Thunderstruck (11 page)

Slaby realized how much the kaiser would value this new information. Slaby adored Wilhelm. In a letter to Preece, he would write, in unpolished English, “I can’t love him more than I [do], he is the best and loveliest monarch who ever sit on a throne with the deepest understanding for the progress of his time. More than ever I regret, that those horrid politics have made him a stranger to your countrymen and to your whole country, that he is loving so very deeply.”

But this adoration transformed Slaby from neutral academic into de facto spy. In Berlin Slaby had been experimenting on his own with coherers and induction coils to generate electromagnetic waves. He knew the fundamentals, but now he took detailed notes on how Marconi had designed, built, and assembled his apparatus. There can be little doubt that if Marconi had known just how much detail Slaby had harvested, he would have barred him from the tests, but apparently he was too deeply engrossed to notice.

More messages followed.

“It is cold here and the wind is up.”

“How are you?”

“Go to bed.”

“Go to tea.”

And of course, this early example of wireless humor, possibly the first: “Go to Hull.”

Next Marconi tried sending signals all the way across the channel. Though barely legible, they did reach the opposite bank nine miles away, a new record. To Slaby, such a distance seemed incomprehensible. “I had not been able to telegraph more than one hundred meters through the air,” Slaby wrote. “It was at once clear to me that Marconi must have added something else—something new—to what was already known.”

After the experiments Slaby returned quickly to Germany. He was back in Berlin within two days and immediately wrote to Preece to thank him for arranging his visit. “I came as a stranger and was received like a friend and experienced once more, that people may be separated by politics and newspapers but that science unites them.”

Marconi did not share these warm feelings. Just as Preece felt betrayed by Marconi, Marconi now felt betrayed by Preece, for inviting Slaby to witness the experiments. Outwardly, however, he and Preece appeared still to be allies. With post office help Marconi continued his experiments, and Preece prepared for his talk at the Royal Institution, one of the most anticipated lectures in London.

In Berlin, Slaby immediately got to work replicating Marconi’s equipment.

I
N
L
IVERPOOL
O
LIVER
L
ODGE
roused himself from his dalliances with X-rays and ghosts. Angered by the attention being heaped upon Marconi, and by Preece’s patronage, he hired his own attorney. On May 10, 1897, he filed an application to patent a means of tuning wireless transmissions so that signals sent from one transmitter would not interfere with those from another. In the same application he sought also to patent his own coherer and a tapping device that automatically thumped the coherer after each transmission to return its filings to their nonconductive state.

He had to withdraw these last two claims, however. Marconi’s patent had priority.

This did nothing to quell Lodge’s mounting resentment; nor did the news that Preece now planned a lecture on Marconi’s wireless telegraphy at the Royal Institution. For Lodge, it was too much. On Saturday, May 29, 1897, he wrote to Preece to remind him of his own Royal Institution lecture three years earlier:

“The papers seem to treat the Marconi method as all new. Of course you know better, [and] so long as my scientific confreres are well informed it matters but little what the public press says.

“The stress of business may however have caused you to forget some of the details published by me in 1894. I used brass filings in vacuo then too. It could all have been done 3 years ago had I known that it was regarded as a commercially important desideratum. I had the automatic tapping-back [and] everything.”

P
REECE WENT AHEAD
with his lecture at the Royal Institution. He and Marconi included a demonstration similar to what they had done at Toynbee Hall, with bells “ringing merrily” from refuse cans, as
The Electrician
put it. The journal called the experiments “wizard-like.”

Preece told the audience, “The distance to which signals have been sent is remarkable,” and added, “we have by no means reached the limit.” Here he aimed an attack at Oliver Lodge. Without identifying Lodge by name, Preece alluded to Lodge’s declaration of three years earlier that Hertzian waves probably could not travel farther than half a mile. “It is interesting to read the surmises of others,” Preece said. “Half a mile was the wildest dream.”

Here, as
The Electrician
reported, Preece “scored an effective hit.”

At the close of his lecture great applause rose from the audience. From Lodge and the Maxwellians came more fury. In a striking breach of the decorum that governed Victorian science, Lodge took his anger public. In a letter to
The Times
he wrote, “It appears that many persons suppose that the method of signaling across space by means of Hertzian waves received by a Branly tube of filings is a new discovery made by Signor Marconi. It is well known to physicists, and perhaps the public may be willing to share the information, that I myself showed what was essentially the same plan of signaling in 1894.” He complained that “much of the language indulged in during the last few months by writers of popular articles on the subject about ‘Marconi waves,’ ‘important discoveries’ and ‘brilliant novelties’ has been more than usually absurd.”

The attack startled even his friend and fellow physicist George FitzGerald, though FitzGerald shared Lodge’s opinion. Shortly after the
Times
letter appeared, FitzGerald wrote to Lodge and cautioned, “It would be important to keep it from becoming a personal question between you and Marconi. The public don’t care about that and will only say, ‘This is a personal squabble: let them settle it amongst themselves.’”

FitzGerald did not blame Marconi. “This young chap himself, I understand he is merely 20”—actually, he was twenty-three—“deserves a great deal of credit for his persistency, enthusiasm, and pluck and must be really a very clever young fellow and it would be very hard to expect him to be quite judicial in his views as to everybody’s credit in the matter.” Marconi had not been “very open,” he wrote, “but he is hardly to blame if his head is a bit swelled under the circumstances, and no Italian or other foreigner was ever really fair in their judgments so that it is quite unreasonable to expect them to be so.”

The real problem was Preece, FitzGerald charged. He urged that Lodge focus his attacks on him, in particular on how Preece and the post office—“
absurdly
ignorant, as usual”—had ignored the scientific discoveries on which Marconi had based his apparatus and instead had been seduced by a “secret box.”

He added, “Preece is, I think, distinctly and intentionally scoffing at scientific men and deserves severe rebuke.”

O
N
J
ULY
2, 1897, M
ARCONI
received his full, formal patent and, without Preece’s knowledge, moved steadily closer to join with Jameson Davis to form a new company.

Preece may have believed he had stymied this plan. In a letter to superiors on July 15, in which he argued the time had come to consider acquiring the patent rights to Marconi’s system, he wrote: “I have distinctly told him that as he has submitted his scheme to the consideration of the Post Office, the Admiralty and the War Department, he cannot morally enter into any negotiation with anyone else or listen to any financial proposals which might lead to a species of ‘blackmailing’ of his principal, if not his only, customers. He accepts and recognizes this position.”

Preece recommended the government pay a mere £10,000 for the patent rights—about $1.1 million today—and doubted Marconi would feel himself in a position to argue. “It must be remembered that Mr. Marconi is a very young man…. He is a foreigner. He has proved himself to be open and candid and he has resisted very tempting offers. He has very little experience. On the other hand he cannot do much without our assistance and his system can scarcely be made practical for telegraphy by any one in this country but by ourselves.”

But just five days later Marconi founded his new company. His representatives registered its name as the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Co. and identified its headquarters as being in London. Jameson Davis became managing director, with the understanding that once the enterprise was well established he would resign. Marconi received sixty thousand shares of stock valued at one pound each, representing 60 percent ownership of the company. He also received the £15,000 cash, and the company’s pledge to spend another £25,000 developing the technology.

Within six months, the value of Marconi’s stock tripled and suddenly his sixty thousand shares were worth £180,000 pounds, about $20 million today. At twenty-three years of age, he was both famous and rich.

I
N
B
ERLIN
A
DOLF
S
LABY
had been busy. On June 17, one month after witnessing the Bristol Channel experiments, he wrote to Preece, “I have now constructed the whole apparatus of M[onsieur] Marconi and it works quite well. After returning from my holidays, which I intend to spend at the sea shore, I will try to signal through some distance. I feel always indebted to your extreme kindness in remembering those very pleasant and interesting days at Lavernock.”

But Slaby’s warm thanks belied grander ambitions, both for himself and for Germany. Soon he and two associates would begin marketing their own system and, with the enthusiastic backing of the kaiser and a cadre of powerful German investors, would become locked in a shadow war with Marconi that embodied the animosities then gaining sway in the larger world.

For the moment, however, Slaby pretended that all that mattered was science and knowledge. He wrote to Preece, “We are happy men, that we need not care for politics. The friendship that science had made cannot be disturbed and I wish to repeat to you the truest feelings of my heart.”