Heaviside’s life was utterly different from Marconi’s. In an affectionate memoir Professor G.F.C. Searle recalled a visit he made with his wife to Heaviside’s home: ‘We had been warned what we should find. The teapot spout was completely stopped up by tea leaves and no tea could come out of it. Oliver tipped the pot so far that tea ran out of the top. He caught what he could in the cups, and carefully spooned the tea leaves out of Mrs Searle’s cup.’ On another visit Heaviside told them: ‘There are nine pieces of bread and butter - three pieces each. There is some cake at the end but I would not recommend it.’ Heaviside wrote to Searle around 1902: ‘if I boil an egg, I am startled by a loud report; either I did not put any water in or else it has boiled away’.

  At that time Heaviside was fifty-two years old, living in squalor with a woman relative who acted as housekeeper. His strange manner drew the attention of local boys, who constantly persecuted him, throwing stones at his windows. He offered the local police 150 apples from his garden if they would keep a watch on his home. And yet this social misfit was one of only two scientists in the world in 1902 who proposed the correct solution to the puzzle of how Marconi was able to transmit wireless signals to distances of over two thousand miles.

  Heaviside was a pure scientist: he arrived at Heinrich Hertz’s proof of electro-magnetic waves through deduction at the time the German was testing James Clerk Maxwell’s ideas in his laboratory. When Marconi’s wireless telegraphy began to receive wide publicity, Heaviside was quick to point out that William Preece - who was publicly suggesting it was he, and not Marconi, who had developed it - did not understand it at all, and could not tell the difference between induction and Hertzian waves. In September 1900, while Marconi and Ambrose Fleming were about to start work at Poldhu, Preece was telling the British Association: ‘The sensation created in 1897 by Mr Marconi’s application of Hertzian waves distracted attention from the more practical, simpler and older method.’ By 1907 he was telling a committee of the House of Commons that he had been working on wireless telegraphy twelve years before Marconi came to Britain.

  When Heaviside heard about Marconi’s transatlantic signal he quickly had an explanation based on his profound understanding of electro-magnetism. He wrote to The Electrician suggesting that there might be a conducting layer in the upper atmosphere which reflected the wireless waves, but his letter was not published. Then, in 1902, he was asked to contribute a piece on ‘The Theory of the Electric Telegraph’ to the tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In it he mentioned, almost in passing, that seawater had ‘enough conductivity’ for Hertzian waves to bounce off it, and that ‘there may possibly be a sufficiently conducting layer in the upper air. If so, the waves will, so to speak, catch on it more or less. Then the guidance will be by the sea on one side and the upper layer on the other.’

  The theory of an upper layer of the atmosphere which reflected wireless waves downwards was also proposed by Arthur Kennelly, an expatriate Briton working in America. But nobody took any notice, and there were plenty of rival theories. None of this mattered much to Marconi, for even if there was a reflecting layer sending his long wireless waves back to earth, nobody had any idea how it behaved.

  Oliver Heaviside turned down a number of honours. He declined the invitation to the banquet held for all the contributors to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, although he did accept the fee. In his last years he took to awarding himself the self-deprecating acronym ‘W.O.R.M.’ after his name. There is no record of any correspondence or contact between him and Marconi.

  As far as the development of wireless went, Heaviside’s brilliant speculation was of no practical use at the time, because nobody knew how to examine the properties of the upper atmosphere. And there were still many urgent unanswered questions. Would wireless waves travel as far over land as over the sea? Most self-appointed experts thought not; mountain ranges might prove to be an obstacle. Marconi himself was not sure. There was only one way to find out.

  21

  The King’s Appendix

  Queen Victoria had died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 22 January 1901. The nation was in mourning for six months, decked out in miles of black crêpe. The coronation of her son Edward in Westminster Abbey was fixed for 26 June 1902, and for weeks beforehand London was transformed, with the arrival of exotic troops of soldiers and sailors from all over the Empire who would take part in the coronation parades. There was to be a naval review at Spithead, and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy made arrangements to arrive by sea aboard his cruiser the Carlo Alberto. The twenty-nine-year-old Emmanuel had come to the throne only two years earlier, after the assassination of his father, King Umberto, by a member of an international group of anarchists, an Italian from New Jersey.

  A friend of Marconi’s, the Italian naval officer Luigi Solari, had asked the young King if a ship might be made available for wireless experiments. Fiercely proud that the world-famous inventor of wireless was an Italian national, Emmanuel invited Marconi to install his equipment aboard the Carlo Alberto, so that when the coronation and naval review were over Marconi could join the King and conduct whatever wireless tests he liked as they steamed back to Italy. This was a tremendous opportunity for Marconi and he happily accepted Emmanuel’s offer.

  When the Carlo Alberto came in sight of the English coast on the morning of 18 June 1902, the captain, Admiral Mirabello, the King and the ship’s crew could see the masts of Poldhu in the distance. With equipment Luigi Solari had fitted to the ship they exchanged messages with the Marconi station. The next day George Kemp bought a large Union Jack in preparation for Coronation Day, and hoisted it on one of the wireless masts.

  At 11.15 a.m. on 24 June a notice was posted outside Buckingham Palace which read: ‘The King is suffering from perityphlitis. His condition on Saturday was so satisfactory that it was hoped that with care his Majesty would be able to go through the Coronation ceremony. On Monday evening a recrudescence became manifest, rendering a surgical operation necessary today.’ Crowds gathered outside the palace waiting for news, while others went to St James’s Square to see if they could learn anything from the Earl Marshal at Norfolk House, organisational headquarters for the coronation. The Times reported: ‘But the servant who answered the door . . . had nothing to say to the general inquirer. Even to the accredited press representative his answer was courteous but laconic: “The Coronation will be postponed; we can tell you no more.”

  In early-twentieth-century England, only the poor were treated in hospitals: the well-to-do were attended and operated on at home. Edward had what we now call appendicitis. He needed an operation, and the surgeon chosen was the celebrated Frederick Treves of the London Hospital, who had announced his retirement in his early forties after making a fortune in private practice. It was Treves who had befriended and found a haven for the deformed Joseph Merrick, known as ‘the Elephant Man’. An operating bed was brought from the London Hospital and installed in a room in Buckingham Palace, with one nurse in attendance.

  The anaesthetics in use at the time were ether and chloroform, which were applied only briefly. Surgeons like Treves prided themselves on the speed with which they worked so patients were not rendered unconscious for long. Edward, however, was sixty-four years old, overweight and not in the best physical condition. He reacted violently to the first administration of the anaesthetic, and almost swallowed his tongue: his beard had to be pulled hard to retrieve it so that he did not choke. Queen Alexandra, who was present, became hysterical and had to be ushered from the room. Treves, wearing a dirty old coat - he was an old-fashioned practitioner, with little time for what he regarded as the ‘continental’ obsession with cleanliness which had developed after the discovery of micro-organisms - then proceeded to open up the future monarch and drain the pus from his infected appendix.

  It was not at all certain that Edward would survive, and if he did, how long the coronation would be delayed. Many foreign visitors packed up and went home. King Victor Emmanuel decided to go back to Italy on the Carlo Alberto, and hasty arrangements were made to get Marconi’s equipment aboard at Poole. Then Emmanuel changed his mind. He had been in touch by cable with Tsar Nicholas, who invited him to Russia. Marconi had gone to London, leaving George Kemp to organise the fitting-out of the Carlo Alberto. At the last minute it was arranged that he would meet the ship at Dover, by which time Kemp would have it ready for an exciting series of experiments as it sailed north. An extra mast was raised on the ship, and a four-stranded aerial rigged as high as possible as the Carlo Alberto steamed towards Dover. Once again Kemp stayed behind in England, waving Marconi goodbye and wishing him well with his latest invention. On board the Carlo Alberto for this unexpected voyage north was an entirely new kind of detector which Marconi had only just put together.

  Any device which reacted to the impact of electro-magnetic waves could be turned into a receiver of Morse dots and dashes. Marconi had read accounts by the brilliant New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford of experiments in which electro-magnetic waves were used to demagnetise iron needles. Just three years older than Marconi, Rutherford was a true scientist who had become famous for his work on radioactivity; in 1931 he would be honoured with the title Lord Rutherford.

  In 1894 Rutherford had written a paper showing how a coil of magnetised wire could become a detector of wireless waves. It took Marconi’s dogged determination and craftsman’s ingenuity to fashion from Rutherford’s blueprint a practical wireless detector out of bits and pieces he could lay his hands on while working at the Haven Hotel. Like the Vail brothers, who bought milliners’ copper wire designed for ‘skyscraper hats’ for their experimental electric telegraph, Marconi made use of an unexpected source for the thin wire he needed. While cycling around the Poole area he had often gone into Bournemouth, and his attention had been attracted by a pretty girl in a flower shop who worked all day making posies for visitors to the resort. Marconi remembered that she had used a delicate wire frame for their structure, and in a moment of inspiration he cycled to Bournemouth and persuaded the girl in the flower shop to sell him some lengths of fine decorative wire. He almost ‘scorched’ Heaviside-fashion back to the Haven Hotel in his impatience to begin winding it into a coil.

  George Kemp produced a wooden Havana cigar box in which to house the new receiver, and horseshoe magnets were not hard to find. But Marconi also required a revolving strand of wire on two small wooden spools, and these needed a miniature motor of some kind. As always, late-Victorian ingenuity unwittingly provided just the thing. On 2 June Kemp noted in his diary: ‘I went to Bournemouth where I bought a second-hand Edison Phonograph; the clockwork was taken out and used for revolving the iron core of No. 40 silk covered iron wire through the primary coil of the detector.’ Cannibalised Edison cylindrical phonographs were to provide several of the early motors for Marconi’s new invention.

  As the Carlo Alberto raced up the North Sea, Marconi worked night and day testing his magnetic detector. It worked well apart from a persistent problem with atmospheric interference, the price of its greater sensitivity. He also rigged up a coherer and Morse printer to provide a permanent record of messages received. But once again, as on the Philadelphia, the sunrise cut them off from Poldhu once they were five hundred miles away, and signals could not get through again until half an hour after sunset. With a midshipman, Raineri-Biscia, Marconi worked through the night adjusting his equipment and trying out all kinds of devices which he hoped might bring Poldhu back in daylight. But nothing worked. Raineri-Biscia noticed that Marconi became more and more agitated, shouting in Italian with a Bolognese accent: ‘Damn the sun! How long will it torment us!’

  When the Carlo Alberto reached Russia they anchored at Kronstadt, and King Victor Emmanuel went off to meet Tsar Nicholas. Naturally the Tsar wanted to see for himself this remarkable invention of Marconi’s, with which he was able to receive messages from Cornwall, 1600 miles away. He arrived in splendour, with the battleships of his fleet firing salutes, the sailors cheering and bands playing the national anthem. Marconi showed the wireless equipment to the Tsar, who was thrilled to see a special greeting tapped out on the printer. Speaking in English, he asked Marconi where it had come from. Marconi apologetically explained that it had been sent not from Cornwall, but from the other end of the Carlo Alberto, where a transmitter had been hastily put together by Solari. They would not hear from Poldhu again until the sun had set.

  As a matter of courtesy, King Victor Emmanuel had arranged to rendezvous at sea with the German Emperor. Kaiser Wilhelm II, cousin to Edward VII, was regarded in royal and diplomatic circles as ‘not quite sane’. Bismarck said of him: ‘The Kaiser is like a balloon. If you do not hold fast to the string, you never know where he will be off to.’ It was Wilhelm who had demanded that Germany have great ships like the British, and who had ordered the building of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and the Deutschland, both former holders of the Blue Riband. It was also he who had asked William Preece to allow Professor Adolphus Slaby to spy on Marconi. The Kaiser wanted Germany to be ahead of all other countries in new technologies, and it did not please him that Marconi appeared to be far more successful than his own scientists and inventors. The wireless system which Slaby and Count von Arco had developed was fitted on a few ships by 1902, one of them the Deutschland. Other German vessels, like the Kronprinz Wilhelm, had Marconi equipment. And it was the Marconi Company that had most of the shore stations.

  Early in 1902 the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Heinrich, had made an official visit to the United States, sailing on the Kronprinz Wilhelm. He was pleased to find that he could send messages via Marconi operators either to the east or the west all voyage, and was never out of wireless contact. He sailed back from America on the Deutschland, and found to his great annoyance that he could not get any messages through at all with its German wireless equipment. The Germans believed that the Marconi Company was refusing to listen in to Slaby-Arco operators because it wanted a worldwide monopoly of wireless. When the Kaiser learned of this apparent snub to his brother, he was furious. What the American magazine Electrical World described as ‘malignant Marconiphobia’ spread across Germany, and soon Slaby and others were writing indignant letters to the New York Herald complaining that they were the victims of deliberate wireless sabotage.

  Marconi replied in letters to various newspapers, including the New York Times, that the Deutschland’s Slaby-Arco equipment was not tuned to his. It was simply a technical matter, and had nothing to do with any monopolistic ambitions of his company. Had there been the desire, the two systems could have been made compatible, though Marconi’s was superior. His claim that the problem was technical rather than political was disingenuous: he was just trying to calm things down. Nevertheless, according to Electrical World the battle raged with ‘berserk fury’ in Germany, as it did in the columns of American newspapers. This grievance was still raw when King Victor Emmanuel ordered Admiral Mirabello to take the Carlo Alberto to the German port of Kiel for an official meeting with the Kaiser, who was wandering aimlessly at sea in the imperial yacht Hohenzollern awaiting the outcome of Edward’s operation at Buckingham Palace.

  Poor George Kemp, who had been working on installations in England, was cabled by Marconi with a message to get to Kiel as quickly as possible. At 9.25 a.m. on 22 July he bought a train-boat ticket to Kiel at Holborn station in London, and he was on a steamer heading for Germany at 11.30 that morning. Some of his luggage had gone missing when he reached the German coast and he had to cable for it before settling down in a restaurant car on his way to Hamburg. He was in Kiel soon after 11 o’clock the following morning - just over twenty-four hours after leaving London. As there was no sign of the Carlo Alberto he booked himself into a hotel, and watched the harbour. The next morning he noted in his diary: ‘I was aroused by a band and a company of soldiers on the march.’ German militarism was even then evident, a portent of the great conflict to come. Kemp watched the German battleships leave the harbour, and in the early afternoon was pleased to see the Carlo Alberto arrive. After a stroll along the seafront with Marconi and Admiral Mirabello he was given a cabin and dinner on the Italian ship.

  The rendezvous with the Kaiser was some days off, and the time was spent testing Marconi’s equipment in Kiel harbour. Kemp and Marconi stayed up until the early hours of the morning, as that was the only time they could pick up the Poldhu signals - half an hour after daybreak the signals would cease, which Kemp believed had something to do with a ‘change in the earth’s magnetic medium’.

  The arrival of the Hohenzollern with an already aggrieved Kaiser aboard did not go well. It was around midnight, and Admiral Mirabello was ordered by the Germans to greet their King with a twenty-one-gun salute. He replied that it would be a breach of his orders to fire a salute after dark, and when the demand was repeated the decision was taken for the Carlo Alberto to leave immediately. According to the story told by Luigi Solari, which perhaps has some romance in it, as they passed the Hohenzollern they sent her a message by wireless, asking if she wanted news from Poldhu. The reply came back that such a long-distance signal was impossible, whereupon the German operator leaned on his key, jamming the airwaves with meaningless dots and dashes.

 

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