Signor Marconi's Magic Box (24 page)

On the pretext of helping McKenzie, James took him aboard the
Haimun
and promised to do what he could to find him a cable station in China. Instead, while sending his own wireless reports, he made sure the
Daily Mail
man remained out of action. As the steamer approached Wei-hai-Wei, James held a dinner party. He recalled gleefully some years later: ‘We plied McKenzie with as much champagne as he would take, and pointed the crevices with cocktails and liqueurs. McKenzie deserved these good things, as he had been living on Japanese dried skate and sodden rice for the past fortnight. The comfort of the
Haimun
was a joy to him.’ Once McKenzie was asleep he was locked in his cabin. James took a boat ashore to Wei-hai-Wei, checked that his stories had got through, and returned to the
Haimun
. As he put it, ‘as in love, so in war - and especially War Correspondence - all is fair’.

The Russians soon caught up with the
Haimun
, however, and life became more difficult for James. Fraser was sent off to cover the land battles in Manchuria, and the Japanese withdrew James’s permit, bringing to an end his short, heroic and duplicitous engagement as the first war correspondent to make use of wireless. The Wei-hai-Wei station was dismantled long before the decisive engagement between Russia and Japan the following year, but back in the United States de Forest and Abraham White made much of their brilliant coup.

And Guglielmo Marconi had had to endure in 1903 another humiliation, this time in his own backyard, in one of the most august of London’s scientific institutions.

D
emonstrations of scientific wonders were still very popular with the London public in the early years of the twentieth century, and there was no lecture theatre more prestigious than that of the porticoed Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. Here the likes of Marconi’s boyhood hero Michael Faraday had drawn huge crowds in the nineteenth century, and in 1900 Marconi himself had taken the platform to demonstrate the miniature coherer he had devised. The Royal Institution’s audiences were described by
The Electrician
as a mixture of those who regretted they had not had time to read up on the subject beforehand in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, scientists hoping to hear of a new discovery, and ‘a large proportion of the fairer sex, a number of whom were old
habitués
’.

Ambrose Fleming was a popular speaker here, and in the early evening of 3 June 1903 he prepared for a lecture on the progress made in wireless telegraphy, with special reference to the ability to tune to specific wavelengths. As a demonstration, messages relayed from Poldhu via the Marconi station at Chelmsford in Essex would be received at prearranged times on a tickertape machine on the platform. Fleming was warming to his subject of ‘Electric Resonance and Wireless Telegraphy’ when his assistants noticed something strange happening. One of them, Arthur Blok, recalled:

Fleming’s poor hearing protected him from any distraction and he lectured on oblivious as Blok and the other assistants heard in Morse: ‘There was a young fellow of Italy, Who diddled the public prettily.’ Then there were some quotes from Shakespeare. All this was recorded on a tape which was spewing out before any planned signals were due. As the time for the Chelmsford message approached, Blok looked anxiously around the audience to see if there were any telegraphists who had been able to decipher these unwanted messages. Everyone, it seemed, was enthralled by Fleming, and nobody had noticed anything untoward. Then Blok’s eyes lighted on a face he recognised: a young man associated with Nevil Maskelyne, son of a celebrated magician who performed at the Egyptian Hall around the corner,
⁵
and an aspiring rival of Marconi.

Fleming concluded the lecture without any knowledge of what had happened backstage. The audience applauded, and the event was written up as a great success in the technical magazines and newspapers. Fleming had a reputation among his students at University College for being quick-tempered, and it seems nobody
dared to tell him of the ‘rats’ intrusion until a day or two later. When Blok showed him the offending Morse tape, which he had quickly gathered up and stuffed in his pocket, the distinguished scientist flew into a rage.

As no publicity had been given to this attempt to discredit Marconi by showing that his transmissions were vulnerable to attack, it could have been quietly brushed aside. But Fleming could not contain his anger. He sent a letter to
The Times
which described the act as ‘scientific hooliganism’, and lashed out at ‘monkeyish pranks’ - phrases which instantly became popular amongst his students. Fleming appealed for anyone who knew who had committed this ‘outrage against the traditions of the Royal Institution’ to come forward.

As it happened, the culprit came forward himself, with the telling argument that he was merely illustrating the vulnerability of wireless signals to interference, and making nonsense of the claim that tuning would provide confidentiality. In a letter to
The Times
published on 16 June, Nevil Maskelyne owned up without apology, rejecting the charge of ‘scientific hooliganism’: ‘Prof. Fleming says his experiments were carried out in the face of a deliberate attempt to wreck his demonstration. That is a falsehood. His demonstration succeeded by courtesy of those who, having the power to wreck it, yet refrained from doing so.’ Far from having carried out a ‘monkeyish prank’, Maskelyne declared that he and his accomplices were making a valid point: all the claims made for the ‘syntony’ or tuning of wireless waves emanating from Poldhu were false, and the public ought to know it. ‘We have been led to believe that Marconi messages are proof against interference. The recent Marconi “triumphs” have all been in that direction. Prof. Fleming himself has vouched for the reliability and efficacy of the Marconi syntony. The object of his lecture was to demonstrate this. Then, if we are expected to believe certain statements, no one can complain if we proceed to put those statements to the test.’

Evidently relishing the discomfort he had caused Fleming, Maskelyne told newspaper reporters that he had decided not to
wreck the lecture, but merely to draw the fire of a pompous academic making false claims. He informed
The Electrician
: ‘This device succeeded perfectly. The simple interjection of the word “rats” actually drew Prof. Fleming himself. It is a harmless expression signifying incredulity. I have heard it used by university professors on occasions; and really, it was most appropriate. As for instance when the lecturer spoke of signals from Poldhu travelling over vast areas without anyone therein having cognisance of the fact. Surely he knows that a “sweet little cherub” in the form of a “Maskelyne” receiver generally keeps watch upon the doings at Poldhu.’ It was true that Marconi had admitted in a newspaper interview that Poldhu had been ‘tapped’ by a pirate station in Cornwall.

Maskelyne had Fleming and the Marconi Company over a barrel. In a series of interviews with the
Express
,
Telegraph
,
St James’s Gazette
and
The Times
, Fleming tried desperately to rubbish Maskelyne, claiming that the receiving instrument at the lecture was not syntonic, that it was ‘demonstration’ rather than working equipment, that the interference had stopped because his assistants were able to cut it out, that it only happened when they were tuning in, and that it was not wireless interference at all, but used ‘earth currents’. As Maskelyne gleefully pointed out, the eminent Professor contradicted himself almost every time he sounded off on the subject. The row rumbled on in the newspapers, with headlines such as ‘Wireless “Rats” - Mr Nevil Maskelyne and his Mysterious Message’ (
Morning Leader
), giving the opportunity for a very public discussion of the true state of the Marconi wireless system. Maskelyne pointed out that his surreptitious monitoring of Poldhu, which he called ‘the thunder factory’, had revealed that the fifty-horsepower transmitter sent out messages at two and a half words per minute. He told the
Morning Leader
: ‘Had the same horse power been applied to a motor-car the message would have arrived as quickly by road.’

There were suggestions in the press that a cable company intent on sabotaging wireless was behind the Maskelyne scam. That is
possible, but there was never any hard evidence. Maskelyne was most likely just another jealous rival who wanted to cut Marconi down to size. In 1904 he was briefly involved with Abraham White when the American huckster tried to set up in competition with Marconi in London. Whatever his true motives, Maskelyne’s criticisms were valid. Morse by wireless was still agonisingly slow, and it could not promise privacy. But if the Marconi Company was being a little careless of the truth, the claims it made for a wonderful future for wireless were nothing compared with the hyperbole being orchestrated by its rivals on the other side of the Atlantic.

A
mong the wonders that greeted the millions of visitors to the World’s Fair in St Louis which opened on 30 April 1904 was a tower which had written on it vertically in illuminated letters, each eight feet high, the name ‘DE FOREST’. A report in the St Louis
Post Dispatch
painted the picture:

The purple prose reads like a press release, and it almost certainly was, the work of the redoubtable Abraham White, Lee de Forest’s bejewelled and moustachioed backer, whose wireless companies still had little or nothing to show for the millions of dollars invested in them.

When the World’s Fair was being planned to commemorate the centenary of Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to the United States, the Marconi Company had been invited to show the American public, most of whom had only the vaguest idea about wireless telegraphy, how this amazing new invention worked. However, Abraham White put in a successful bid to demonstrate his ‘All American’ system, and the Marconi Company pulled out when it was understood that there would be competition. It was not their style to engage in that kind of rivalrous showmanship. This left the field open for White and de Forest to pull out all the stops and to lay claim to an array of innovations which by that time were in reality already part of wireless history. With his unerring eye for the main chance, White bought an old observation tower which had been used to give the public an aerial view of Niagara Falls. The tower had been dismantled because of the danger of icicles falling from it onto the people below, and White had it shipped to St Louis and reassembled as a primitive wireless transmitter at the World’s Fair, with de Forest’s name emblazoned on it. The company’s role in the pioneer reporting of the Russo-Japanese war by wireless
was celebrated in a large map of the Yellow Sea within the de Forest showcase.

The impression given was that the de Forest Company was well established and fully staffed. For a few weeks de Forest was set up as a gentleman with a butler and his own carriage. This was no more than a façade. Although he was raising huge amounts of capital, Abraham White allowed de Forest no more than a pittance for research: at the World’s Fair he began with only one assistant. When a young telegraph operator, Frank Butler, turned up to offer his services he was taken on only after agreeing that he and the other assistant would share one salary. None of this, however, was evident to the public, as ‘aerograms’, as White still liked to call them, were transmitted to local newspapers, and a bulletin was produced on site which made extravagant claims for de Forest’s system.

Marconi himself paid a brief visit to the St Louis World’s Fair, where he drank too many mint juleps and became unsteady on his feet. It was as if all his pioneering work in wireless, his transmissions over thousands of miles, his shipboard news bulletins on the Cunard liners, had never happened. Visitors to the Fair were led to believe that this wonderful new system of communication was being demonstrated for the first time. De Forest’s assistant Frank Butler recalled for
Radio Broadcast
magazine in 1924: