Signor Marconi's Magic Box (8 page)

It was quite by chance that Morse code proved to be ideally suited to Marconi’s primitive spark transmitters, which could only send messages in the form of long and short bursts of electro-magnetic waves. In fact, had Morse code not been devised more than half a century before Marconi began to create his wireless system at the Villa Griffone, he would have had to invent something very like it. In all probability, he would not have had the idea of wireless telegraphy at all.

The man who gave his name to the code was Samuel Finley
Breese Morse. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791 and studied at Yale University, where he took an interest in science. His ambition, however, was to be a great painter. He studied in Europe, and had some success with his landscapes and more dramatic canvases. In London he won prizes for his depiction of
The Dying Hercules
as well as for his sculpture. But in America he found it hard to earn a living. He had an unpaid academic post in New York, and got by painting portraits which fetched only about $15 each. On a trip back from Europe on the sailing packet
Scully
in 1837 he fell into conversation with fellow passengers about the uses of electricity, and conceived the idea of an electric telegraph. It was not an original idea, and Morse was not the man to turn it into a workable invention: he lacked the meticulous craftsmanship which was Marconi’s greatest talent. But it was his inspiration which led to the development of the telegraph code which would for ever after bear his name.

Morse’s original idea was to assign to hundreds of words a dedicated number, and to use electric current to activate a machine at a distance which would record a series of figures on paper. In September 1837 he set up a demonstration in a lecture theatre at the University of the City of New York, with wires wound around the hall to give a distance of about a third of a mile. It was not a working system, but the prototype for something which with a bit of imagination might be made commercial. Morse and his brother Sidney were the publishers of the
Journal of Commerce
, which was read by, among others, the very inventive Vail family of Speedwell, New Jersey. Stephen Vail, the father, had turned a local blacksmith’s works into a thriving iron foundry which had built the steam engine for the SS
Savannah
, which in 1819 had become the first ship to cross the Atlantic powered by paddle-wheels as well as sail. His son Alfred had studied at the University of the City of New York, and saw there by chance one of Morse’s telegraph demonstrations. He introduced himself, and with his father’s agreement subsequently offered to help develop the system.

Morse had no money, while the Vails had prospered from their
steam engines and the casting of hundreds of miles of track for the railways which were beginning to spread out across America. An agreement was signed by which Alfred Vail and his brother George would share with Morse all the rights and rewards of a commercial telegraph system. The Vail brothers went to work on improving the technology, while Morse handled the publicity. A deadline was set for 1 January 1838, by which time Morse wanted to be able to offer the US government and businesses a workable system. It was a tall order: the only available electric cable was milliners’ copper wire, used to give a structure to the ‘skyscraper’ bonnets which were then fashionable. The Vails’ first batteries were made of cherry wood, with beeswax as insulation.

The local people in the Vails’ town of Speedwell thought Alfred and George had lost their minds as they worked long hours on what was regarded as a crazy venture. Meanwhile, Morse continued to compile his dictionary, assigning to each of five thousand words a specific number - England, for example, was ‘252’. However, devising a machine which could write ‘252’ proved too much for the Vails. They were close to despair when Alfred had the brain-wave that a lever which had an up-and-down movement could more easily mark dots and dashes, and these, rather than whole numbers, could represent letters and numerals. Alfred and George had missed their deadline, but they had cracked the problem.

Alfred feverishly studied the letters of the alphabet, and found that ‘E’ was used more frequently than any other. He assigned it one dot. Other letters were then given their codes - ‘S’ became three dots, for example. It took until 1844 before the first commercial telegraphy system using what became known as ‘Morse code’ went into service in the United States. It was in truth Alfred Vail who devised it, but he allowed Samuel Morse to take the plaudits and enjoy the innumerable international honours which were showered upon him.

Operating Morse keys was an entirely new skill, as was the interpretation of the dots and dashes. With the invention of the telephone receiver a tape printer was no longer necessary, for
the operator could simply listen to the urgent staccato of the Morse messages, translating them instantaneously from dots and dashes to letters and words. Very soon those with experience found they could recognise the styles of other individual Morse operators; some claimed they could tell the difference between the styles of men and women. Competitions were held to find the most skilful operators, and, ever attentive to the texture of contemporary life,
McClure’s
magazine sent a reporter to one such public demonstration held in New York at the turn of the century. It was a ‘fast sending competition’, held in a great hall in which ‘sets of shining telegraph instruments’ had been set up. Most of the audience were themselves telegraph operators, there to see which of the dozen young male contestants was adjudged the best.
McClure’s
described the scene:

Marconi was at this time using exactly the same shining Morse keys as the contestants used for their New York sending competition. But he could not hope to match their speed, and certainly nobody would hearken to the beauty of his sending. Each dot and dash sent by wireless was created by a deafening spark - the operators soon took to wearing earplugs. At the receiving end, if the operator was using headphones, which was soon the regular practice, the noise of interference was also disturbing and uncomfortable. It was like listening intently to a station improperly tuned on the radio. There was no tuning in the modern sense of finding the exact point on the wave spectrum to receive a transmitter’s signal. And wireless telegraphy was painfully slow. When in 1897 Marconi returned briefly to Italy to fulfil his obligation to carry out his military service, he demonstrated his invention to the navy at La Spezia. On that occasion each Morse dot required the transmitting lever to be held down for five seconds, and each dash for fifteen seconds. The letter ‘H’ alone (dot, dash, dot, dot, dot) took more than half a minute to send. The messages relayed to and from the royal yacht
Osborne
were equally laborious.

Lack of speed was not, however, Marconi’s greatest concern. He needed to prove not only that his system worked, but that it could span distances which the leading scientists of the day insisted were unattainable. Unless he could send messages hundreds of miles, he could never compete with the cable telegraph, and wireless would have only a restricted value for ships at sea. The widely accepted view was that because the earth was round, a spark signal transmitted from any point on land would head off over the horizon, keep going until it reached the upper atmosphere and head out into space. There was no reason to believe that electro-magnetic
waves would ‘hug’ the surface of land or sea. However high you raised your transmitting and receiving aerials, the signal could be picked up no further than the line of sight between the topmost points. Marconi, and those working with him, had no theory to contradict the received wisdom. All they could do was carry on blindly, in the hope of demonstrating that the theory was wrong.

The degree to which Marconi was able to inspire confidence in his assistants, most of whom were a good deal older than him - he was just twenty-five in 1899 - was remarkable. Quiet and modest though he was in his dealings with the press, Marconi evidently had a messianic quality in his workshops in the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight and the Haven Hotel in Poole. He led by example, often working into the night.

The detective writer turned wireless sleuth for
McClure’s
, Cleveland Moffett, visited both these stations in 1899, and chatted to Marconi and the engineers working with him. One of these was Dr Erskine Murray, based at the Haven Hotel, where he sometimes tuned up his cello to make up a trio with Marconi and his brother Alfonso. Moffett wrote:

It was the universal belief among scientists at the time that light waves could not exist in a vacuum, but must travel through
something
; and so too with electro-magnetic waves. What that something was, nobody knew, but it was given the name ‘the ether’, and was conceived of as a very thin, colourless, odourless jelly, in which the whole of the universe was set. The most common way of explaining ‘wireless waves’ was with the analogy of throwing a stone into the still waters of a pond and watching the ripples spread out in ever larger circles. There was some popular confusion about the term ‘ether’, for it was also the name of a gas which was an early form of anaesthetic. When scientists referred to the ether it was sometimes imagined as a vapour, but really it made no difference
what it was. Marconi believed in its existence, and as far as he was concerned it had some special property which enabled the electro-magnetic waves he sent out to travel much further than they were supposed to.