Signor Marconi's Magic Box (10 page)

America, which had had the fastest sailing ships in the early nineteenth century, fell behind in this shipbuilding spree, and the government decreed that only liners built in the United States could fly the Stars and Stripes. This had little effect, but it did produce the liner
St Paul
, which was launched from the
Philadelphia shipyards in 1895, and was to provide the opulent setting for two of the most poignant episodes in Marconi’s life.

Once he had satisfied himself that wireless signals could be sent and received over distances which stretched beyond the horizon, and did not disappear into space as the scientists had predicted, Marconi began to dream of conquering the Atlantic. When he first sailed for New York on the
Aurania
it was out of touch with land for days on end. If another ship sailed within signalling distance in mid-ocean they could ‘speak’ to each other by means of the semaphore flags, but if they hit an iceberg, a common hazard in the North Atlantic in spring, or their engines failed, or they caught fire, they had no means of calling for assistance. Although the Cunard Line had an impeccable safety record, every year passenger and cargo ships disappeared, many leaving no survivors or clues to the fate that had befallen them. When Marconi sailed from New York on 9 November 1899, taking a suite of first-class cabins on the American Line’s
St Paul
, he laid plans to end the lonely isolation of ships at sea.

W
ithin the exclusive social circle of first class on the
St Paul
, Marconi was a celebrity, the young inventor all New York had been talking about. But there were those in America who believed that Marconi’s fame and popularity were grounded in public ignorance of the new technology. The magazine
Electrical World
saw him off from New York with no more than grudging admiration for his gift for publicity: ‘If the visit of Marconi has resulted in no additions to our knowledge of wireless telegraphy, on the other hand, his managers have shown that they have nothing to learn from Yankeedom as to the art of commercial exploitation of an inventor and his inventions.’

Marconi did not, in fact, have any ‘managers’ orchestrating his publicity, nor did he need any. What had most impressed the newspapers was his refusal to make any claims for his system of wireless that he could not demonstrate publicly. Thomas Edison became one of his greatest admirers, and quipped that the Italian ‘delivered more than he promised’. He added that Marconi was the first inventor he had ever met who sported patent leather shoes. In his quiet way, Marconi was an accomplished self-publicist, and before he left New York on the
St Paul
he had devised a scheme which would make the headlines and astonish the first-class passengers on the liner. He arranged for a cable to be sent to the engineers manning the wireless station at the Royal Needles Hotel on the
Isle of Wight, asking them to listen out for a signal from the
St Paul
as it approached the English Channel on the last leg of its voyage to Southampton.

Before he sailed, Marconi set up a wireless cabin on the liner, the first ever on an Atlantic voyage, and tested and tuned it in readiness for the last hours of the journey. The transmitter would have a limited range, of little more than fifty miles, and the
St Paul
would be near the end of its crossing before the Isle of Wight station could pick up its signals.

Before then, Marconi had time to enjoy the easy mid-Atlantic social life. Among the first-class passengers was a glamorous young American woman, Josephine Holman. A family friend of the Holmans’, Henry McClure of
McClure’s
, a cousin of the magazine’s founder, was also aboard, and he no doubt introduced Josephine to Marconi. By the time the
St Paul
was approaching the west coast of Ireland they were engaged. Neither of them was sure how their families would react to the news. Marconi’s fame did not necessarily mark him out as a fine ‘catch’ as far as the parents of marriageable young ladies were concerned. Despite his aristocratic associations through his mother’s family, he was fatally Italian, and therefore ‘foreign’; and his fortune was by no means assured. The wireless business, many reasoned, might turn out to be just a passing fad. And Marconi’s own family might not be keen for him to marry at such an uncertain time in his career, especially to an American woman they had never met. Josephine and Guglielmo decided to keep their engagement secret for the time being.

There was no certainty about when the
St Paul
would enter the English Channel, or when it would be within wireless range of the Isle of Wight. The Marconi engineers waiting at the Royal Needles Hotel were therefore on tenterhooks. In the same way that fishermen attach a bell to their line so that they will know if a fish is biting even if they have dozed off, the engineers had rigged up a system whereby a bell would wake them if their receiver was called up at night. Henry Jameson-Davis and Major Flood Page, the managing director of Marconi’s company, were at the hotel
awaiting the
St Paul
’s signal. In a letter to
The Times
Major Flood Page gave a vivid description of the excitement of the occasion:

While the rustic Totland Bay post office was handling an unusually heavy load of telegraph messages, including one giving instructions for the menu at a forthcoming dinner party in London, on board the
St Paul
as it steamed towards Southampton there was a good deal of fun and games. The operator at the Royal Needles Hotel tapped out a few bits of news, including the latest from South Africa, where the British were engaged in an embarrassingly costly war with the Boers, who had besieged Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. With the permission of the ship’s commander, Captain Jamison, the on-board printers, accustomed to turning out menus and general notices, produced a small news-sheet under the banner
The Transatlantic Times
, vol. 1, no. 1. It was sold to passengers at $1 a copy, the money to go to the Seamen’s Fund. One news item bristling with British pluck read: ‘At Ladysmith no more killed. Bombardment at Kimberley elicited the destruction of ONE TIN POT. It was auctioned for £200. It is felt that period of anxiety and strain is over, and that our turn has come.’

One of Marconi’s engineers, Mr W.W. Bradfield, was credited as ‘editor in chief’, and Henry McClure as ‘managing editor’. Mr Marconi was recorded as having made the arrangements for the publication. And there was a credit for the treasurer - a Miss J.H. Holman. Straitlaced, rather humourless and ‘older than his age’ in public, Marconi had a keen sense of fun in private. Ever since he had demonstrated his early experiments to his English cousins at the Villa Griffone he had shown a talent for amusing young ladies. He liked to teach them the Morse code, a secret language which in the commercial world was an almost exclusively male preserve, and therefore for young women especially exciting.

Once the
St Paul
had docked, Marconi saw Josephine Holman only occasionally, though she did meet Annie, his mother, in
London. Marconi could not afford much time to enjoy a romance, and Josephine kept in touch with him chiefly by telegraph and letter. She continued to keep their engagement secret after her return to America, fearful that her mother would be furious if she learned of it. When she wrote from her home in Indianapolis she would include passages in the dots and dashes of Morse code, to guard against her mother’s watchful eye. In one such passage she described the anxiety she had felt when another suitor had approached her, and her relief when he had proposed to another woman. For his part, Marconi confided in Josephine a secret ambition, and she referred to this darkly in her letters, wishing him luck with the ‘great thing’ he hoped to achieve.

During the next hectic year, Josephine could often only get news of her fiancé by reading about his endeavours in the newspapers. But these were for the most part downright misleading, as only Josephine Holman and a few other people very close to Marconi knew.

B
lissfully unaware of the epoch-making events taking place a few miles to the south in the autumn of 1899, golfers in plusfours and tweed caps hacked away on the clifftop fairways of the recently established Mullion Golf Club. The course had been laid out on the windswept western shore of the Lizard peninsula which juts into the English Channel on the southern Cornish coast. Many a ball was lost on the notorious twelfth hole, which was cut through by a ravine between sixty-foot-high cliffs, with Atlantic surf boiling on the rocks below. The club had been established in 1895, when Guglielmo Marconi was experimenting with electro-magnetism in the grounds of the Villa Griffone. In those days the people of Mullion, a pretty fishing village, would still tug a forelock if they encountered Squire Sydney Davey of Bochym Manor. A farm-worker had the task each day of watching the sea from the clifftops for a telltale change in the colour of the water, which would have him running to the village shouting ‘Heva, heva, heva!’, so the fishermen could get their boats out and net a shoal of pilchards before they swam into the territory of a neighbouring manor. Cornwall was much more remote than the Isle of Wight or Bournemouth, and had had its own language. A donkey pulled the mower which kept the greens trim at the Mullion Golf Club, whose members had reluctantly agreed to pay £6 annually for the rabbit-shooting rights on the course.

This was a deeply romantic corner of England, a treacherous rocky coast with low, crumbling cliffs and sandy coves, where the local people still talked of the lost bounties of wrecked Spanish and Portuguese galleons. Writers and artists sought solace and inspiration in the guest-houses and isolated clifftop hotels which looked out over a sea tossed by winds that blew from the Americas. It was here, close to Mullion, that Arthur Conan Doyle, a visitor to the new golf club, set one of his last Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’. In this tale, Holmes had been close to a nervous breakdown, and was persuaded to travel to Cornwall for a rest and a therapeutic dose of sea air. As always, Dr Watson narrated the story, which concerned a strange murder at the vicarage: ‘. . . we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay . . . It was a singular spot . . . from the windows of our little white-washed home which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon a whole sinister semi-circle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge swept reefs . . . The wise mariner stands far out from that evil place.’

By the summer of 1900, when the clifftops of Mullion and Poldhu Cove shimmered with the pinks and whites of wildflowers, guests staying at the Poldhu Hotel could take the train to Helston station, and then a horse-drawn coach along rough roads up to the clifftop, with fine views to the west over the sea. In August the new arrivals included Major Flood Page, the pipe-smoking and garrulous Chief Engineer Richard Vyvyan, and Guglielmo Marconi. They had no time for golf, for they were here strictly on business, and very soon decided this was just the spot to establish their next, and by far their largest, wireless station. The Poldhu Hotel itself would provide them with a place to stay, food and comfort, but the station they planned could not be accommodated in a few rented hotel rooms. An area next to the hotel atop Angrouse Cliff was leased from its owner, Viscount Clifton, and in October a large area was enclosed with a security fence, and work began on a single-storey building to house the transmitter.
A gate with a stout lock led into the grounds of the Poldhu Hotel.

Surprisingly little notice was taken by the Mullion people of the unfamiliar-looking structure which began to take shape on Angrouse Cliff at the end of 1900. Locals were not unused to industrial developments: Richard Trevithick, the six-foot-two ‘Cornish Giant’ and famed local wrestler, had designed and run the first ever steam locomotives in the early 1800s. And until the late nineteenth century Cornwall had produced a large part of the world’s supply of tin and copper. But this industry had collapsed, and there had been an exodus of Cornish miners to America, South Africa and Australia in the 1890s. Some of those who stayed behind were recruited to work on the wireless station as it took shape early in 1901.