Signor Marconi's Magic Box (29 page)

At first the novelty of the Telharmonium performances attracted widespread interest and admiration, but it was soon discovered that the powerful signals jumped from the company’s lines to those of ordinary telephone subscribers, who were furious when disjointed bursts of Handel or Bach interrupted their conversations. However, Cahill’s invention survived just long enough to attract the attention of Lee de Forest, who was experimenting with a new kind of receiver which could receive speech and music as well as Morse code.

All those concerned with wireless around the world were searching for more efficient ways of transmitting and receiving electro-magnetic signals. Among them was Ambrose Fleming, whose laboratory at University College, London was littered with rejected experimental aerials, batteries and generators. As he racked his brains for an idea for a better detector than the ‘Maggie’, he recalled that when he worked for Thomas Edison an intriguing observation had been made about the flow of electric particles through a vacuum lightbulb. It was known as the ‘Edison effect’, and in essence was the fact that the current between the filament and the electrode within a bulb would run one way, and not the other. In that sense the bulb acted like a valve in a water pipe, which closed to the flow in one direction, and opened if the flow was reversed. With a little adaptation a lightbulb could be made to pick up the alternating impulses of a wireless signal and convert it into a direct current which would activate a telephone receiver. Fleming had a dozen valves made to his own design by the Ediswan company, and when
they proved effective he ran off along Gower Street to the Patent Office in his green galoshes. That was in 1904, and over the next three years the ‘diode’ valve was tested out at Marconi stations.

In America Lee de Forest, still seeking his fortune, adapted Fleming’s valve to produce a receiver which he called an ‘audion’.
¹¹
With this he made an attempt at transmitting Cahill’s Telharmonium music by wireless. But the audion was a very imperfect piece of equipment: the sound quality was dismal, and the performance was hardly pleasing to the US Navy, which found that its cruisers and battleships were picking up ear-splitting renditions of Rossini instead of vital information about manoeuvres. The public too appeared unimpressed by the notion of broadcasting which de Forest was just beginning to imagine. In December 1906 the
New York Times
carried an editorial with the headline ‘A Triumph but Still a Terror’ in response to de Forest’s claims that he was about to make a big breakthrough in wireless telephony: ‘There is something almost terrifying in the news . . . that attempts at telephoning without wires have already attained such success that scientists announce the approach of the time when man will be able to speak without any conducting wire to a friend in any part of the world.’

Out on the snowy wastes of Brant Rock, Reginald Fessenden was still pursuing his ambition to be the first in the field of ‘wireless telephony’ by transmitting speech. He had asked General Electric to build him high-speed generators which could send out a continuous stream of electro-magnetic signals, and had used these in his attempts to establish a telegraph link between Massachusetts and Machrihanish on the west coast of Scotland, very nearly beating Marconi in the race to cross the Atlantic with intelligible messages. But in January 1906 the quality of reception varied so much that he was often in despair. He wrote to a friend: ‘Sometimes the signals are very loud, so that we can hear Machrihanish with the
telephones six inches away from the ear, but two or three times every month we can hardly hear them at all, which of course is not commercial.’ He was plagued too with the same problem Marconi had, of the loss of reception during daylight hours.

Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1906 Fessenden’s NESCO remained a serious rival for the Marconi Company, and his excited backers were awaiting the announcement that the transatlantic service was reliable enough to be offered to businesses and newspapers. They promised to ride around Pittsburgh in a cab with their legs hanging out when the news came through. Instead, on 5 December the Machrihanish mast collapsed in high winds. It was a fatal blow to NESCO, which had promised so much. In the aftermath of the disaster Fessenden continued to indulge his passion for telephony. On one occasion during the ill-fated transatlantic tests an engineer in Scotland had been sure he had heard a voice at Brant Rock. Encouraged by this, Fessenden began sending short spoken messages to the crews of New England fishing fleets.

The boats of the United Fruit Company plying between South America and Boston all had either de Forest receivers or those of Fessenden’s company, and the US Navy’s ships off the coast of Brant Rock were now mostly equipped with detectors of one kind or another. Early in December 1906 Fessenden sent a telegraph message to all these vessels alerting them to two events for which they were to listen out on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. These would be the world’s first-ever wireless programmes, and would include speech, music and singing. Fessenden then wrote to phonograph companies asking them to donate records by famous performers, and prepared his wife and his assistants to gather with him around the microphone.

Sure enough, on Christmas Eve the wireless telegraphy operators aboard United Fruit ships as they steamed to and from Boston with their cargoes of bananas were startled to pick up not the familiar dots and dashes of Morse code, but the sonorous voice of Reginald Fessenden himself. He was the sole live performer, as his
wife and assistants got stage fright at the last minute. Of that historic night Fessenden wrote:

Fessenden was heard as far south as Norfolk, Virginia. The programme went out again on 31 December, with a different phonograph record and one additional voice, that of a brave assistant who had been persuaded to sing a little.

This first ‘radio’ broadcast in history was heard by only a few fishermen off the New England coast, a handful of naval officers and the very first radio hams. Fessenden continued with the occasional broadcast, and recorded reception at distances of over two hundred miles. But his wealthy Pittsburgh backers Hay Walker Jr and Thomas Given had set their sights on transatlantic telegraphy, and were not interested; they decided to sell out. Even Fessenden himself thought of wireless telephony only as a replacement for Morse code as a means of communication, and surprisingly never thought of broadcasting as a form of entertainment. His pioneer programmes received practically no publicity, and were soon forgotten. The concept of ‘broadcasting’ took a long time to dawn on the new wireless industry, which is surprising, because it had in effect been invented before Marconi arrived in London in 1896, and was well established in one European city by the early 1900s.

V
isitors to the city of Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the first years of the twentieth century might hear, as they arrived by paddle-steamer on the River Danube, the noon-day hour marked by the firing of a cannon from the Citadella. Budapest was one of the most vibrant cities in Europe at that time, with a bustling street life, smart hotels - one of which was called the New York - and around six hundred coffee bars. Formed by the union of two cities that lay on opposite banks of the Danube, Buda and Pest, in 1873, Budapest enjoyed a great cultural and economic revival in the late nineteenth century, and was considered by many to be livelier than Vienna. One thing the city lacked, however, was accurate public clocks. The midday cannon-shot filled the gap for a population which had reached around 800,000 by 1900.

There was, however, an alternative to the cannon for an accurate time check for an elite group of around six thousand Magyar-speaking citizens of Budapest, and those who moved quickly enough in some of the most fashionable hotels and cafés. All they had to do was pick up a telephone and tune in to a station called Telefon Hirmondo, which announced the exact astronomical time at noon as part of its daily schedule of programmes. In the Magyar tongue ‘
hirmondo
’ was the term for a town crier, and the city’s unique telephone broadcasting system fulfilled the function of the old liveried bellower of the latest news, and a good deal more.

Reporting on this novelty in 1901, Thomas S. Denison wrote in the American magazine
World’s Work
:

Most of the thousands of foreign visitors to Budapest had never heard of Telefon Hirmondo, and could be startled by the abrupt upheavals it caused in public places. In his
Hungary and the Hungarians
(1908) the English writer W.B. Foster Bovill warned: ‘You may be seated as I was in the reading-room of one of the hotels or in a large coffee-house, when suddenly a rush is made for a telephone-looking instrument which hangs from the wall.’

Telefon Hirmondo was the brainchild of Tivador Puskas, a Hungarian who worked for a time at Thomas Edison’s experimental hothouse Menlo Park in New Jersey. Edison credited Puskas with the invention of a form of telephone switchboard, and clearly had a high opinion of him. As early as 1881 Puskas had delighted visitors to the Paris Exposition Internationale d’Électricité Téléphonique with a ‘Théȃtrephone’ demonstration, in which a concert was transmitted from a hall by telephone. In 1882 he repeated the show in his native Budapest, with a performance from the national theatre to a nearby hall. When Tivador’s brother Ferenc acquired the first telephone concessions in Hungary in 1881 he hired the young Nikola Tesla to work on the equipment’s design, setting that eccentric inventor on the path to his career in Paris and the United States.

In Budapest, Tivador devised Telefon Hirmondo, creating a newsroom and studio to broadcast regular bulletins to a thousand
subscribers who rented lines connected to the central telephone exchange. The first programmes went out in 1893, but Tivador died within a few weeks of his triumph. There were teething troubles, and new lines had to be laid, but the service became well established, and lasted for a quarter of a century.

Very little was known about Telefon Hirmondo outside Hungary until articles began to appear in European and American journals in the early 1900s. In June 1907
Scientific American
carried a vivid account of the operation of the station. One of the big problems with the existing technology was the amplification of sounds to enable them to travel through long lengths of cable. Although the Hungarians appear to have devised some ingenious solutions, the qualities of the old town crier were still called upon. The printed news items were bellowed out in relay by eight readers, who were observed in action by the
Scientific American
correspondent:

For broadcasts of musical performances there were enormous microphones, four feet in diameter, to receive the maximum volume.

Not everyone in Budapest could tune in to Telefon Hirmondo:
it was a service for an elite. Nevertheless, it embodied a fully developed idea of what later became known as broadcasting.
Scientific American
reproduced a full day’s programme: