Signor Marconi's Magic Box (30 page)

Telefon Hirmondo made money, as the subscription its wealthy customers were prepared to pay easily covered the cost of delivering
the service. The broadcast of the exact time was greatly appreciated by watchmakers and jewellers, who were later to benefit from the same service provided by wireless.

Although similar broadcasts were attempted in France, England and the United States, they were mostly mere novelties. In 1894 the Chicago Telephone Company set up a system to read local election results to subscribers. A team of 150 operators were given twelve to twenty numbers each to phone, with the assumption that the subscribers would listen in silence as the results were read out to all of them simultaneously, then replace the receiver with a polite ‘Thank you.’ But it did not work out like that. Groups listening to each operator’s recital of the results did not remain passive, but began to squabble among themselves. The company’s general manager, A.S. Hibberd, gave the
Electrical Review
an account of the exciting experimental evening:

Reactions to this early ‘phone-in’ reflect a general fear about broadcasting as a concept: that it could be troublesome and
intrusive. The most aggravating experiments in the United States were with ‘telephone advertising’, a bright idea sales people had once a large number of subscribers were linked to any local exchange. In 1909 a woman complained to her local paper in Rochester, New York:

Despite the success of Telefon Hirmondo in Hungary, the telephone was not the ideal instrument for broadcasting. Wireless was much better, as it would be possible for an audience to tune in and out when they wanted. But, of course, no members of the general public, apart from a few amateur enthusiasts, had a wireless receiver, and there was therefore no audience. The last thing Marconi wanted for his transmissions was ‘eavesdroppers’. He was always at pains to point out that once he had solved the problem of tuning
Morse, messages by wireless would be every bit as private as those sent by cable.

Although Marconi’s huge transmitters at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia and Clifden in Ireland were reliable enough to provide newspapers with a transatlantic service as an alternative to cable, this alone was not going to make his fortune. He still spent most of his time travelling, and had taken Beatrice with him when he went to Nova Scotia for the inauguration of the Glace Bay transmissions in October 1907. While Marconi continued to enjoy the acclaim of the Canadians, Beatrice was not allowed to socialise much, or even to go fishing or hunting with the ebullient Richard Vyvyan.

The young couple, saddened by the loss of their first child, still had no permanent home and no settled life. When Beatrice became pregnant again, Marconi finally rented a country home, Sunbourne in Hampshire, owned by Sir Richard Harvey Bathurst. They moved into Sunbourne in the summer of 1908, but Marconi spent most of his time travelling between Poldhu, the Haven Hotel and Clifden. If he was working in London, he and Bea stayed at the Ritz. When Marconi returned to North America he left Beatrice in a house he rented in the West End of London. He was in Canada when their second child was born on 11 September 1908, and on the return journey to England he read a history of Venice in which he came across the name ‘Degna’, which he chose for his new daughter.

Proud though he was to be a father, the glamorous, itinerant lifestyle Marconi enjoyed so much, mingling on Atlantic liners with great singers, actors and actresses, and the newly emerging film stars, must have made home life seem dull. He and Bea had many rows, which began to worry her family. And he could not relax, for though he was now universally regarded in the popular imagination as ‘the inventor of wireless’, he knew very well that the technology was changing fast, and that at any time he might be toppled from his pedestal. The huckster Abraham White was still in business with his newly formed company, United Wireless, which was fitting out ships with shoddy equipment derived from
patents other than Marconi’s. And Lee de Forest was making great claims for his audion - which looked suspiciously like a copy of a Marconi Company invention - and was promising to transmit speech and music to audiences in America.

Although the Marconi Company’s own Sir Ambrose Fleming had invented the first ‘valve’, the very piece of equipment that would bring the era of broadcasting in wireless, it was treated in the first years as a mere novelty. Marconi himself remained wedded to the technology he trusted, adapting it gradually but always making sure that it worked as advertised, and was therefore attractive to shipping lines, who put greater store by reliability than anything else. The Marconi Company now had several training schools for young operators,
¹²
who supplied a complete service to those who bought its equipment. They fitted out the wireless cabins on the ships, taking the rank of junior officers, and despite their age were soon afforded considerable respect as the guardians of a ship’s safety at sea. When William Preece had sung Marconi’s praises in his Toynbee Hall lecture of 1896, and said that the magic boxes demonstrated that night would ensure that sailors would soon have a ‘new sense and a new friend’, he had, for once, grasped the true potential of wireless telegraphy in the first two decades of its existence. Marconi might have grander ambitions to link the whole world with wireless stations, but it was out on the Atlantic that he achieved his first great life-saving triumphs.

A
t first light on a bitter January morning in 1909 a thick sea mist blanketed the treacherous waters of Nantucket shoals, which lie in the busy sea lanes off the coast of Massachusetts. On a wild headland of Nantucket Island, once celebrated for its whaling fleet and immortalised in Herman Melville’s epic
Moby-Dick
, the wireless operator in the Siasconset station had fallen asleep and the coal on his fire had nearly all burned away. Jack Irwin had had a quiet night, with few messages coming in from Atlantic liners. Even the big ships equipped with wireless had just one operator on board, who would catch what sleep he could with one ear always cocked towards the receiver, which might at any time tap out an important message.

It was the cold which woke Irwin, who roused himself to rebuild his fire. As he was shovelling on the coal he heard his receiver come alive. He put on his headphones and picked up the faint but thrilling sequence which spelled out ‘CQD’. It was the distress call of a Marconi operator: ‘CQ’ was the general call-sign ‘Seek you’, and the ‘D’ stood for distress.

Irwin tapped out his call-sign, ‘MSC’, then took down the incoming message, translating from Morse: ‘Republic wrecked. Stand by for Captain’s Message.’ He knew that the
Republic
, a White Star liner, could not be far offshore, for its wireless had a range of barely seventy miles. Irwin relayed the distress signal, and
told the
Republic
he was calling for tugs to go to her rescue. Then the
Republic
’s wireless died.

That any message had got through at all was a small miracle, for the liner’s lone operator, twenty-six-year-old Jack Binns, an experienced Marconi man, had very nearly lost his life when the ship, creeping through the dense mist with its automatic foghorn sounding, had been halted with a tremendous shudder. Binns had been asleep, and at first had no idea what had happened. He dashed from his bunk to the wireless cabin, where he saw the bows of another ship smash into the side of the
Republic
, wrecking cabins on the upper deck, slicing into the engine room and tearing away part of the wireless cabin.

Binns threw on some clothes and went straight to the Morse key to hammer out the ‘CQD’. For a few moments the ship’s electricity, which powered the wireless station, remained on, then everything went black. Binns rigged up the emergency batteries and checked that the aerial was still intact. He could not use the phone to the bridge, which was down, but the ship’s commander, Captain Inman Sealby, gave instructions for Binns to send the message ‘Republic rammed by unknown steamer 175 miles east Ambrose Light. Lat. 40.7, lon. 70. No danger to lives.’ This was optimistic, for the
Republic
was clearly sinking.

Jack Irwin’s general distress signal from Siasconset was picked up by two liners, of which the
Baltic
was closest to the
Republic
. Its operator soon established contact with Binns. He told them to hurry.

The
Republic
had left New York at 5.30 the previous afternoon, with 1600 passengers, including many well-to-do Americans embarking on a European tour. It had been rammed by a much smaller liner, the
Florida
, which carried two thousand passengers, many of them refugees from Messina in Italy, where they had been made homeless by a recent earthquake. Powerless, and shipping water all the time, the
Republic
was dragged around by the strong currents. Captain Sealby asked for permission to transfer all his passengers to the already heavily loaded
Florida
. This was done
with the
Republic
’s lifeboats, each of which had to make several journeys as there were not enough for all the passengers on board.

Meanwhile, Binns stayed at his post, calling the
Baltic
and guiding it towards them in the dense sea mist. The
Republic
was sinking at the rate of about one foot every hour as its ‘watertight’ compartments filled. The
Florida
stood by, badly damaged and dangerously overloaded. Captain Sealby relied on the trained ears of Binns to estimate how far away the
Baltic
was as its wireless signals became perceptibly stronger, little by little. Around noon it was thought the majestic liner was just ten miles off, but the fog had thickened, and it had had to reduce speed because of the very real danger that it would suddenly emerge from the gloom and ram the
Republic
. Many other ships had by now picked up the distress signals, either from the
Republic
’s own wireless or from the Siasconset station.

All through the afternoon Binns kept at the Morse key, drawing the
Baltic
in until Captain Sealby thought it might be within earshot. Rockets and flares were fired by both ships, but there was no contact. The
Republic
let off its last direction-finding bomb, but the
Baltic
’s crew did not hear it. Finally, at about six o’clock in the evening, Binns asked the
Baltic
to detonate its last bomb. On the
Republic
Captain Sealby, the seven crew members who had remained on board, and Binns stood in a circle and listened intently. Binns heard a faint explosion, and an officer confirmed it. Binns, who had been at the Morse key almost continuously for fifteen hours, returned to the wreck of the wireless cabin and sent the
Baltic
their bearings. He was still in the cabin when he heard the
Baltic
’s foghorn, and then loud cheering as it pulled alongside them with its passengers leaning over the side, waving.

The captain of the
Baltic
was asked to find the
Florida
and to take all its passengers aboard for safety, leaving the
Republic
wallowing and powerless in the swell. Nearly four thousand passengers were taken from the
Florida
in lifeboats and put aboard the
Baltic
, which was a huge liner and capable of carrying many more than its legal limit. Recalling this great drama, Jack Binns said later: