Signor Marconi's Magic Box (22 page)

To round off the picture, it transpired that White’s real name was Schwarz - the German for black.

When railroad mania was at its height in the 1870s in the United States, Mark Twain created a character called Colonel Sellers. Sellers was a dreamer who imagined making his fortune from all kinds of unlikely enterprises, such as selling just one bottle of eyewash to every man and woman in China. A classic Sellers scheme was to promote a railway line to a new town he called
Napoleon. Everything was put in order for the arrival of the first hooting steam engine with its cowcatcher out front. Investors parted with their cash and waited for the grand opening, which they imagined would be a prelude to their making a fortune. On the day there was only one thing missing - the railway line. During the wireless boom there was no shortage of characters who in real life outdid the exploits of Twain’s imaginary Colonel Sellers. To attract public attention and the funds of a credulous public, some built wireless stations, but these were usually so far apart that they were unable to exchange messages.

As a young man Abraham Black changed his name to Abraham White. He had moved from Texas to New York, having reputedly made $100,000 on an investment of forty-four cents, the cost of the postage stamp which had secured him shares which he sold at a profit before he had bought them. Stories about his audacious coups trading on the stock market were legendary. He was said to have made $25,000 while having a lunch which lasted under an hour. In December 1901 he had been inspired to try his hand as a wireless promoter by Marconi’s success with the letter ‘S’ in Newfoundland. White had been impressed by the young American Lee de Forest and his fellow researchers in Chicago, who had formed the company which gave Marconi a run for his money with the 1901 America’s Cup coverage. On 3 January 1902, White invited de Forest for lunch.

Ever since he was a boy, de Forest had dreamed of making his fortune as an inventor. Born in 1873, he had endured a lonely and difficult childhood. When he was eight years old his father, a Congregationalist minister, became head of Talladega College for Negroes in Alabama. The family were isolated from the white community, and Lee spent a great deal of time when he was not scrapping with local white children amusing himself with science experiments. His father wanted him to follow him into the ministry, but finally agreed to allow him to study at a college for poor children in Massachusetts, and from there Lee got a place in the scientific school at Yale. De Forest, like Reginald Fessenden, was
a prolific inventor, and had notebooks full of what he regarded as brilliant ideas. He was most impressed by Marconi’s achievements, took his doctoral thesis on Hertzian waves and saw his future as a wireless pioneer. Unlike Marconi, however, de Forest was always short of money, and when Abraham White invited him out for lunch and peeled off a $100 bill to ‘get him started’ he was wide-eyed with gratitude.

De Forest was just the man White was looking for: an ambitious, poverty-stricken inventor, with a modest track record and an overriding desire for fame and wealth. Over lunch the De Forest Wireless Telegraphy Company was formed with capital of $3 million which appeared from nowhere. White became its President, and hired a press agent to fill the columns of the American dailies with glowing reports of de Forest’s successes. De Forest went straight on the payroll at $20 a week, far more than he had ever earned before. A crucial plank of White’s promotional campaign was to rubbish Marconi publicly and privately, calling him ‘the Dago’ and appealing to the nationalist sympathies of American investors. ‘It is the policy of our company,’ his advertisements would say, ‘to develop its own system with American brains and American capital.’

De Forest became Abraham White’s puppet. He was set up in a glass-sided laboratory on the roof of 17 State Street, Manhattan, and potential investors were invited to watch as he signalled to a station at the Castleton Hotel on Staten Island. In February 1903 a comical little motor vehicle with ‘WIRELESS AUTO NO. 1’ stencilled on the side could be seen parked in the Wall Street area, with White urging passers-by to observe de Forest sending stock market quotations to a nearby Dow Jones office. White had no compunction about inventing the most unlikely successes: to boost his company’s share prices he would plant a story in the newspapers saying it had bought out American Marconi. Before there was time for a denial to be issued he would cash in shares whose value had risen momentarily, then keep his head down until the storm blew over.

White promised American investors that they would make fortunes in no time as he and de Forest established ‘World-Wide Wireless’, with stations all over the United States. He collected millions of dollars from investors, bought up other companies, and built wireless stations in many parts of America to maintain interest in his grand plan. An announcement would be made that the newly raised aerial would soon put the locals in touch with the rest of the continent; but few if any of these stations were able to contact each other, as they were too far apart for the makeshift technology de Forest was using. They were no more use than a Colonel Sellers railway station without the railway line.

While White was building his castles in the air and registering new companies with bewildering speed, de Forest was achieving in 1903 more or less what Marconi had three years earlier. The America’s Cup was staged in October that year, with Sir Thomas Lipton again the challenger with his yacht
Shamrock III
. Once again Marconi and de Forest provided coverage for rival press associations, but this time an interloper spoiled the show. A Philadelphia offshoot of the fraudulent American Wireless Company simply jammed both Marconi and de Forest, sending streams of ‘AAAA’s and ‘BBBB’s and rude messages. De Forest, however, with White’s help, managed to impress Sir Thomas Lipton himself, who gave him an endorsement and invited him to try his luck in England. White crossed the Atlantic and in 1904 began to set up wireless companies in London with industrial magnates at their heads.

In the United States, White founded
Wireless News
, a blatantly promotional paper which carried stories he commissioned himself. In an issue of April 1903 there was the following:

White clearly had no intention of staying in the wireless business long, but in the short term the fact that nobody quite knew what to make of claims that wireless messages could be sent with ease over thousands of miles, and that the cable companies were facing serious competition, made life relatively easy for a trickster. He indulged in the most outrageous scams. Not to be outdone by Marconi’s feat of sending messages of greeting from Canada and America to European royalty, White despatched de Forest to Ireland so that he could receive from him what he liked to call an ‘aerogram’. It was an eight-hundred-word history of telegraphy which included the following: ‘The application of man’s genius and the utilisation of God’s natural forces represent a truly wonderful combination . . . this marvellous achievement recalls to mind that historic telegraph message sent over the Morse cable many years ago, “What hath God wrought!”

As
Success
magazine put it when reviewing White’s antics:

Undaunted, de Forest and White continued to challenge Marconi with their publicity campaigns, and were soon to enjoy a most unlikely scoop in the South China Seas.

Also snapping at Marconi’s heels at this time was the man Lee de Forest considered to be his greatest American rival, Reginald Fessenden. In 1902 Fessenden had fallen out with his paymasters, the US Weather Bureau. While Marconi was struggling to transmit readable signals from Glace Bay to Poldhu, Fessenden was approached by two millionaires from Pittsburgh who said they would back him and buy out his patents: Thomas H. Given, a self-made man who had begun as an errand boy with the Farmers’ Deposit National Bank and risen to President; and Hay Walker Jr, who had a company making soap and candles.

Given and Walker at least were genuine, and had no intention of fooling investors with false promises of riches. Both put in their own money to provide Fessenden with a salary and funds to turn his experimental wireless system into a commercial and profitable business. In November 1902 the National Electric Signalling Company was formed. Fessenden’s first thought was to set up a wireless link between Virginia and Bermuda, where he had taught a few years before. But he discovered before this venture began that a British cable company had a monopoly on communications in Bermuda, and that he would end up in court if tried to break it.

Fessenden really had no idea how to turn his system into something saleable. Nor did his millionaire backers, who became more and more frustrated with their chosen wireless wizard. Stations were set up in Washington, Jersey City and Philadelphia, a few signals were sent and attempts were made to interest the US Navy, but nothing much happened. In frustration Given and Walker told
Fessenden that they wanted to compete directly with Marconi in establishing a transatlantic service. Fessenden was at first not at all enthusiastic, complaining that the greatest distance he had successfully transmitted a message so far was 120 miles. Fessenden was often moody and jealous, boastful one minute, despairing the next. But the money was there, and he took to the challenge his backers had set him with fervour. A station was established in 1904 at Brant Rock, just south of Plymouth in Massachusetts, and Fessenden moved there with his wife and son. A station on the British mainland would have to be found with the permission of the Postmaster General, who was now in charge of issuing wireless licences. As Marconi had always feared, America would very soon present him with fierce competition.

‘In the public mind, Signor Marconi and wireless telegraphy are pretty nearly one; he is all of it. And for this there is some reason,’ wrote the American magazine
Harper’s Weekly
in February 1903. ‘Marconi was the first in the field, the first to send a wireless message several miles, the first to reach a hundred miles, and the first to cross the sea. He has had the lead, and he has it now. And this, in the face of a perfect host of competitors, is a big achievement for a young man still under thirty. He deserves all the fame he has won.’ But,
Harper’s
warned, the wireless maestro was about to be put in his place by two inventors working in the United States: Lee de Forest and Reginald Fessenden. Taking at face value the outlandish claims of de Forest’s unscrupulous backer Abraham White, and Fessenden’s boasts about the superior technology he had developed,
Harper’s
foresaw the end of Marconi’s reign as the leading exponent of wireless.

The pace of Marconi’s life now was such that he barely had time to consider the threat of rival technologies or the American competition. Take just one year, 1903. In January he was working on the first transatlantic transmissions from Cape Cod via Glace Bay. In May he was invited to Italy to be made a Citizen of Rome and visited his home town of Bologna on the way, to a rapturous reception. At the railway station in Rome he had to fight through
crowds of admirers to reach the Mayor’s coach. A group of students unhitched the horses and pulled the coach to the Grand Hotel. Marconi’s parents were with him: this was one of the last times he saw his ageing father, who was nearly eighty and very proud of his famous son. The German Kaiser was visiting the Vatican, and the streets were so jammed that Marconi was an hour and a half late for a lecture he was giving in Rome. Italian newspapers had a bit of fun about the antagonism of the two ‘Williams’, Guglielmo and Wilhelm. That night Marconi was introduced to the Kaiser by King Victor Emmanuel. It was an awkward occasion in which the German ruler expressed his country’s disapproval of Marconi’s refusal to communicate with German wireless services.

In July the Prince and Princess of Wales paid an official visit to the wireless station at Poldhu, arriving in a motor-car, one of the first to be seen in that part of the world. The Poldhu Hotel was decked with patriotic flags, as were the masts of the station. Marconi was the star of the show, demonstrating to the future King George V, who could read Morse code, the reception of signals from the nearby Lizard station. A small party including the Prince climbed to the top of one of the four transmission towers to take in the view. Then, in a cloud of dust, the royal party motored over dirt roads to the Lizard, where they enjoyed a brisk clifftop walk before taking tea with Marconi at the Housel Bay Hotel.