Signor Marconi's Magic Box, page 23
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: . . . when daylight broke the next morning, Sunday, there was one of the greatest concourses of ships ever seen on the seas. Everywhere as far as the eye could see were ships. Every liner and every cargo boat equipped with wireless that happened to be within a three hundred mile radius of the disaster, overhearing the exchange of messages between the Baltic and Republic had gathered around and stood by ready to be of whatever assistance they could. It was a fine testimonial to the value of wireless. Shortly after daybreak the Baltic proceeded to New York and the Florida also proceeded at slow speed, convoyed by two or three other ships that were standing by. And then relief ships cared for the badly damaged Republic.
Jack Binns was the archetypal Marconi operator. Born in Lincolnshire in 1884, he had shown an interest in electrical science and had got a place at a technical school run by the Great Eastern Railway. He learned Morse code and the job of the telegraph operator, and was an ideal candidate for the new world of wireless telegraphy. After he joined the Marconi Company he was sent to Belgium, and became an operator on a German ship fitted with Marconi wireless. He might have stayed there had Germany, which was still campaigning to bring the Marconi Company into line, not made the decision to dismiss all foreign operators from its ships. Germany had established at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference of 1906 that the international distress signal should be its own: the letters ‘SOS’, which in Morse is three dots, three dashes, and three dots. Marconi operators chose to ignore this ruling, and continued to use their own distress call, ‘CQD’. Out on the Atlantic the chances were that wireless operators would know each other personally, and Marconi men could behave as if there were no international rules or laws governing their behaviour.
The first news-sheet ever produced on an ocean liner with reports transmitted from the shore by wireless. Returning from New York in 1899 on the SS St Paul, Marconi persuaded the captain to allow him to use the print room to produce the Transatlantic Times, with news sent from the Royal Needles Hotel. Passengers paid $1 a copy, which was donated to a fund for seamen.
A love letter from the American heiress Josephine Holman, who Marconi met on the liner St Paul in 1899. The shipboard romance had led to a secret engagement. Back home in America, Josephine wrote some of her letters to Marconi in Morse code in case her mother, who did not know of her engagement, found them.
The wild and desperate scene of Marconi’s greatest achievement, which astonished the world and was greeted with scepticism by many scientists. Here he watches as helpers attempt to get a huge kite airborne at St John’s, Newfoundland, in December 1901, to carry an aerial with which he hoped to pick up a signal from Cornwall on the other side of the Atlantic.
The proof Marconi needed to dispel doubts that he could send wireless signals more than two thousand miles: a chart, signed by the captain and first mate of the SS Philadelphia, confirming the distances Morse messages were received as the liner sailed from Southampton to New York in February 1902.
A ‘magnetic detector’ devised by Marconi in 1902 to replace his earlier receiver, the coherer. Though it looks makeshift in its cigar-box housing, and included a motor cannibalised from an Edison phonograph and coils made of florists’ wire, the ‘maggie’, as wireless operators called it with affection, served Marconi well for many years, and was the prototype of the receiver used on the Titanic.
A favoured, adopted son of the British upper crust, Marconi is here decked out in some kind of ceremonial regalia as he accompanies his friend Sir Henneker Heaton MP to a bash at Westminster to celebrate Edward VII’s coronation in 1902.
A thorn in Marconi’s flesh for many years, the boastful and eccentric American Lee de Forest, posing with his claim to fame, the ‘audion’, an early wireless valve, and a later, miniaturised model. De Forest styled himself ‘the Father of Radio’, but all his claims to inventive originality were hotly disputed.
American wireless pioneers and their unscrupulous backers were keen to convince a gullible public that they had beaten Marconi at his own game. This exhibit, put on at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904 by Abraham White, the fraudster who funded Lee de Forest, claims, with some justification, two ‘firsts’: the Morse-code car-phone, and the use of wireless in war, to report on naval battles between Russia and Japan.
A dramatic illustration of how Marconi’s practical but anachronistic technology grew to outlandish proportions. These are the gigantic power packs of his transmitter at Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland, built before he discovered there were more efficient ways to send signals across the Atlantic.
The final scene of what the French newspapers called ‘Le Match Drew-Crippen’, in which Inspector Drew of Scotland Yard chased Hawley Harvey Crippen, wanted for the murder of his wife, across the Atlantic. The captain of the liner Montrose, on which Crippen hoped to escape with his lover Ethel Le Neve, saw through their disguises and alerted Inspector Drew by wireless.
When the Titanic began to sink in the early hours of 15 April 1912, the shocking news was relayed across the Atlantic by Marconi operators. Tragically, this message from the liner Virginian to the Californian, the ship nearest the Titanic when it went down, was to no avail. It was sent at 4 a.m., nearly two hours after the Titanic sank, but was not picked up by the Californian’s lone wireless operator, who was asleep.
Marconi was acknowledged worldwide as the hero of the Titanic disaster, for without his invention on board, and the wireless distress signals sent out, the fate of the ship would have remained a mystery and nobody would have survived. Many perished because of a lack of lifeboats, a point made in this American cartoon, which has Marconi telling King Neptune he can ‘beat him anytime’ - once the shipping lines provide the rescue boats.
A family snapshot of Marconi with his wife Bea and their three children Degna (left), Giulio and Gioia. Taken around 1920, this was not a picture of domestic bliss, for Bea was not prepared to endure her husband’s long absences and infidelities for much longer; they were divorced three years later, when Bea herself had found a lover whom she wanted to marry.
Oliver Lodge, an eminent English physicist and wireless pioneer, making a broadcast in one of the first radio studios in the early 1920s. Though Lodge was sometimes bitter about Marconi’s commercial success, he showed a greater interest himself in spiritualist séances and discovering a proof of life after death than in developing a workable wireless system.
The mobile Marconi wireless kit proudly displayed by British soldiers in the First World War. Wireless was used in the trenches, where a Marconi engineer developed direction-finding techniques, but it had its greatest impact in the decoding of German naval messages picked up by listening stations on the English coast.
Marconi with his second wife Cristina Bezzi-Scali enjoying the sunshine of his fame on the yacht Elettra, which he bought and had fitted out as a floating home and laboratory in 1920.
While it was being towed in, the badly damaged Republic sank, with the captain and first officer still aboard. They were rescued after a search, and Jack Binns finally steamed back to New York. It was then that his real nightmare began. At the White Star pier a group of sailors and stewards hoisted Binns and Captain Sealby onto their shoulders and carried them through the cheering crowd, amidst a fanfare of trumpets. The New York Times and all the other newspapers and magazines had followed the drama, and Jack Binns was treated like a modern pop star. He did his best to shun this unwanted publicity, but the press would not leave him alone. The Marconi Company exploited his celebrity to the full, producing publicity cards with a photograph of Binns, captioned ‘Wireless hero’ and decorated with their own ‘CQD’.
On their way into New York from Nantucket the passengers on the Baltic made a collection, the money from which was used to strike commemorative coins of the event. All the crew members of the Baltic, Republic and Florida received medals, but four were struck in gold, one each for the three captains and Jack Binns. On one side of the medal was the distress call ‘CQD’ above a picture of a ship with ‘SS Republic’ below, and on the reverse was a citation commemorating the rescue.
Binns was a reluctant hero, but Guglielmo Marconi basked more happily in the reflected glory of the story: it was his invention that had saved nearly four thousand lives. The only casualties had been three passengers on the Republic, who were killed when the Florida rammed into their cabins. The magazine Harper’s wrote up the drama of the rescue as if wireless had only just been invented: ‘What a wonder-tale it is and how deeply moving - the cry for help thrown out into the air from a mast-tip, and caught, a hundred miles or more away . . . It is a new story; there never was one quite like it before.’
Jack Binns could not wait to get away from New York and back to work. But when he arrived back in Liverpool on the Baltic there were again huge crowds, who saw him reunited with his girlfriend. In his home in Peterborough he had to endure a mayoral reception. Finally, Marconi himself presented him with a commemorative watch.
From then onwards the Marconi wireless operator was no longer an intriguing but minor figure who tapped out inconsequential messages for first-class passengers: he was the saviour on the high seas. With his horror of publicity and entirely genuine puzzlement at the adulation he received, Jack Binns proved himself a true heir to the young Marconi, modestly brushing aside the plaudits, insisting that he was only doing his job. None of the boasts of Marconi’s rivals could compare with the triumph of this rescue at sea: it was not long before he would be awarded the highest of international honours for his achievements, and it was probably the rescue of the Republic which tipped the balance in his favour.
35
Dynamite for Marconi
On 10 December 1896, just two days before Guglielmo Marconi’s demonstration of his magic boxes at Toynbee Hall in London, an inventor with more than three hundred patents to his name died in San Remo, Italy. Alfred Nobel was both an immensely wealthy and an immensely cultured man, a poet who was fluent in Russian, French, English and German as well as his native Swedish. He was born in Stockholm in 1833, the son of Immanuel Nobel, an enterprising builder. The family were bankrupted by an unfortunate accident in which a consignment of construction materials was lost, and Immanuel took them first to Finland and then to Russia, where his wife supported them by running a grocery store. Immanuel had been experimenting with explosives to blast rock for his construction work, and in time he was awarded a contract to provide the Russian army with equipment, including explosives for a crude form of naval mine. The family settled in St Petersburg, where Immanuel prospered and arranged for his children to be educated by private tutors.
The young Alfred Nobel, whose fondness for literature was regarded by his father as unfortunate, was despatched to various parts of the world to work with chemical firms and academics, and finally settled in Paris. There he learned about the highly volatile explosive nitro-glycerine, and began to experiment with ways of making it serviceable. Meanwhile his father’s Russian business collapsed and the family fortune was once again in jeopardy until two of Alfred’s brothers revived it by developing the Russian oil industry. Alfred returned to Sweden, where he continued to experiment with nitro-glycerine. It was a very dangerous substance: one of his brothers was killed along with other workers in an explosion before Alfred had found a way of making it safe, producing nitro-glycerine in solid sticks which could only be detonated with a blasting cap. He called it ‘dynamite’, and patented it in 1867. Dynamite made him his fortune.
At the age of forty-three, Alfred Nobel was still single. The French novelist Victor Hugo described him as ‘Europe’s richest vagabond’. Desperate for a relationship, he put a lonely hearts advertisement in a newspaper: ‘Wealthy, highly educated gentleman seeks lady of mature age, versed in languages, as secretary and supervisor of household.’ The post went to Countess Bertha Kinsky, an Austrian aristocrat who stayed with Nobel for only two months but remained a friend for the rest of his life. She married a fellow Austrian, Count Arthur von Sutter, and became an activist in the European peace movement towards the end of the nineteenth century. Nobel, though famous for his invention of dynamite, became a supporter of the peace movement - explosives were more widely used for blasting rock for roads and mines than in warfare. He always retained his interest in literature and poetry.
When he died, aged sixty-three, Nobel was unmarried and childless. His family were startled to find that he had left most of his fortune in the trusteeship of two engineers, with instructions that they should award annual prizes for the best work anywhere in the world in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. By 1901 the Nobel Foundation was established, and was deliberating on who should receive the first awards. Scientists around the globe were asked to put names forward. One of those consulted was Ambrose Fleming, and it occurred to him straight away that Marconi should be a contender. He wrote to him: ‘I do not know whether you have ever heard of the Nobel Prizes of the Swedish Academy. Mr Nobel was the inventor of dynamite and he left an enormous fortune to the Swedish Academy for funding Institutes and awarding prizes to inventors . . . One of these is for physics or inventions in physics . . . It occurs to me that your name should be put forward . . . and I shall be very pleased to nominate you.’
That first-ever Nobel Prize for physics in fact went to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen for his discovery of X-rays, which had already had a profound influence on medicine. Wireless was still very new, and Marconi had not yet spanned the Atlantic at the time the first contenders were being considered. For the next seven years his name was always up for consideration by the Swedish Academy, but the award was given to others. Marconi had no expectation of winning it, because he was always conscious of the fact that he was not, technically speaking, a proper scientist with qualifications, and had only honorary academic posts awarded in recognition of his practical achievements.
After the excitement of the great sea rescue in January 1909, Marconi settled back into his work routine, enjoying his frequent trips across the Atlantic in the sumptuous saloons of luxury liners. Beatrice, his young daughter Degna and his mother would still sometimes stay at the Haven Hotel in Poole, where in his few spare moments the faithful George Kemp would try to keep them amused. On occasion, following forlornly in her husband’s foot-steps, Beatrice would travel to the remote wireless stations. The largest of these, at Clifden, was in her native Ireland, and it was while she was staying there in the autumn of 1909 that she discovered she was pregnant once again. Marconi was on a liner returning from America, and in her youthful eagerness Beatrice thought it would be exciting to break the news to him as soon as possible, not by telegraph but face to face before his ship arrived. A tug was due to take supplies to the liner as it approached the Irish coast, and she persuaded the skipper to take her aboard, and to let the captain know that an unexpected passenger should be added to the distinguished list in first class. It should have been a wildly romantic meeting. Beatrice found Marconi in the company of the great tenor Enrico Caruso and a party of glamorous actresses. The sight of his wife broke the spell. Instead of greeting her warmly, Marconi was angry at this intrusion on his other life. Beatrice was heartbroken, and locked herself in his cabin until the liner docked at Liverpool, refusing all his apologies.
It took a long while for the wound to heal, but by December 1909 they were reconciled. Marconi was away again, but he had read about an exciting rumour. He wrote to Beatrice: ‘Some of the papers have said that I have got the Nobel Prize of £8,000. It rather makes one’s mouth water to think about it just now, but I suppose it’s not true.’
The reports turned out to be correct: Marconi was to share the 1909 Nobel Prize for physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, the Principal of the Physics Institute at the University of Strasbourg. Braun was hardly known to the public, though he had invented the cathode ray tube, which was to become an essential component of television. He had also studied, both theoretically and practically, many of the same problems as Marconi, although the rivalry between Germany and the Marconi Company had ensured that they knew little of each other’s work. When the two met for the first time in Stockholm both were in a state of pleasant surprise that they had received a share of the award: Marconi because he was not really a scientist, and Braun because he imagined his work was virtually unknown outside German academic circles. Perhaps because he was so conscious of his lack of academic credentials, Marconi’s Nobel speech was highly technical, a detailed account with diagrams of all his experiments going back to 1894. He delivered it in English rather than Italian, explaining at the end that he felt this was a more widely understood language.
Marconi was frank about the fact that he did not understand how his signals had spanned the Atlantic, though he ran through the existing theories about waves bending and the effects of the earth’s ‘magnetic fields’. He made no mention of Oliver Heaviside, who was more than once put up for the Nobel Prize himself, or of Heaviside’s theory about waves being reflected by the ionosphere.
There can have been few successful inventors with as little theoretical understanding of their own achievements as Marconi. But that did not matter much to him, or to his companies, which were now the world’s foremost makers and providers of wireless telegraphy. If an Atlantic liner had a wireless cabin, the equipment would almost certainly be Marconi’s, and the young man operating it one of his employees.
