Signor Marconi's Magic Box (28 page)

The Russian army had bought some Marconi equipment, which was set up in the harsh conditions of Siberia then nearly destroyed by Orthodox priests who insisted on anointing it with holy water. But the Russian navy had been more patriotic, adopting the Popov-Ducretet system
¹⁰
for its ships. Admiral Rozhestvensky had had some experience of this equipment, and was unimpressed. In theory the Russian fleet had the key secret weapon in the forthcoming conflict, a wireless station established on the cruiser
Ural
with a range of seven hundred miles. The equipment, which had been bought from Germany, would enable the Baltic fleet to contact Vladivostok as it approached the danger zone of the Straits of Tsushima, and alert the surviving ships there to attack the Japanese from the opposite direction.

Nobody had sold the Japanese any wireless equipment. The general belief was that the system they had developed was a straight copy of that demonstrated by Marconi at La Spezia in 1897, and that it had been improved very little. It was certainly way behind Marconi’s own system at the time. But it worked efficiently over a range of up to six miles, and with shore stations set up along the Korean coast, on anchored battleships and the western shores of Japan, a large area could be covered by a relay system from one station to another. The Japanese had the Straits of Tsushima covered, and waited and watched for the Russian fleet, their wireless antennae ever alert for the crackle of the enemy’s Morse spark.

Which of three routes, winding between islands in the narrow seas, would Admiral Rozhestvensky go for? How would his fleet’s wireless be used to outmanoeuvre and engage the enemy? To the alarm and disappointment of many of his own officers, Rozhestvensky decided on total wireless silence from his ships, reasoning that any signals they sent would instantly give the Baltic fleet’s position away to the waiting Japanese. His aim was not to engage the Japanese but to make it through the Straits to Vladivostok unnoticed. All the Russian wireless operators were asked to do was to listen for Japanese signals.

Rozhestvensky chose to go through the Straits of Korea, and his ships approached them in two lines on 25 May 1905. The weather was rough, with poor visibility. The Russian fleet soon picked up wireless signals from Japanese ships, which became stronger as they headed north-east towards Vladivostok. On a misty morning three days later a Russian hospital ship sighted another vessel and signalled to it, unaware that it was a Japanese cruiser, the
Shinamo Maru
, which had been tailing it. As the mist cleared and the
Shinamo Maru
saw the great line of the Baltic fleet it began to send warning messages, but they did not reach any Japanese stations, which were too far away. However, the Russian fleet picked them up instantly. Guns were trained on the
Shinamo Maru
, but Admiral Rozhestvensky gave no order to fire, possibly fearing that to do so would give their position away.

The captain of the
Ural
signalled in semaphore for permission to jam the Japanese cruiser’s wireless using his powerful equipment. This request was turned down, and the Russian fleet ploughed on at a steady nine knots towards Vladivostok, taking a middle course through the Straits of Korea. It was then that the
Shinamo Maru
came close enough to the rest of the Japanese fleet to report the exact position and route of the Russian ships. Rozhestvensky, knowing that his intended passage must have been reported to the Japanese commander Admiral Togo, could have changed course. Many urged him to do so. But instead he steamed straight into Togo’s well-prepared ambush. The first volley of Japanese shells
killed all Rozhestvensky’s officers, and left him unconscious and badly wounded. Only three of the fifty-nine Russian ships got through to Vladivostok: the rest were sunk or captured, and Rozhestvensky himself was taken prisoner. The confident young officer admired by the Tsar and Kaiser Wilhelm had misunderstood the power of wireless in warfare, with disastrous consequences.

In his defence, it was said that Rozhestvensky’s experience of his inferior wireless equipment made his decision not to use it justifiable, and that the outcome of the conflict, given the strategic advantage of the Japanese, might not have been very different had he made use of wireless, as many of his officers had wanted him to. As for the Japanese, they had adopted early on an unsophisticated system which worked efficiently within its limitations, and used it to the full. It was some consolation for the Marconi Company that, having been beaten to the reporting of war by wireless, the war itself was won with equipment copied from their own design. And from that time on all the navies of the world recognised that they had to come to terms with wireless, and that what they needed above all was a system they could have faith in.

By 1904 the United States government had set up various committees to consider the uses of wireless, but the US Navy continued to dither over which was the best system to invest in. Naval shore stations had been set up the length of the eastern seaboard, and trials went on more or less continuously in an effort to overcome the problem of interference between transmitters whose wavelengths overlapped. Then, in 1905, the navy began to experience a problem it had not anticipated. One of the beauties of Marconi’s invention was that anybody with a few dollars and a bit of ingenuity could get in on the act, and amateur wireless enthusiasts had set up makeshift stations of their own in attics and bedrooms all along America’s east coast. Some of them had equipment more powerful and efficient than the navy itself. And there was nothing the American amateur enjoyed more than hacking into the wavelengths of the US Navy.

A
new shop, the very first of its kind, opened in 1905 at 233 Fulton Street, New York. It was called the Electro Importing Company, and was run by a recent immigrant from Europe, Hugo Gernsback, who had arrived in the United States the previous year with a design for a new dry battery which he hoped would make him a fortune in the New World. Gernsback had been brought up and educated in Luxembourg, studying at the École Industrielle and later at university in Bingen, Germany. Born in 1884, he was ten years younger than Marconi, and had a very different vision of how wireless telegraphy might develop. Gernsback was not concerned about competing with cable companies or sending signals over thousands of miles; he foresaw that cheap, easy-to-build wireless equipment might have a popular appeal among boys and young men like himself. At the end of 1905 he bought space in the magazine
Scientific American
to advertise what was almost certainly the first do-it-yourself wireless station kit. He called it the ‘Telimco Wireless Telegraph Outfit’.

The Telimco kit had its own spark transmitter and coherer-receiver, and was guaranteed to work up to a range of one mile. It was in fact very like one of Marconi’s boyhood magic boxes, and in no way represented any kind of technological breakthrough. But Gernsback, who also sold do-it-yourself Telimco X-ray kits, had recognised a fact that Marconi had failed to appreciate despite
his own background as a schoolboy inventor: homespun wireless telegraphy could be fantastic fun. From the attics and playrooms of suburban Boston or New York the amateur wireless enthusiast could tune in to the exciting clandestine world of the airwaves, which buzzed every night with hundreds of messages. He - there were very few girl amateurs - could learn the secret language of Morse code and use it to send messages to others with home-made wireless stations. Gernsback got in at the beginning of a craze which was to sweep the east coast of North America, and had a profound effect on the way wireless was to develop.

In Great Britain, amateurs had to take out experimental licences from the Postmaster-General after the Wireless Act became law in 1905. But in the United States there were no regulations, and the amateurs were to enjoy a brief period of total freedom, which they exploited with great enthusiasm, ingenuity and a considerable amount of irresponsibility. They had no need to worry about legal action, as they were small fry; if they infringed Marconi’s tuning or other patents, there was no point in a big company pursuing them.

Very rapidly the amateurs learned how to make much more powerful sets than Gernsback’s Telimco starter kits, pillaging all kinds of equipment, much of it designed for quite other purposes. They used old photography plates wrapped in metal foil to make batteries, generated sparks between old brass bedstead knobs, and found that the electrical ignition coils from Model-T Fords provided transmitter power. Cannibalised electric fans could be used to generate a string of sparks. Crude loudspeakers were made with rolled-up newspapers, and when Quaker Oats brought out a cylindrical cardboard package it made an ideal drum around which the wires for a crude tuning system could be wound. Umbrellas’ ribs could be used for aerials, and the power of transmitters could be bumped up by an illegal tap into street power cables. The most difficult and expensive item to acquire was a headset: these were often stolen from public telephone boxes.

Very soon the ingenuity of the amateurs created a vibrant
community of backroom stations on the eastern seaboard which represented the greatest concentration of wireless telegraphy activity in the world. This began to capture the interest and imagination of the popular newspapers and magazines, who were thrilled to discover that youthful enterprise had taken hold of a novel technology and fashioned an entirely new and exciting hobby. In November 1907 the
New York Times Magazine
ran a full-page lead story headlined ‘New Wonders with Wireless - and by a Boy!’ The ‘boy’, twenty-six-year-old William J. Willenborg, had built himself a wireless station in his parents’ home in Hoboken, New Jersey. Photographed in jacket and tie and with an expression of cool determination, he was honoured with a large oval portrait and surrounded by pictures of his apparatus and rooftop aerial. The reporter who had been invited to join him for an evening’s eavesdropping was ecstatic with the excitement of it all: ‘For intrigue, plot and counterplot, in business or in love or science, take to the air and tread its paths, sounding your way for the footfall of your friend’s or enemy’s message. There is romance, a comedy, and a tragedy yet to be written.’

Willenborg demonstrated the command he had of the airwaves. He showed the
Times
reporter how he could jam the signals coming from the Atlantic Highlands station that Marconi had originally had built to take in the 1899 America’s Cup results. In frustration the professional operator tapped out: ‘Lay off New York!’ When Willenborg impishly jammed him again, the operator Morsed: ‘Go to hell.’ When Willenborg leaned on his key again to jam Atlantic Highlands the operator finally gave up, much to the amusement of the ‘boy’ amateur and the reporter.

Not all the amateurs were able to transmit signals and sabotage US Navy and Marconi transmissions. Many were content just to listen in, and for them the great breakthrough was the marketing from 1906 of ‘crystal set’ receivers. The discovery that certain minerals acted as ‘semi-conductors’ of electro-magnetic waves had been made around the turn of the century by the German academic Professor Ferdinand Braun, but nothing practical came of it. Then
simultaneously two men working in the American wireless industry patented the ‘crystal set’, in which a thin wire or ‘cat’s whisker’ was brought into contact with the surface of a piece of carborundum or silicon to act as a receiver. With a crystal set, a bit of tuning and a telephone set, the amateur could tap into just about any wireless signal.

When, after years of frustration and toil, Marconi finally had his transatlantic telegraphy system between Cape Breton and Clifden working reliably in October 1907, there was no triumphant public announcement. It was primarily a service for newspapers, and the company policy was simply to get it running and to hope there would be enough custom to make it pay. The messages transmitted from Cape Breton and Cape Cod provided the American amateurs with great interest, as they could easily tap into them and get a thrilling sense that they were connected with the very heart of an exciting world of urgent news. The night sky had become one great ‘whispering gallery’, as an article in
Scientific American
put it, every word of it tapped out in the romantic dots and dashes of Morse code. But it would not be long before there was music and speech as well on the airwaves.

I
n the late summer of 1906, at New York’s fashionable Café Martin on 26th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, diners were entertained to a performance of popular pieces by classical composers. There were no musicians to be seen, nor was there an Edison phonograph on show: the renditions of Rossini, Chopin, Grieg and Bach emerged from foghorn-like speakers arranged in the rooms. The two pianists playing the music were some way off, in a building opposite the Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway, level with 39th Street. The notes the café’s customers heard were generated electronically by a huge bank of alternators, each of which had been set to hum at a different pitch, and travelled down telephone wires to be ‘broadcast’ from the speakers in the Café Martin.

The machine which produced this synthesised, piped music was called a Telharmonium, and weighed two hundred tons. It made a deafening hum, and was housed in the basement of the music hall in which the pianists were playing. The Telharmonium, or Dynamaphone as he sometimes called it, was the brainchild of a Washington DC lawyer named Thaddeus Cahill. An earlier version of this giant electronic music generator, which Cahill described as a synthesiser, had been patented in 1898. Cahill’s prototype weighed a mere seven tons, and worked well enough for him to get financial backers to form a company called the New England Electronic Music Company.

With his new funds Cahill refined and enlarged his machine. In search of audiences, the company moved to New York, and one of Cahill’s backers, Oscar T. Crosby, formed the New York Electronic Music Company. The giant machine with its 145 generators or alternators was dismantled and loaded onto thirty-two railroad cars to be transported to New York, where it was carried in horse-drawn wagons to Broadway. A deal with the New York Telephone Company allowed the laying of lines to cafés and restaurants to provide the clientele with a kind of early Muzak.