Signor Marconi's Magic Box (26 page)

Beatrice’s father, the fourteenth Baron Inchiquin, was in many ways a throwback to the early Victorian period. For Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897 he had his own state coach, and at Dromoland Castle he employed a huge range of servants, including one footman to carry the gravy at table, and another to pass the bread sauce. Bea was one of fourteen children, eight girls and six boys. All the boys were sent to public school and then to Oxford or Cambridge, in the hope that they would gain some professional expertise, as only the eldest son would inherit the estate. The girls were given very little education, as the ambition for them was simply that they should marry well. As a child Beatrice mixed with the most eligible of young men. Her mother took her and her sisters on a giddy social round of the finest houses in England, and a favourite summer stay was at Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Close by was Sandringham, the country estate bought by Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales, and Beatrice was invited there to play with young Prince George, who would become King on Edward VII’s death in 1910.

When Beatrice met Marconi at the pier on Brownsea Island she already knew something about him. Her father had told her and her sister Lilah about the remarkable young Italian inventor when he was first making a name for himself on the Isle of Wight and in his coverage of the Cowes and Kingston regattas. Lord Inchiquin had died in 1900, before Marconi had become truly world famous, but Beatrice recalled her father’s admiration for the inventor. Before coming to Brownsea Island Beatrice had been staying in Chirk Castle in Wales with another aristocratic family, the Howard de Waldens. There she had had her first, and rather frightening, experience of motoring, as a passenger when young Howard de Walden ploughed into one of the ancient walls of the castle at fifteen miles per hour.

Marconi visited Brownsea Island regularly while Beatrice was staying there, then bought a ticket to a great ball held at the Albert Hall which he knew she would be attending. He searched for her in the bejewelled throng, and when he found her he proposed. She hesitated, then a few days later invited him to tea in London and turned him down. Though he was a celebrated figure, Marconi
was not necessarily regarded as a great catch. Even though Beatrice’s mother had eight daughters to marry off, she certainly favoured people of breeding rather than foreigners, however inventive. Josephine Holman might have said she preferred the wireless wizard to ‘a King’, but that was not the view of Lady Inchiquin.

In order to free himself to propose to Beatrice, Marconi had asked Inez Milholland to agree to break off their engagement. Now he was unattached again.

Marconi continued his gruelling schedule, with experimentation at the Haven Hotel, another stay in New York in the autumn to fight legal battles, and a trip to Italy, where he was rumoured to have become attached to an Italian princess. As far as Beatrice was concerned the newspaper stories about her suitor’s new attachment put an end to what for her had been a very difficult time. When she went to stay with the van Raaltes again she asked that they should make sure Marconi stayed away.

Though Marconi continued to work almost continuously, the companies that carried his name had now grown to such an extent that it was quite impossible for him to attend to every aspect of the work. His status and expertise were needed for the fighting of patent suits and in negotiations with governments, and he had less and less time for technical innovations. By December 1904 there were sixty-nine Marconi shore stations in Britain and abroad, and 124 ships had been equipped with wireless. In addition to the British Marconi Company, the International Marine Company supplied ships, and there were subsidiaries in America, Canada and various European countries. Collectively, with several hundred staff making and operating equipment for ship and shore stations, this was probably the most extensive and best-organised wireless telegraphy business in the world at the time, rivalled only by the German Telefunken. The crackling spark transmitters and the trusty magnetic receivers, known affectionately as ‘Maggies’, which Marconi had first devised in 1902 to replace the coherer were no longer at the forefront of wireless development, but they were easy to turn out in the factory and were, above all, reliable. No other wireless
telegraphy system was so well advanced in terms of organisation, so sure to deliver the goods.

Finally in 1904 the British Parliament put the Marconi Company on a solid footing: a new Act, which came into force the following year, gave the Post Office the responsibility of issuing licences for wireless telegraphy, and Marconi was duly awarded them. The Germans were still seething with resentment because Marconi operators would not exchange messages with others using Slaby-Arco equipment on ships. Despite the pressure brought on the Marconi companies to comply with German demands, they refused, though their old argument that communication was technically impossible was not tenable.

The company just kept ahead of the field. For Marconi himself it had been a very tough year. His widowed mother wrote to him on notepaper edged in black, wondering how he was. Often she wrote to one of his employees, Mr Kershaw, to ask for news of her son. Marconi was obsessed with the problems of his transatlantic service and the new Cape Breton station, which locals called ‘Marconi Towers’. And he had fallen in love and been rejected. On his return from New York at the end of the year it must have seemed to him that the only pleasure in his life was motoring, though even that was hazardous: the loyal Kemp noted in his diary a series of punctures.

Then, in December 1904, Kemp mentions the Haven Hotel station being visited by a Mr and Mrs O’Brien, Bea’s brother and mother. After Christmas there is a report that Mr Marconi has left for London in his car - with Miss O’Brien. The inventor and the anxious aristocratic teenager were speeding along in a white Mercedes, churning up mud on country roads, frightening horses, defying convention and heading for a future together as magical and uncertain as anything so far in Marconi’s astonishingly eventful life.

A
t his experimental station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, Reginald Fessenden took nearly a year to build a transmitter to his own specifications while living with his wife Helen and young son in a remote cottage. His assistants lived in another cottage, and the whole site was fenced off and carefully guarded the year round. They were especially vigilant in the summer, when holidaymakers headed for the coast and were infuriatingly inquisitive about the strange, rocket-like aerial that was under construction. It was possible to climb inside this tubular steel mast to the top, and take in the view of the surrounding countryside and the sea. When the portly Fessenden made the attempt he managed to ease his way to the summit, but found he was jammed when he tried to slither down. To the amusement of his assistants, ‘the Old Man’ had to take off his clothes and cover himself in axle grease before he could slither back to the ground.

Fessenden was very much a hands-on inventor. But he was also the most scientific and theoretically inclined of the wireless wizards then at work on a commercial system. His ideas about how to transmit and receive electro-magnetic waves were genuinely new. Instead of a spark creating dots and dashes, he believed a very high-powered ‘alternator’ could be used to send out a continuous wave - which held out the exciting possibility of transmitting speech. What Fessenden really wanted to achieve was transatlantic
telephony. His electrolytic receiver, or ‘barreter’, was much more sensitive than Marconi’s magnetic detector. But that proved to be its greatest weakness, for it picked up so much atmospheric static that in certain conditions signals were effectively drowned out. This problem almost drove Fessenden mad, and he was desperate to find a solution.

Whereas Marconi ignored the talents of the eccentric Oliver Heaviside even though he lived only a short motor-car ride from the Haven Hotel, Fessenden did not. He wrote to Heaviside offering to employ him as a technical consultant and enclosing a fee of £100. Heaviside, now considered by the locals to be completely crazy, turned the offer down and refused to accept the money. Fessenden tried again, but Heaviside regarded his work in electro-magnetism to be more or less finished, and refused to apply his inventive mind to Fessenden’s problems with atmospheric interference.

Fessenden had been looking for a site on the other side of the Atlantic, for which he needed a licence from the British Postmaster-General. It was no doubt with a wry smile that the political head of the Post Office, having surveyed the western coastline, allotted Fessenden just about the remotest spot possible. West of Glasgow, the Scottish Highlands rise in a jigsaw of sea lochs, glens and rugged bays. The Mull of Kintyre is a long finger of heather-covered land which juts southwards, bounded by the River Clyde estuary on one side and the Atlantic on the other. Fessenden was given a licence to operate from the village of Machrihanish, on the western seaboard of the peninsula, a place with no railway; his men made the last leg of the trip from Glasgow in an open horse and cart. But, bit by bit, the station at Machrihanish was put together, tethered to the rocky ground with huge cables to sustain it against Atlantic storms. At least nobody was going to spy on Fessenden’s work in such a remote spot, and there was none of the paranoia that pervaded the station at Brant Rock. Fessenden’s millionaire backer Hay Walker Jr had warned him: ‘De Forest and other obnoxious persons should be prevented from seeing what you are doing.’

Though de Forest had a reputation for stealing inventions, making slight adjustments to them and calling them his own, he was at this time quite preoccupied, and in reality a threat to neither Fessenden nor Marconi. If anything, it was his own loyal staff who were endangered by de Forest’s shoddy approach to wireless telegraphy. After his triumph at the World’s Fair in St Louis, the US Navy had set de Forest the task of establishing a series of stations in Pensacola and Key West in Florida, and on a number of West Indian islands, including Cuba. Frank Butler, who had attached himself to de Forest at the World’s Fair, was sent out to build the Cuban station, on a bleak promontory composed chiefly of coral. After a gruelling train journey from Havana to Santiago, then a boat trip and a slog through undergrowth, Butler reached the jungle of Guantanamo.
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He had seconded to him some US Navy men, including a government inspector who sat observing what was going on from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day without ever uttering a word. Butler hired local labour, including a renegade Frenchman who acted as chef and general dogsbody. They were continuously attacked by insects, scorpions, wild cats and snakes. Not long after the station house was built, the motto ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, for verily this
is
hell’ was nailed over the door.

Butler kept a diary, which included the following entries for the summer, autumn and winter of 1905:

When the Guantanamo station did briefly manage to operate, the tropical climate generated such static that it was difficult to read the signals. But Butler kept to his post, and was rewarded with encouraging letters from de Forest. On 9 August he was gratified to receive a note which read: ‘You certainly are the star martyr to the wireless cause at present and have our fullest sympathies - if those will do you any appreciable good. None of us are too happy or enjoying flowery beds of ease. It is a tough problem . . . but will keep trying new stunts until it is solved. “Never say die” and “You can’t stop a Yank” are the two cardinal mottoes of the wireless bunch you know.’

De Forest himself believed that he was about to become rich. He had tasted the kind of life he yearned for at the World’s Fair, although this brief opulence proved to be a chimera, just one of Abraham White’s stunts to convince potential investors of the success of the business. De Forest had also turned his mind to romance, but in this, as in his choice of technology, he was sadly lacking in judgement. In November 1905 he married a woman
called Lucile Sheardown, only to discover that she was the mistress of another man and that she refused to consummate the marriage. Calling her a ‘harlot’ in his diary, he separated from her after five months.

Very rapidly, de Forest’s life fell apart. With Frank Butler struck down by yellow fever in Cuba, and the US Navy contract running into serious trouble because the equipment was so unreliable, de Forest crossed the Atlantic as a second rival to Marconi in the race to establish wireless telegraphy between the United States and Great Britain. The Marconi Company had advance news of these plans, and was prepared to see him off with legal action. But it was not necessary: the few experiments de Forest carried out ended in total failure. By April 1906 he was back in New York, where he was presented with the prospect of a spell in jail. He and Abraham White were judged to be in contempt of court for continuing to use the electrolytic detector patented by Fessenden without payment. De Forest was advised to flee to Canada for a while, but White paid a fine and kept them out of prison. Then he fired de Forest, leaving him with only $500. Bitter at his treatment, de Forest wrote in his diary: ‘He [White] has made of me these years an office boy, a traveller about the country to meet people, to talk glowing prospects, to build and operate impossible stations, so that his stock agents might reap large commissions, while he stole the residue.’ In desperation de Forest asked Hay Walker if he could join Fessenden’s National Electric Signalling Company (NESCO). There was as much chance of that as of him signing up with Marconi, who was, in any case, preoccupied with his personal life.