Signor Marconi's Magic Box by Gavin Weightman Read Free Book Online Page A

four thousand immediately and six thousand when the patent is granted by the American Government . . . I believe it may be better for me to accept one of these early offers . . . even in the case something goes wrong with the other applications I would still have made a considerable profit.
    A sense of urgency, of being on the brink not only of international fame but of a fortune, runs through the letters to old Giuseppe, and was the driving force in Marconi’s life after his arrival in London. This conviction that they were onto something which could bring them all riches was evidently shared by his mother’s side of the family, and their willingness to gamble a small fortune on Marconi arose from the pressure to prevent others from profiting from his invention. There was, at the same time, an underlying anxiety about the validity of the young man’s claim to have devised a genuinely unique technology, for in a very real sense every piece of his ingeniously fashioned and beautifully crafted
equipment was derived from the experimental work of others. Marconi himself was acutely aware of this, and it took the very best patent lawyers in London months to find a form of words which amounted to a convincing case that in assembling bits and pieces devised in laboratories in Germany, France, England and Italy - coils, spark gaps and ‘coherers’ - Guglielmo Marconi had arrived at a unique arrangement.
    Marconi’s blood had run cold when in 1896 he met on Salisbury Plain a companionable young man, Captain Henry Jackson of the Royal Navy, who told him that he too had been experimenting with Hertzian waves, and had actually built and operated a wireless telegraphy system which had been given a trial run on a battleship, with some success. According to Captain Jackson, as Marconi listened he became crestfallen, and it was only when the naval officer assured him that this work was top secret, and there were no plans to apply for a patent, that he cheered up. William Preece, during his brief honeymoon with Marconi, would insist on basking in the reflected glory of having ‘discovered’ the Italian inventor, and continued to lecture to audiences around the country on the great value this new sort of wireless telegraphy might have for lightships and lighthouses. Preece’s promotion of Marconi infuriated one of the leading English scientists of the day, Professor Oliver Lodge of Liverpool University.
    Preece and Lodge had a longstanding feud about the best way to erect lightning conductors - the Post Office had hundreds of them, to protect the telegraphy system from storms - and Lodge could not abide what he regarded as Preece’s ill-informed recounting of the miraculous Marconi invention. An undignified spat broke out on the pages of The Times . ‘It appears that many persons suppose that the method of signalling across space by means of Hertzian waves received by a Branly tube of filings is a new discovery made by Signor Marconi,’ Lodge wrote in a letter to The Times in June 1897. ‘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 signalling in
1894. My apparatus acted vigorously across the college quadrangle, a distance of 60 yards, and I estimated that there would be a response up to a limit of half a mile.’
    By that time Marconi had already demonstrated that the range of wireless waves was not as limited as Lodge claimed. Lodge protested that he did not mean that half a mile was the absolute limit, and commended Marconi for working hard ‘to develop the method into a commercial success’. In the same letter he continued: ‘For all this the full credit is due - I do not suppose that Signor Marconi himself claims any more - but 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”