Signor Marconi's Magic Box (27 page)

T
he whole of the front page of London’s
Daily Mirror
on 16 March 1905 was devoted to photographs of Guglielmo Marconi and his bride, the Hon. Beatrice O’Brien, who were to be married that day at St George’s church, Hanover Square, Mayfair. Although the paper showed a good deal of interest in the details of Beatrice’s ‘lovely and very uncommon toilette’, its headline was ‘Inventor of Wireless Marries Today’. Reproduced on the front page was a marconiogram
⁸
sent in Morse to the couple from Fleet Street which read: ‘TO THE CHEVALIER GUGLIELMO MARCONI HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS TO YOURSELF AND BRIDE FROM THE DAILY MIRROR’. Each word was written above the dots and dashes of the Morse message - - /. - /. - . /- . - . / - - - /-./.., spelling ‘Marconi’.

‘Extraordinary interest is being evinced in the event,’ wrote the
Daily Mail
, ‘for the bridegroom, who has given a daily paper to Atlantic liners and promises annihilation to the cable companies, and, if the popular story be true, has compelled the Chinese to compose a special prayer for protection against him, has friends in every quarter of the globe.’ Wedding presents were listed, with an estimate that they must be worth £20,000 - perhaps £1 million at
today’s values. Marconi had given Bea a beautiful sealskin jacket and a magnificent diamond tiara. He showered her with jewellery; but no mention is made in the papers of the bicycle which only close family knew was among Marconi’s gifts to his bride.

All the newspapers carried an account of the wedding the following day. Under the heading ‘Cosmopolitan Throng at St George’s’, the
Mail
reported: ‘A vast crowd of onlookers was outside; for “the man in the street” has been interesting himself greatly in the wedding of the great hero of wireless telegraphy.’

The church was packed, and there was a great crush of people outside. In Edwardian London ‘society weddings’ usually attracted a crowd, for the aristocracy still had something of the glamour of film and pop stars today. Mostly women gathered to take a look at the fabulous dresses of the bride and bridesmaids, and the female guests. None of that was lacking from Marconi’s wedding, as St George’s filled with members of the aristocracy, but the
Daily Mail
reporter thought those straining their necks for a glimpse of the couple were unusual. ‘The police outside found themselves obliged to cope with a rather obstreperous crowd, in which, oddly enough, the feminine element for once found itself decidedly in the minority. Tall hats and black coats surged up and down the street in as resolute an attempt to see the arriving wedding guests as any women have ever displayed on similar occasions.’

The society magazine
Vanity Fair
honoured Marconi with a caricature to mark his wedding, and defined him for its fashionable readers.

The magazine insisted on calling him ‘Bill’, and was not so overawed by his reputation that it could not poke a little fun: ‘He is a hard worker, displaying the greatest resolution before unexpected difficulties. He rides, cycles and motors. Of music he is a sincere admirer. Being half an Irishman his lack of humour is prodigious.’

The union of a brilliant inventor and an aristocratic young lady seemed perfect, but the path to the wedding had not been smooth. It was Florence van Raalte who mischievously brought the couple together after Beatrice had turned Marconi down. Charles van Raalte had assured Bea that Marconi would not be invited to Brownsea while she was there, but his wife broke the agreement, and the two found themselves once again together on the romantic island. Under its influence Bea fell head over heels for Marconi. When she announced that she wanted to marry him, her elder brother Lucius, now head of the family, and her mother declared that he was an unsuitable match. No doubt the van Raaltes and others who had befriended Marconi spoke up for him. He was
almost
a gentleman, and at least half Irish-English, even if he stubbornly held on to his Italian nationality. The
Daily Mail
was at pains to point out that in St George’s church Marconi spoke the wedding vows ‘without a trace of an Italian accent’.

In the end Lucius, now Lord Inchiquin, gave her away. Marconi’s best man was his elder brother Alfonso, and his mother Annie mingled proudly with the glittering array of lords and ladies. Old Giuseppe had died a year too soon to see his son fêted in London, but King Victor Emmanuel sent a personal letter to Marconi signed ‘yours affectionately’, and the Italian Ambassador was among the wedding guests. One of the newer European offshoots of the wireless enterprise, the Belgian Marconi Wireless Company, sent a large jar with the message that they hoped there would be ‘no family jar’ in the Marconi household. The pun was
unfortunate: from the very beginning this would not be an easy marriage.

After a reception in London at which the fabulous wedding gifts were displayed, Marconi and Beatrice travelled to Ireland, where they had been offered two weeks in the Inchiquin family pile, Dromoland. It was now a sad and lonely place, which had seldom been lived in since the death of Beatrice’s father five years earlier, and she missed the gaiety she had enjoyed there in her childhood. Still, she remained vivacious, bubbly and naïve - but these very qualities which attracted Marconi also made him absurdly jealous and protective. He became moody, taking long walks on his own.

The newlyweds returned to London before the two weeks of the honeymoon were up so that Marconi could get back to work. They stayed for a time in the fashionable Carlton Hotel,
⁹
and naturally enough Bea liked to walk around the West End when her husband was out on company business. But Marconi would not tolerate such small freedoms, imagining that his young bride was taking an interest in other suitors. He could not abide the suspicion that his wife might be unfaithful to him - though later he himself was to have a reputation as a philanderer - and did his best to keep her out of the public eye and under lock and key.

In May they took the liner
Campania
to New York. It was, as always, a working trip for Marconi, who was testing the signals from Poldhu. At first Beatrice enjoyed the social life in first class, but she was soon to get a lecture from her husband about ‘flirting’ with other passengers. To distract her from romance Marconi taught her Morse code, and she took on the tasks - formerly attended to by his mother - of tidying his clothes and darning his socks. In New York the couple were entertained at a round of parties, and had lunch with President Theodore Roosevelt before
travelling to the bleak landscape of Cape Breton, where Marconi continued to grapple with the problem of getting his transatlantic service working. Beatrice had to share the station house with Richard Vyvyan’s wife Jane, and the two found life together difficult to begin with. There was no social life for Beatrice here, though as a bachelor Marconi had been rumoured by the newspapers to have had many woman friends on Cape Breton.

When Marconi returned to England on the
Campania
for further tests of his transmitters he left Beatrice behind for three whole months. Neither of them knew when he left that she was pregnant, and she was sick much of the time, which made her life on Cape Breton even more miserable. When she came back to England Marconi at first put her up in the Poldhu Hotel, a lonely and dull place in winter. Concerned for her daughter’s well-being, and in the belief that Marconi could afford it, Lady Inchiquin found her a rented house just off Berkeley Square in London’s Mayfair.

Although he accepted this, Marconi was actually in deep financial trouble, living a life he could not afford. To keep the company going he had put most of his own money back into it. If he had fallen in with the kind of financial backers Fessenden and de Forest relied on, it is doubtful he would have survived this crucial time. But his board of directors remained loyal to him as he asked for more and more money to sustain his married life and to invest in larger and more powerful transmitters.

Beatrice gave birth to a daughter in February 1906. The child was named Lucia, but before she could be baptised she died of an infection. Marconi wrote to his mother: ‘Our darling little baby was taken away from us suddenly on Friday morning. (I was at Poldhu at the time and only got here when it was all over). She had been very well all the time before and the doctor said she was a more than usually healthy baby. On Thursday night she had what was thought to be a slight attack of indigestion and at about 8 a.m. on Friday morning an attack of convulsions and all was over in a few minutes. Bea got a most awful shock and she is now very weak . . .’ Because the little girl was not baptised, Marconi had to
use all his influence to get her a Christian burial. Finally there was a brief service at a cemetery in west London.

With Beatrice sick and grieving, and the pressures of work intense, Marconi himself fell ill. He had suffered before from feverish attacks, which were believed to be a recurrence of a bout of malaria. Delirious for much of the time, he lay in bed in the rented house in London, fearful of any medicines he was given, always checking the labels, and rejecting many because he thought they contained something which might harm him. With black humour he cut out undertakers’ advertisements and propped them on a table at his bedside. He railed against English doctors and nurses, who he said treated him like an idiot, and insisted on being attended by a Dr Tallarico from the Italian Hospital in London.

To be struck down by illness at such a time was a torment for Marconi. After persistent experimentation with the shape of the aerial at Glace Bay there was now the prospect of a breakthrough in his attempts to make the transatlantic link work reliably. He and his engineers had discovered that if a pattern of very long wires was stretched out horizontally above the ground, facing in the direction signals were transmitted and received, performance improved dramatically in both daylight and night-time hours. The so-called ‘directional aerial’ was huge, and demanded acres of land. There was room at the new ‘Marconi Towers’ site at Cape Breton, but the clifftop Poldhu station, which had looked so imperiously grandiose two years earlier, could not be extended. Reluctantly, the company had agreed that a larger site had to be found, and to defray the cost they had asked the British Admiralty if it would contribute. When help was refused, they went ahead anyway, and to increase the chances of success decided on a site nearer to Cape Breton than Cornwall. Land was acquired at Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland, and a station and directional aerial constructed which dwarfed the men who worked on it. The storage batteries for the power plant were the height of a four- or five-storey building.

Marconi was becoming aware that he was reaching the limits of his spark technology. In Cape Breton the flashes and thunderclaps
of the new station attracted so much popular attention that the local railway company made a special stop close by, so that passengers could watch the tongues of bluish-white flame which flashed when the Morse key was pressed, and, with hands over their ears, feel the thunderclap and the crackling of the aerial wires. Marconi’s equipment had not so much ‘snatched the thunderbolt’ as emulated the thunderstorms which inspired the experiments of his boyhood hero Benjamin Franklin. Yet no other inventor had devised a system of wireless telegraphy to replace Marconi’s, whatever claims they might make. The spark transmitter and the coherer and Maggie detectors had not yet played out their historic role. As Marconi lay on his sickbed the first real test of the value of wireless in wartime was unfolding dramatically in the Far East, as the Russians made a last-ditch attempt to defeat the Japanese.

L
ong after Captain Lionel James had been expelled by the Japanese, the Russo- Japanese war had rumbled on with land and sea engagements, but with no decisive action by either side. It was in desperation that Tsar Nicholas and his military chiefs in St Petersburg took the decision to despatch fifty-nine ships from the Baltic port of Libau to join the remnants of the Far East fleet in Vladivostok. To reach the safety of that naval base they had to steam through the Straits of Tsushima, which divide southern Korea and Japan, where they knew the enemy would be waiting to ambush them. In the spring of 1905 the entire Russian Baltic fleet was nearing the East China Sea after an eighteen-thousand-mile voyage which had begun in mid-October the previous year. The Russian navy, stationed at Port Arthur and Chemulpo on the Yellow Sea and at Vladivostok, had had the worst of the frequent naval encounters, and had lost a large part of its fleet either sunk or captured.

The navies of all the major powers awaited the outcome of this confrontation with particular fascination. For the first time in history both protagonists were equipped with wireless, and nobody knew how this would affect the fighting, or what strategies would be adopted.

In command of the Russian fleet was Admiral Zinoviy Petrovitch Rozhestvensky, who had achieved rapid promotion. When Tsar
Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm had staged their impromptu meeting in 1902 while awaiting Edward VII’s postponed coronation they had been entertained by displays of naval prowess. Rozhestvensky was the young officer in charge of a battleship which gave a demonstration to the two imperial leaders of firing at moving targets. After observing three hours of faultless and unruffled command, Kaiser Wilhelm said to his despised cousin the Tsar: ‘I would be glad to have in my navy officers as efficient as your Rozhestvensky.’