Signor Marconi's Magic Box (17 page)

Guests mobbed Marconi, asking him to sign the specially designed menu cards, which had a cameo photograph of the inventor with the three dots of the Morse ‘S’ arching across from one lighthouse representing Poldhu to another representing St John’s. The President of the Institute, Charles Proteus S. Steinmetz, had to call for order so that apologies for absences could be read out. There was ‘prolonged and loud applause’, said the
Times
report, when the toastmaster read a telegram from Thomas Edison: ‘I am sorry not to be present to pay my respects to Mr Marconi. I would like to meet that young man who has had the monumental audacity to attempt and succeed in jumping an electric wave clear across the Atlantic.’

The toastmaster then told the audience that within the last ten days he had spoken to Edison, who had told him he thought that wireless waves must at some time be sent across the Atlantic, but that he had been so preoccupied he did not have time to do it himself. Amidst roars of laughter he continued with a quotation from Edison: ‘I’m glad he did it. That fellow’s work puts him in the same class as me. It’s a good thing we caught him young!’ There was a message too from Nikola Tesla, received with loud cheers: ‘Marconi is a splendid worker and a deep thinker, and may he prove one of those whose powers increase and reach out for the good of the race and the honour of his country.’

Many more letters of congratulation were read out to loud cheering before Marconi himself rose to make his speech as guest of honour with, as the
New York Times
put it, ‘a modesty almost amounting to diffidence’. He spoke of the achievements of his ‘system’ so far - seventy ships equipped with wireless, the majority on British and Italian naval vessels, the rest on passenger liners, and twenty shore stations in England. His explanation of why he had gone to Newfoundland rather than make the first experiment in transatlantic signalling to the United States was that he thought it ‘prudent’ to attempt a shorter distance with temporary equipment, rather than wait until his large stations were operating. The implication was that he had not himself been sure that it was possible
to cover the distance, and wanted some proof before pursuing the costly work on Cape Cod. He described the trouble he and his team had had with kites and balloons, and was cheered when he described the final triumph on 12 December. Bad weather and the writ from the Anglo-American Cable Company had put a premature end to the experiment, though the manager of Anglo-American in St John’s had told Marconi that his achievement had been good for business: in the three days of the experiments fifty thousand words had been sent by cable. And he paid tribute to Alexander Graham Bell, who was in the audience: he had used a telephone handset to receive the signals in St John’s.

The support of the Canadian government had clearly boosted Marconi’s confidence, and he told the audience that wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic would be much cheaper than cable, making it affordable to people of modest means. Thanking America for its hospitality, he then took his audience by surprise with a toast to the Institute. The
New York Times
reporter wrote: ‘Mr Marconi took a glass from the table, holding it high above his head, lowered it to his lips, and started to drink before the diners grasped the situation. Then the men and women quickly found glasses and drank in silence the toast. In a few seconds cheers and hand clapping resounded through the banquet hall while Mr Marconi bowed acknowledgement to the plaudits.’

Just below the report on Marconi’s triumph was a short paragraph on ‘persistent rumors’ that the wireless inventor would be married at the Waldorf-Astoria that week. ‘Prof Marconi’ - he had been awarded instant academic status - denied the reports, and said he would not be married until his return from Europe in about three months’ time. But exactly what had happened between him and the American heiress he had met on the liner
St Paul
was a mystery. The newspapermen wanted to know, none more so than those far away in St John’s, Newfoundland, who had taken Marconi to their hearts. A despatch in the
Daily News
, St John’s, dated 22 January, headlined ‘Marconi Free: Love’s Young Dream’, gave the news that Josephine Holman’s family had announced the day before
that she had officially broken off the engagement, which had been made public on 27 April 1901. This was a great surprise, for only a month earlier Josephine had told a reporter:

Now it was all over. It was noted that Marconi had never visited the Holman home in Indianapolis. Henry McClure, acting as spokesman for Josephine and her mother, said they had sailed for Europe, but their names could not be found on any passenger lists. Reporters cornered Marconi, who reluctantly gave a very brief interview. According to the
Daily News
he ‘appeared disturbed and depressed’, and was ‘unwilling to discuss the motives for Miss Holman’s action’. He confirmed that it was she who had called off the engagement in a letter to him, and that he had accepted in reply. Asked whether she had grown tired of waiting while he spent all his time trying to send a signal across the Atlantic, Marconi replied: ‘The progress of my experiments has been greatly delayed by adverse fortune, and this had much to do with the delay of my marriage arrangements. But there was also a very delicate question involved, which is more than I have admitted to any other newspaper.’ He refused to say what this ‘delicate question’ was. In an earlier interview with another newspaper Miss Holman said, ‘There have been disasters on both sides,’ but she too would not explain what she meant.

The
Daily News
speculated that Marconi’s family were socially
ambitious for him, and had not approved of Miss Holman. Perhaps neither family was happy about the way the two had met. ‘It was a love match, pure and simple, born of the dangerous propinquity of all ocean steamship acquaintance,’ opined the
News
reporter. Friends and relatives made the point that the two lovers had seen very little of each other as Marconi was ‘wedded to his other mistress’, science.

The loss of his fiancée clearly upset Marconi, but it did not interrupt his work, and when he left New York on 22 January 1902 on the American Line’s SS
Philadelphia
he was already planning his next wireless coup.

I
n the summer of 1902 the most eagerly awaited sporting event in America, and indeed throughout much of the world, was a boxing match to be staged in San Francisco on 25 July between two celebrated heavyweights, Bob Fitzsimmons and Jim Jeffries. Fitzsimmons was from the Cornish town of Helston, close to Marconi’s station at Poldhu. He had arrived in San Francisco in 1890, and knocked out Jack Dempsey in New Orleans in 1891. So great was his celebrity that he had appeared in vaudeville and a Broadway play. In 1899 he had been knocked out by Jeffries, who is still considered by many to be the greatest fighter of all time. The San Francisco fight was the long-anticipated rematch. Would Fitzsimmons, nearing the end of a long career in which he was reputed to have stepped into the ring for 350 professional bouts, be able to outpunch Jeffries? The result of the fight would be cabled across continents and oceans instantly, and would be flashed to liners out in the Atlantic that had wireless equipment.

One or two places, however, would have to wait to hear the outcome, because they had no cable link. Among them was Santa Catalina Island, which lies twenty-two miles off the Californian coast. The islanders were as eager as anyone else to know the result, but they would not get it until the morning mailboat brought the newspapers. Their only other form of communication with the mainland was the intermittent pigeon post run by a hotel, and that
was not flying on 25 July. The residents of the main town of Avalon, many of whom had gambled on the outcome of the fight, expected as always to wait for the news.

It arrived, however, much sooner than they had expected or could believe. Around midnight a notice appeared on a billboard in Avalon saying that Jeffries had knocked Fitzsimmons out in the eighth round. It had been sent from the mainland by wireless. There had been heavy betting on the fight, but nobody would pay up on the evidence of this advance news. Even when the newspapers confirmed the result, rumours abounded on the island that false claims had been made about the wireless report. Some said a man had been seen arriving in a boat at around the time the bulletin went up. Others said a carrier pigeon must have been used. The most popular story was that a strong semaphore light had been used: searchlights signalling sporting results were not uncommon. The
Los Angeles Times
had no doubt that trickery was involved, even though the distance covered by the wireless station was no more than that Marconi had achieved in 1898 with text messages from the royal yacht
Osborne
to the Isle of Wight. It took an investigation by a rival paper, the
Los Angeles Herald
, to establish that there was a real, working station in Avalon, and another on the Californian coast, providing the first ever regular wireless news service in America.

The little stations had been set up by a young man called Robert H. Marriott, who had become interested in wireless while studying physics at university just at the time, in 1897, when X-rays had been discovered and there was also great interest in Marconi’s invention. His Professor had recently burned himself very badly while experimenting with X-rays - the dangers of radiation were not at first understood - and advised Marriott to try wireless instead. Over the next three years there was enough information in the technical magazines for Marriott to build himself transmitters and receivers, although the apparatus he had was very crude. He was so enthralled by the new technology that he took a job with the newly formed American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph
Company before he had finished his studies. In its early days the company was almost entirely fraudulent, intent only on extracting money from ignorant investors, and had no intention of setting up operating wireless systems. Its patents were those of Professor Dolbear, whose induction system was worthless. One of Marriott’s first tasks for the company was to attempt to sabotage the coverage of the 1901 America’s Cup, which Marconi’s engineers and Lee de Forest were covering.

Although the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company gave little evidence that it took its business seriously, one or two of its subsidiaries did. Among them was the Pacific concession which was established in Denver, Colorado, where Marriott was based. He and some other employees were aware that Dolbear’s system was no good, and put together their own equipment which combined elements of the inventions of Reginald Fessenden and Marconi. Exactly how Marriott’s detectors work is not clear, but they involved at one time a piece of old tin can ‘oxidised’ with a blowlamp, and all kinds of bits and pieces put together. It is likely that the detector was a copy of Fessenden’s ‘barreter’, and was certainly not a coherer of the kind used by Marconi. The dots and dashes were received in earphones, which made the speed of sending and writing out messages painfully slow, as neither Marriott nor his colleagues were trained operators.

They decided that a link between Santa Catalina and Los Angeles would be practicable and worthwhile, and had a rudimentary system working by early July 1902. They chose the Fitzsimmons-Jeffries fight to make their first attempt to impress sceptical islanders, and the newspapers on the mainland, that they could send messages to Catalina. The station was soon to prove its worth. Two men who had robbed the island’s Metropole Hotel of some champagne and other drinks took the 5 a.m. boat, hoping to make their escape before the theft was known about on the mainland. However, the Avalon station sent a wireless message to the police, who arrested them as they docked. This was the first instance in history of the use of wireless to apprehend criminals
on the run. Little by little the potential uses of wireless were becoming apparent. But not everyone was yet convinced it was any more than some kind of magic show.

The scattered subsidiaries of the bogus American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company gave a number of intriguing demonstrations of the possible uses of wireless. A Kentucky branch, for example, acquired the patent rights in a device created by a farmer and telephone repairman, Nathan B. Stubblefield, and in return offered him a tranche of its company shares. For his first public demonstration, on 1 January 1902, Stubblefield and his son Bernard drew a crowd outside the Calloway County courthouse in Kentucky. Father and son set up two boxes on the ground, about two hundred feet apart. Young Bernard then took out his harmonica and began to play into one of the boxes, far enough away to be inaudible to the crowd. Father Nathan held to his ear a telephone receiver attached to the other box, and showed the audience that he could pick up Bernard’s rendition of popular tunes. This performance must count as one of the earliest wireless broadcasts in history, but few at the time believed it was anything other than a conjuring trick.

However, the St Louis
Post Dispatch
was sufficiently intrigued by the story to send a reporter down to Stubblefield’s farm outside the town of Murray to check it out. The reporter took one of Stubblefield’s boxes and carried it about a mile from the farm. He was told to prod two iron rods into the ground when he set it up. To his astonishment he could hear the voices of Stubblefield and his son through the receiver, and heard Bernard playing the harmonica. With the endorsement of the
Post Dispatch
, Stubblefield was invited to demonstrate his wireless telephone in Washington, DC. Here one of his boxes was put on a steamer on the Potomac River, and others on the shore. Again they worked splendidly, and another demonstration was given in Philadelphia.