate with Westonsuper-Mare across the British (sic.) Channel, and without the use of wires.
M. Marconi’s method is simple and ingenious. It consists, as well as I can explain it, of an accumulator battery, telegraphic keys, induction coils, some eight inch sparks, a brass ball, a wire hook, a big drum – he says nothing about cymbals – and a barrel of waves of assorted sizes.
He mixes these ingredients up together somehow, and the results are as I have already stated.
So said a front page story in The Clarion, on May 1 1897. The words were probably written by its editor and owner Robert Blatchford, who built the paper into the best-selling socialist weekly in the country in the years before the First World War, partly by being funny and entertaining as well as informative. His father had been a stage comedian.
Some innovations creep up unawares on the world, but radio fascinated many people before it was even practicable. The experiments of the young Italian Guglielmo Marconi intrigued the British public because they held out the promise of what was already being called “wireless telegraphy” – something which seemed impossible, beyond the intellects of even many educated people.
As Minehead-born science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke would say many years later, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
In the 1890s everyone could grasp that it was possible to send messages down telegraph wires and even telephone wires, even though they might not understand the science.
But through thin air? Wireless telegraphy? That was magic.
Two weeks after the publication of Mr Blatchford’s whimsical piece, it was demonstrated in what he had carelessly referred to as the “British Channel” that the magic was very much for real.
On the surface, Guglielmo Marconi seems an unlikely innovator. Born in 1874 in Bologna, his father was an Italian aristocrat and landowner, while his mother Annie (nee Jameson) was the daughter of an Irish landowner, and granddaughter of the founder of whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons.
Summers were spent at the family palazzo in Bologna and winters in the warmer climate of Tuscany. Annie and two sons also spent a few years living in Bedford when
Guglielmo was a child, so he grew up speaking English as well as Italian.
The family lived a life of affluence and comfort at what would later seem a golden age for the aristocracy. Guglielmo did not even attend school, instead being educated by a sequence of expensive private tutors.
By the time he was 18 he had become fascinated by the new science of physics and although he was not enrolled as a student, Augusto Righi, professor of physics at the University of Bologna, allowed him to attend lectures and use the university’s library and laboratory.
His particular fascination was with electricity and radio waves. The German physicist Heinrich Hertz had recently proved the existence of electromagnetic waves. Working from predictions by the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, Hertz used ‘Maxwell’s equations’ to generate these electromagnetic waves in his laboratory in 1887.
At the time they were referred to as ‘Hertzian waves’ (and the unit of frequency of radio waves were named ‘Hertz’ in his honour), but nowadays we know them as radio waves.
Many physicists were interested in radio waves as a phenomenon, including Marconi’s mentor Professor Righi. But Marconi noted that few seemed to be interested in the idea of using them as a means of communication. He decided to carry out some experiments in the attic of his grand home, the Villa Griffone in Bologna. In this he took advice from Professor Righi, and, being a young aristocrat, he got his butler to help him.
The first successful experiment was completed in 1894, a storm alarm, which set a bell ringing when it detected radio waves generated by lightning.
Later that year he impressed his mother by setting up a transmitter and receiver that rang a bell at the other side of the room when he pressed a button.
With encouragement (and money) from his father, he was soon transmitting signals for a distance of half a mile on the family estates. By 1895 he was sending further, and even over hills, by raising the antennae higher and by grounding both transmitter and receiver. In all this, his older brother Alfonso proved an enthusiastic helper.
He knew he had the makings of a technology that would be of great use commercially, but he now needed serious financial backing. Legend has it that a letter he sent to the Italian Ministry of Post & Telegraphs received a reply sarcastically addressed to “the insane asylum”.
In 1896 he decided to try his luck in Britain.
Perhaps the oddest thing about Marconi’s story is that when he arrived in Britain, he was still only 21, and so his mum came with him!
The customs officers at Dover were intrigued when they opened his luggage and immediately put him in touch with the Admiralty.
Things moved quickly. In London he also met William Preece, the chief engineer of the General Post Office. The GPO was responsible for telegraphy in the UK, which, of course, was all being done through wires and which was an essential part of the country’s infrastructure for personal and business communication. Preece had him
I shall never forget how the five of us … suddenly heard the first pips Herr Doktor Adolf Slaby
self conducted successful radio experiments, sending Morse code signals over short distances, and became an enthusiastic supporter.
The British Government, probably more for the military and naval potential of wireless telegraphy than civilian use, became very interested in Marconi’s system, which he had now taken care to protect with a patent.
In March 1897 he gave a demonstration for military and Government officials on Salisbury Plain, sending Morse messages over a distance of almost four miles.
Now it was time to show that radio signals could be sent over sea as well. George Kemp, a Cardiffbased engineer working for the GPO, suggested a good spot for the experiment: Lavernock Point on the South Wales coast and Flat Holm island in the Bristol Channel.
George Kemp kept a diary: “On the 11th and 12th his experiments were unsatisfactory – worse still, they were failures – and the fate of his new system trembled in the balance.”
He continued: “An inspiration saved it. On the 13th May the apparatus was carried down to the beach at the foot of the cliff, and connected by another 20 yards (18m) of wire to the pole above, thus making an aerial height of 50 yards (46m) in all. Result, The instruments which for two days failed to record anything intelligible, now rang out the signals clear and unmistakable, and all by the addition of a few yards of wire!”
Marconi tapped out his message in Morse: CAN YOU HEAR ME
Moments later, Kemp sent the reply: YES LOUD AND CLEAR
The slip of paper on which the message was written at the time is now in the National Museum of Wales.
Other messages followed: “So Be It, Let It Be So” … “Tea here is good” … “Go to bed” … “What is the time?” …
The experiment was such a dramatic success that the equipment on Flat Holm was now moved to Brean Down, near Weston-superMare, where signals were sent and received over a distance of almost ten miles.
What is surprising about the experiments, given the amount of money the Government had spent on them specifically because of radio’s possible military and naval applications, was how open they were. Not only were they widely reported in the press, but scientists from other countries were invited to observe, and some of them were closely linked to the governments of potentially hostile powers.
Herr Doktor Adolf Slaby, a scientific adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who less than two decades later would be Britain’s mortal enemy, was present.
Of the moment the first signal was received, Slaby wrote: “I shall never forget how the five of us, crouching inside a big wooden box because of the high wind, our eyes
and ears glued to the receiving instrument, suddenly heard the first pips.
“The first Morse signs, carried soundless and invisible from that rocky coast, through that unknown and mysterious medium, the ether, which formed the only bridge to the planets of the cosmos.”
Marconi was a celebrity while still barely into his twenties. Perhaps the presence of his mother and often his older brother, too,
prevented him from being overawed by all the eminent older scientists who now surrounded him.
The technology advanced. By 1899 he had transmitted across the English Channel and helped an American newspaper cover the Americas Cup yacht race by sending messages from a ship. The first transatlantic messages were sent in 1901 and a regular transatlantic radio telegraph service was established in 1907. Marconi became very wealthy and was heaped with honours, sharing the Nobel Prize
for Physics in 1909. He married Beatrice O’Brien, a member of an Irish aristocratic family, and had three daughters and a son, but divorced and re-married Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali, from an Italian aristocratic family. For whatever reason, he left none of his fortune to the children of his first marriage.
He moved back to Italy in 1913, where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini’s fascists after the First World War as well as a devout Catholic. He died in 1937.