Signor Marconi's Magic Box (39 page)

The position Guglielmo Marconi found himself in as an Italian national in Britain was difficult. At the outset of the war Italy had remained neutral, but there was reason to believe that it would soon enter the conflict as an ally of Germany. Bea, Degna and Giulio were at Eaglehurst in August 1914, and keenly felt the local suspicions that Signor Marconi’s wireless station in one of the old towers might be used for espionage. Degna recalled her mother being told she was not allowed to leave the grounds of Eaglehurst for several weeks, before the anxiety died down. When Marconi applied to the Home Office for exemption under the Aliens Restriction Order, so as to be able to travel around the country, he was at first refused. In time, however, his impeccable social and political connections freed him from suspicion, and the ban was lifted. In the winter of 1914 he crossed the Channel and took the train to Italy, which still maintained its neutrality.

Bea’s sister Lilah and Marconi’s Italian secretary, a Mr Villarosa, had been stranded in Rome at the outbreak of war, but Marconi was able to arrange for them to travel to England with the protection of the British diplomatic courier. He stayed on in Rome, where he had been given a seat in the Senate, and began what was to be a chequered political career. Italy had still not declared its hand early in 1915, and at the end of April Marconi took the Cunard liner
Lusitania
to America, where the American Marconi Company was still operating, running the gauntlet of the German U-boats which had begun to attack ships in British territorial waters. While Marconi was giving evidence in an American court in yet another patent dispute, the
Lusitania
set out on its return voyage to Liverpool on 1 May, with 1257 passengers and a crew of more than seven hundred. All had been warned by a notice posted by the Cunard Line:

As more than a hundred of the passengers on the
Lusitania
were Americans, and it was assumed that Germany would not want to bring such a powerful ally of Britain into the war, there was no great fear that the vessel was in serious danger of attack. What the passengers did not know was that the
Lusitania
was carrying a secret cache of munitions for the British. It is possible that the German Admiralty had been passed this information from the powerful Sayville wireless station on Long Island, which was owned and run by a subsidiary of Telefunken, named the Atlantic Communications Company. The United States allowed wireless messages to be sent across the Atlantic provided they were ‘neutral’ - that is to say, not concerned with the war. Plain-language messages only were allowed, and American censors were posted to both American Marconi stations and to two large German-owned stations at Tuckerton, New Jersey and Sayville. But, just two days after Britain declared war on Germany, the
New York Times
had carried a story claiming that the Sayville station was breaking the rules and passing valuable information on shipping to the German navy, which had begun to patrol the western coast of Britain with U-boats.

On 7 May the
Lusitania
reached the Irish Channel, and was making slow progress towards Liverpool in heavy fog. The liner was spotted by Captain Walther Schwieger of the submarine U-Boat 20, which had been harassing shipping for several days. He regarded the
Lusitania
as a legitimate target, and at 1.20 p.m. he came to the surface and fired two torpedoes at close range. Lookouts saw the danger too late for the
Lusitania
to alter course or pick up speed. There were two explosions, and the vessel listed
heavily, so that it was difficult to launch the lifeboats, which were either hanging from the raised section of the hull or buried beneath the rapidly submerging section. At 2 p.m. the
Lusitania
sank in shallow water, with its bow still showing above the waves as it rested on the seabed. Among the 1198 men, women and children who died were 124 American citizens. There were only 761 survivors.

Two weeks after the sinking of the
Lusitania
had outraged the United States - without shaking its determination to remain a bystander in the European conflict - Marconi boarded the American liner
St Paul
to return to England. He had been told by the Italian Ambassador to Washington that an agreement with Britain and France meant that Italy would soon be at war, and had asked the American judge hearing his patent case to release him. When Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on 24 May, Marconi was well out into the Atlantic. It was rumoured that there was a German plot to capture him, and that news of his presence aboard the
St Paul
had been tapped out in code by the treacherous Sayville transmitter and picked up by the powerful Nauen station in Germany. Marconi, it seemed, was in danger of being tracked down by his own invention. In fact his departure on the
St Paul
had been front-page news in the
New York Tribune
on Sunday, 23 May. He was pictured with a lady war correspondent headed for the front. This was none other than his ex-fiancée, who was now married: Mrs Inez Milholland Boissevain. No mention was made of their former association.

After a short visit to London and Eaglehurst, Marconi travelled on to Paris and then Italy, where in June he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Italian army, with responsibility for overseeing wireless equipment. He stayed in Italy for the rest of the war, developing directional short-wave wireless for the Italian navy. Bea and the children joined him, and in 1916 their third child, Gioia Jolanda, was born in Rome. Meanwhile, America finally stole Marconi’s thunder.

W
hen in January 1887 the engineer Gustave Eiffel and his team won the prize to build a tower for the Paris World Fair of 1889, there were protests from some of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the day. A letter signed by Alexandre Dumas, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Verlaine and others began: ‘We, the writers, painters, sculptors, architects and lovers of the beauty of Paris, do protest with all our vigour and all our indignation, in the name of French taste and endangered French art and history, against the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower . . .’

At the time it was completed in the spring of 1889, Eiffel’s tower did appear to be nothing more than an engineering folly, comprising more than eight thousand individually crafted metal sections held together by over eight million rivets. But as an attraction it was a spectacular success: nearly two million people paid to climb it or take the lifts to the top between May and November 1889, and by December admission receipts had recouped three quarters of the eight million gold francs it had cost to build. It was lit at night, first by twenty-two thousand gas burners, a few years later by electricity. Very soon the ‘monster’ became France’s most distinctive and cherished symbol, and it was not long before a use was found for it. Towering a thousand feet above the rooftops of Paris, it looked for all the world like a gigantic Marconi radio mast; and when experiments with wireless began, that is what it soon became.

The Frenchman Eugène Ducretet made the first transmission from the tower’s summit to the Pantheon four kilometres away in 1898, and seven years later another inventor, Captain Gustave Ferrie, established a wireless telegraphy link with French forces on the German borders. In 1906 Ferrie was communicating with French ships at sea, by 1907 he was able to exchange messages with Casablanca in Morocco, and by 1908 his signals from the Eiffel Tower reached a distance of four thousand kilometres.

When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914 with plans to occupy France, its great prize was to be Paris. The Eiffel Tower became the centre of French military wireless communications, and there were plans to destroy it if the Germans succeeded in breaking through to the capital. But the invaders were halted sixty miles from Paris, and had to dig in along what became known as the Western Front. The Eiffel Tower remained secure, supporting one of the most powerful wireless stations in the world throughout the war. And in the midst of the conflict it was to play a part in a revolutionary breakthrough in wireless which made headline news on both sides of the Atlantic. Neither the name of Marconi nor that of anyone associated with his companies, which were working flat out to equip the British Army and Navy with wireless telegraphy transmitters and receivers, appeared in the sensational stories of the first-ever transmission of the spoken word, from three thousand miles away across the Atlantic to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

The language of the first wireless telephone message was English, the accent American. An engineer speaking into a microphone at the US naval wireless station established a few years earlier at Arlington, Virginia, was heard by a fellow American high up on the Eiffel Tower. It was only possible to send west to east, and confirmation that the engineer’s voice had been heard distinctly was cabled back across the Atlantic. The French, naturally preoccupied with their military communications, allowed the Americans only a few minutes over a period of several days to make this historic broadcast. As with Marconi’s first signal across the Atlantic, it was still reliant on cables. Telegraph messages were sent to alert
Paris to the times when attempts at speech transmission would be made. But there was no longer a conflict between cable telegraphy and wireless, for most of the technology was provided by the giant US company American Telephone and Telegraph - AT&T. The announcement of the successful transmission of speech was made by the company’s dynamic head, Theodore N. Vail, on 22 October 1915.

At the time Europe went to war, the evolution of the ‘valve’ first devised by Ambrose Fleming had been very rapid. Lee de Forest had turned it into the audion, and had discovered that it could be used for amplifying signals received. A young New York amateur enthusiast, Edwin Armstrong, had improved on de Forest’s audion, and discovered that it could be used not only for wireless reception, but for transmission as well. Inevitably Armstrong and de Forest became locked in a series of patent disputes, but AT&T had the power and the money to buy up the latest and best technology and to develop it themselves.

Theodore Vail wanted to stay in the forefront of wireless telephony developments so that his company’s already extensive cable telephone network would not have any rivals. The transmission of speech would mean that ship and shore could speak to each other without the need for specialist operators who could read Morse code. Out-of-the-way places could be reached by telephone without cables. In October 1915, after AT&T had shown that the wireless telephone could span the North American continent, and just before the announcement of the transatlantic triumph, Vail told the
New York Times
: ‘What impresses me is that we, in America, are doing this work, this big, constructive work, at a time when all Europe is at war. That’s pretty fine.’ Lee de Forest did not agree. He believed it was his audion which had provided the breakthrough, and tried to convince the press and the public that Vail had stolen his invention. He even travelled to Paris at his own expense when the Eiffel Tower transmission was made, but was barred from any involvement.

The United States had the field to itself for two and a half vital
years in the development of wireless. AT&T was investing heavily in wireless telephony, and the US Navy, which had dillied and dallied over which system to buy, now equipped itself with the very latest technology. The large and growing fraternity of American amateurs were now forming themselves into more effective political groupings, and had become far and away the world’s largest civilian ‘audience’ for Morse messages sent by wireless. Despite the regulations which had followed the
Titanic
disaster, American amateurs had a fairly free hand, and were keen to buy or make the very latest devices available. While their enthusiasm was directed towards the peacetime uses of wireless, Europe was adapting an already anachronistic system of wireless telegraphy to warfare. Marconi was not out of the picture, but his pre-eminence in the field of wireless was on the wane. When the war was over Guglielmo Marconi could at last rest on his laurels, and enjoy an entirely new era of radio broadcasting to which his boyhood invention had given rise, but in which he himself played only a minor part.

T
he Villa Griffone, where Guglielmo Marconi spent so many of his youthful hours experimenting with electricity, is in many ways little changed. In the summer heat the stony earth shimmers, and in the evenings the invisible cicadas fill the air with their incessant chattering. At night the little Scops owls call with a single note which has an electronic sound, a ‘pink, pink’, like a lazy Morse ‘dot, dot, dot’. The vineyards are still tended and the lawns around the villa watered. Everything is charming - until you stroll below the villa, down the hillside that falls away into a river valley where Marconi played as a boy. Into this hillside a kind of bleak, featureless amphitheatre has been cut, framing a grotesque pseudo-classical stone entrance to a subterranean vault. Marconi himself never saw this. It is a mausoleum, commissioned by Benito Mussolini to commemorate the great Italian inventor’s death on 20 July 1937. Marconi’s body was taken from a local cemetery to be interred in this monstrosity, and that is where he still lies, oblivious to the atrocities which were committed in World War II by his friend and admirer Mussolini and his Nazi allies. Recent allegations that Marconi secretly prevented Jews from joining the prestigious academy he headed from 1930 come as a shock, but are also a reminder that his dogged refusal to bow to scientific authorities was not matched by a similar independence in his political life. Marconi became close friends with Mussolini, and actively promoted the
fascist cause in the last years of his life. The mausoleum is a fitting reflection of what Marconi’s political beliefs would become during those years.