Signor Marconi's Magic Box (16 page)

Next to the quotation from the doubting Thomas Edison, the
Herald
printed a bordered box with a picture of a moustachioed Marconi and the cross-head ‘Signals an “Absolute Fact” Declares Mr Marconi’. There was a short statement with a verification by the reporter in St John’s that this confirmation was from the inventor himself. That was sufficient to convince Edison, who thereafter gave Marconi his invaluable endorsement.

With the scientific community still divided in their opinion, Marconi’s plan was to travel to Cape Cod to see how his American station was progressing, and then to England. The Anglo-American Cable Company threat was sufficient reason to abandon St John’s and, as it turned out, a convenient excuse to postpone any plans for setting up a permanent station there.

However, just as they were packing up the kites and balloons and all their makeshift paraphernalia, Marconi was approached by a Canadian who happened to be in St John’s at the time of the great excitement of 15 December. William Smith, the Secretary of the Canadian Post Office, suggested that Marconi stay on for a few days, as he might be able to persuade his government that it would be to their advantage to offer Marconi a site for a wireless station just south of Newfoundland, on the island of Cape Breton. This was in Canada, where the Anglo-American Cable Company’s monopoly on telegraphy had no force. After an exchange of cable messages with the company in London, Marconi decided to wait a few more days in St John’s.

Three days later a telegram arrived from Ottawa offering enthusiastic Canadian government support. This was a piece of luck neither Marconi nor his hardheaded business associates in London could ever have anticipated: the government of a country with enormous shipping interests was offering not only land on which to set up a wireless station, but the funds with which to build it. Marconi accepted an invitation to go to North Sydney on
Cape Breton Island to meet his potential backers. On Christmas Eve he and Kemp took a sleigh ride around St John’s to say farewell to all those who had been so hospitable to them, and who were now extremely unhappy that the cable company had driven the inventor away from them and into the hands of the Canadians. Mr Paget packed up what was left of their equipment and had it loaded onto the SS
Sardinian
, which was ready to ship it back to England.

With Marconi and Kemp as they prepared to leave for Nova Scotia on Christmas Day was yet another attentive representative of
McClure’s
magazine, this time a writer called Ray Standard Baker who would travel with them on the short sea journey to Cape Breton. A private car in the train called the
Terra Nova
was put at their disposal to take them from St John’s to the steamer
Bruce
at Port-aux-Basques. Baker wrote: ‘The people of the “ancient colony” of Newfoundland, famed for their hospitality, crowned him with every honor in their power . . . it seemed as if every fisher and farmer in that wild country had heard of him, for when the train stopped they came crowding to look in at the window.’

The owner of the train made sure they were well looked-after, serving champagne, turkey and plum pudding as a blizzard raged around the train. Baker saw Marconi drop his guard just once: ‘The only elation I saw him express was over the attack of the cable monopoly in Newfoundland, which he regarded as the greatest tribute that could have been paid to his achievement. During all his life, opposition has been his keenest spur to greater effort.’ Not only had the Anglo-American Cable Company driven the inventor into the arms of friendly Canadians, its action was likely to convince the general public more than the pronouncements of any scientist that wireless telegraphy was well on the way to becoming a commercial reality, and a rival to cable.

The shares of the cable companies had already begun to wobble on the stock exchanges. As P.T. McGrath, editor of the
Evening Herald
in St John’s, explained to
The Century Illustrated
, a monthly magazine: ‘A transatlantic cable represents an initial outlay of at
least three million dollars. A Marconi station can be built for only $60,000 . . . There are now fourteen cables of various sizes [across the Atlantic] with a total length of 189,000 nautical miles . . . these require a great number of ocean going cable steamers for their laying and repairs . . .’ Wireless, if it could be made to work, was a lot cheaper than cables, which were not only costly to lay, but had to be constantly maintained by fleets of ships which dragged them from the ocean bed for repairs.

After a wild crossing, Marconi and Kemp arrived in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 26 December, eleven days after Marconi had announced his Atlantic triumph. He was met by a most distinguished gathering, including the Premier of Nova Scotia, George Murray. At the Belmont Hotel Marconi gave an impromptu press conference, in which he laid before a rapt audience of local journalists and dignitaries a vision of a huge wireless station somewhere on the coast of Cape Breton which would provide a transatlantic service at much cheaper rates than the cable companies could offer.

An electric tram took them to Sydney, where prominent businessmen and politicians were anxious to assure the young inventor that he would have no harassment from any rival organisations in Nova Scotia, and that everything would be done to find the very best site for his station on the rugged coastline. The Dominion Steel and Coal Company gave Marconi a free hand to look for a site on land it owned, and a tour party set off along the coast in a small tug. In blizzards and high seas the boat very nearly collided with another sent out from the port of Louisberg to greet them with the Mayor and most of the town council aboard. Back in Sydney a banquet was held in Marconi’s honour, and all Cape Breton was agog to know which district he would choose for his station. On 30 December the
Halifax Herald
exclaimed that Cape Breton would be ‘a part of the great theatre in which this masterpiece will be shown to the world by the Anglo-Italian inventor’.

The snow was knee-deep in Nova Scotia, and Kemp jotted in his diary that they were glad to get away from it as they travelled by boat and train to the Canadian capital of Ottawa, arriving on
30 December. It was worth the journey. As well as wining and dining Marconi, the government offered $80,000 towards the cost of building and fitting out a wireless station at Cape Breton. In return they wanted a guaranteed cheap rate on wireless telegrams, undercutting the cable companies by more than 50 per cent, and a fixed rate for ship to shore messages of five cents a word. With a draft agreement drawn up, Marconi and Kemp continued on their lap of honour in North America. On 10 January 1902 they were in Montreal as the guests of the Association of Electrical Engineers of Canada, and that evening they took the night train down to New York through a beautiful arctic landscape which they could survey from their private stateroom. The following morning they saw the Hudson River, frozen solid and covered with a new fall of snow.

Back in Halifax, the
Herald
newspaper was waxing lyrical, calling Marconi ‘the most famous young man in the world’. Who is he, the newspaper asked?

L
ate in the evening on 12 January 1902 Guglielmo Marconi and George Kemp arrived at Grand Central Station, New York, and took a horse-drawn cab to their hotel. At the dawn of the twentieth century New York was undoubtedly the most exciting city in the world, with the first of the skyscrapers pushing up to form Manhattan’s celebrated silhouette. The excavations for the subway had begun, and motor-cars, many of them powered by electricity, jostled among the wagons on the streets. There was a craze for what was known as ‘celestial advertising’, the projection of images onto low clouds with powerful carbon arc lamps. On the roof of Joseph Pulitzer’s
World
skyscraper was a huge electrically-lit magic lantern weighing over three thousand pounds and casting beams of 1.5 million candlepower. When the nights were clear and there was no cloud cover to act as a screen, images and information were projected onto nearby buildings. In 1891 the
World
’s lantern was used to flash Morse messages on the clouds, giving the latest results in the elections for governor. These could be read in the sky as far away as New Jersey and Long Island. For the presidential elections of 1892 the
Herald
’s searchlight was in Madison Square Gardens; if it shone southwards it meant New York had gone for the Democrat Grover Cleveland, whereas if the city had gone for his Republican rival Benjamin Harrison the beam would have shone to Harlem.

One or two scientists had suggested in the 1890s that light could be used to send global or even extra-terrestrial messages. In a journal called
Science Siftings
there was a quite serious proposal to send messages from New York to London using a huge reflector to bounce the sun’s rays off the moon, the short and long flashes spelling out a Morse message in the sky. Professor Dolbear of Tufts University, who had patented the wireless induction apparatus which he claimed in 1899 that Marconi had stolen, suggested that communication with Mars would be possible with a beam of a few million candlepower - but only if that distant planet were inhabited by people as sophisticated as Americans.

The eccentric Nikola Tesla, famous in the United States for his work on the electricity-generating plant at Niagara Falls, was confidently predicting that experiments he had carried out in Colorado, in which huge amounts of electric current had been created, would enable him to recharge power stations from a distance, without any wires. In an article in
Collier’s Weekly
in February 1901 he claimed to have invented his own system of telegraphy without wires as early as 1893, and declared that ‘the time is not far away now when the practical results of my labors will be placed before the world and their influence felt everywhere. One of the immediate consequences will be the transmission of messages without wires, over sea or land, to an immense distance. I have already demonstrated, by crucial tests, the practicability of signalling by my system from one to any other point of the globe, no matter how remote, and I shall soon convert the disbelievers.’ Tesla was a rather unstable character, prone to fits of depression followed by wild elation. His lectures were spectacular. On stage he would pass huge currents of hundreds of thousands of volts through his body, so that white flames shot from his fingers. In darkened rooms he would generate voltages so high they produced a mysterious electrostatic hum.

The wonders of electricity were not yet being enjoyed in the average American home, although the Electric Girl Lighting Company offered glowing waitresses and hostesses for special occasions. Customers could choose from a variety of decorative filament lamp
adornments, each of the girls being guaranteed at ‘fifty candlepower’. Thomas Edison was keen on this sort of thing, and one of his engineers fitted out his own daughter for a New Year’s Eve party with an electric wand, earrings and breastpin, her hair glowing with tiny Edison bulbs.

The American Institute of Electrical Engineers had been due to hold its annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel shortly after Marconi’s announcement that he had sent a wireless signal across the Atlantic. There was at first considerable doubt about the claim, but Marconi’s modest manner and reputation for caution in all he said won the day, and the Institute had decided to invite him to be guest of honour at the dinner, which was postponed until 13 January 1902, the day after Marconi and Kemp arrived in New York.

The scene that greeted them when they entered the crowded Astor Gallery of the Waldorf-Astoria took their breath away. Behind the guests’ table was a black tablet decorated with smilax, a kind of briar, and set with lamps which spelled the name ‘MAR-CONI’. At the eastern end of the gallery was another tablet with ‘POLDHU’ written in lightbulbs, and at the western end another tablet which glowed ‘ST JOHN’S’. Between the two tablets was a silk cord with, at intervals, the three dots of the Morse letter ‘S’ in lights, which appeared to travel from one to the other. There were lights all over the tables, which were decorated with more smilax and American Beauty roses. Among the guests were the British and Italian consuls. The
New York Times
reported: