An Ocean of Air (25 page)

Unlike her husband, Annie had great respect for the rights of children. "If only grown-ups understood what harm they can do to children," she would later tell her granddaughter, Degna. "They think nothing of constantly interrupting their train of thought." Annie saw that her young Guglielmo was full of ideas. She also saw that he was capable of intense, obsessive concentration, and she did her best to ensure he had the space and time to put his schemes into practice.

Marconi's early life was full of these contradictions between his parents' characters and cultures: Italian or Irish, Catholic or Protestant, strict or indulgent. But among these different languages, religions, and attitudes, between his father's stern criticisms and his mother's warm indulgences, there was always space for Guglielmo to slip through the cracks and have his own way. His unconventional upbringing only served to accentuate the characteristics he was born with. He grew up to be reserved, willful, focused, independent, and never, ever daunted.

As relief from the formal lessons that he hated, Guglielmo often escaped to his father's library. His early love of Greek mythology soon gave way to the enthralling works of Benjamin Franklin, and Michael Faraday's classic lectures on the new science of electricity. These readings fueled Marconi's passion for fiddling with machines. Before he was ten, he had taken apart his cousin Daisy's sewing machine and rigged it to a roasting spit. (When Daisy cried, the repentant Guglielmo immediately put the machine back together.) At thirteen he made a secret still for distilling spirits. But it was the experiment with the dinner plates that destroyed any remaining shreds of his father's patience. Guglielmo had read all about Franklin's experiments with electricity and decided to try one of his own. For some reason, he wired up a series of plates, but when he sent a jolt of electricity through them, the plates all crashed to the ground. To Guglielmo's father, this was wanton destruction of the most wasteful kind, and for no conceivable purpose. From now on, if he came across one of his son's infernal contraptions, he destroyed it. And from now on, Guglielmo coolly made sure that his inventions remained well hidden.

At first the young Marconi was just playing with his inventions, but in summer 1894, while on vacation in the Italian Alps, he read something that would change his life. A German scientist named Heinrich Hertz had recently died, and Marconi stumbled across his obituary. This didn't only write about Hertz's life; it also explained some of his scientific work.

Seven years earlier, it seemed that Hertz had discovered something extraordinary: invisible electromagnetic waves. A brilliant Scottish scientist named James Clerk Maxwell had predicted that such waves existed, but
until Hertz nobody had seen them in action. They had crests and troughs like normal waves, but traveled at the speed of light. In fact they were simply stretched (or squeezed) versions of light waves, with wavelengths too long (or too short) for our eyes to see.

Hertz had made the waves using a loop of copper wire, its two ends separated by a gap several inches long. When he pressed a key to connect the wire loop to a source of high-voltage electricity, a large blue spark leapt across the gap. The spark itself was normal visible light; there was nothing mysterious about that. But it also set off an electrical disturbance in the surrounding air, a little like dropping a stone in a pond. "Ripples" of alternating electric and magnetic waves spread out invisibly from Hertz's apparatus.

He knew this because he had also stationed a second loop of wire a few feet away, to act as the receiver. The gap in the receiving loop was much smaller, just a fraction of an inch. But when the first spark leapt, invisible waves did indeed shoot over to the receiver and a tiny blue spurt appeared across the gap there, to show they had arrived.

When Marconi read about this experiment, it triggered a spark in his receptive mind. Perhaps these new Hertzian waves could be used to send messages.

Thanks to the industrial revolution, long-distance communication was heavily in demand. At first the technology was very rudimentary. The beginning of the nineteenth century had seen a profusion of semaphore stations spring up throughout Europe. Each station had a tall post bearing a pair of adjustable arms. At the next station, an operator would peer through his telescope, mark down the message's shifting letters, and then adjust his own semaphore arms to pass the information on. Though the process was laborious, a message could pass this way from Paris to the coast in just a few minutes. Better still, in 1860, when most stations had been refitted with the new electric telegraph, cables were laid underground or carried on poles to transmit the ubiquitous dots and dashes of Mr. Morse's code wherever they were needed.

But there the technology had stalled, because messages could go only where the cable was laid. Hence the essence of Marconi's idea: If these Hertzian waves could be made to travel far enough, they could enable communication from anywhere to anywhere, eliminating the need for cables. True, Hertz's waves had traveled only a few yards, and had been greatly enfeebled by the journey. But surely he, Guglielmo Marconi, could improve on the design. Back home he persuaded his mother to let him use two attic rooms for his laboratory, and he worked on his invention for the whole of the winter. Marconi had failed both his navy entrance exams and his attempts to matriculate at the university, and his father had all but washed his hands of this useless son. But Marconi's genius would never lie in theory. His approach was all practice.

By spring 1895, Marconi had a working system that could send and receive dots and dashes across his attic laboratory. By summer he had moved his "wireless" out of the house. He began sending messages hundreds of yards, down to the fields in front of the villa where his older brother Alfonso was waiting with the aerial. Alfonso would wave a handkerchief attached to a pole as soon as the message arrived, and the flutter of white cloth was appearing at greater and greater distances. Still, Marconi knew that his invention would never amount to much unless he could use it to communicate across natural obstacles like hills and mountains.

With no reason to believe that it would work other than his inner conviction, Marconi resolved to send a message to the other side of a nearby hill. For this, a handkerchief would be a useless signal. Loyal Alfonso took up a hunting rifle and headed off up the hill, followed by two assistants hauling the antenna. It was a golden September day. Marconi watched for twenty minutes until the procession mounted to the brow of the hill and then disappeared from view over the horizon. He waited a few minutes more, then sent his message. In the distance, an answering shot from Alfonso's gun echoed down the valley.

Marconi had no idea why or how the waves had passed over the hill. He thought at first they had somehow traveled through it. But he had proved that his wireless waves really could go far. One consequence of this experiment was that, at last, Marconi's father was impressed. All his criticisms evaporated. Now his son's invention was something he could understand, a business proposition. He gave him the money he needed to develop it further, and even sought support for it from the Italian government.

To everyone's disappointment, the government declined. Marconi traveled with his mother to London, where her family connections would get him a hearing, and where he was better received. In spite of Marconi's funny foreign name, London businessmen were reassured to find that he carried himself in the manner of a perfect English gentleman. He spoke slowly and carefully, but—thanks to his mother's lessons—his English was flawless, without the slightest trace of an Italian, or even an Irish, accent. He had his mother's steady blue eyes, her light hair and fair complexion. His air was surprisingly confident for one so young, yet he was scrupulously neat and neither flamboyant nor showy, either of which attributes would surely have scared away the sober London investors.

(While London decided that Marconi was comfortingly English, America would later find him pleasantly continental. "When you meet Marconi," one U.S. reporter later observed, "you're bound to notice that he's a 'for'ner.' The information is written all over him. His suit of clothes is English. In stature he is French. His boot heels are Spanish military. His hair and moustache are German. His mother is Irish. His father is Italian. And altogether there's little doubt that Marconi is thoroughly a cosmopolitan." He was no smooth sophisticate, though. Another American newspaper reported: "He is no bigger than a Frenchman and not older than a quarter century. He is a mere boy, with a boy's happy temperament and enthusiasm, and a man's nervous view of his life's work. His manner is a little nervous and his eyes a bit dreamy. He acts with the modesty of a man who merely shrugs his shoulders when accused of discovering a new continent. He looks the student all over and possesses the peculiar semi-abstracted air that characterizes men who devote their days to study and scientific experiment.")

London businessmen were impressed by Marconi's invention as well as his manner. Unlike the Italian government, they were quick to see the possibilities, and very ready to put up the money to exploit this new "wireless" technology. On July 20, 1897, Marconi became majority shareholder in a new company, the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Co. Ltd. (later renamed Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd.). As well as 60 percent of
the shares, Marconi received fifteen thousand pounds in cash. He was twenty-three years old, rich, and beginning to become famous.

The following summer, Marconi went to Poole, on the south coast of England, to participate in the first journalistic use of wireless telegraphy. The Dublin
Daily Express
had sent their sailing correspondent to follow the regatta of the Royal St. George Yacht Club. He watched the race from the bridge of a tugboat, and then passed his reports on slips of paper to where Marconi sat at his wireless transmitter.

The reporter found Marconi refreshingly candid about his inability to explain the mysterious behavior of his invention. He wrote that when Marconi was working on the transmitter, "his face shows a suppressed enthusiasm which is a delightful revelation of character. A youth of twenty-three who can, very literally, evoke spirits from the vasty [sic] deep and dispatch them on the wings of the wind must naturally feel that he had done something very like picking the lock of Nature's laboratory. Signor Marconi listens to the crack-crack of his instrument with some such wondering interest as Aladdin must have displayed on first hearing the voice of the Genius who had been called up by the friction of his lamp." Another reporter on board confessed that it was almost irresistible to play with the wireless. "No sooner were we alive to the extraordinary fact that it was possible, without connecting wires, to communicate with a station which was miles away and quite invisible to us, than we began to send silly messages, such as to request the man in charge of the Kingston station to be sure to keep sober and not to take too many 'whisky-and-sodas.'"

The race went on for two days. Sometimes the fog was so dense that the ships were invisible from shore, and the only news came from the steady trail of Morse code from Marconi's wireless transmitter. The newspapers were full of this amazing new demonstration of the nautical power of wireless. Queen Victoria herself heard about their reports. The queen, now nearly eighty, was staying at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, and she asked Marconi to set up a receiving station on the royal yacht, moored offshore, so she could communicate by wireless with her son, Edward, Prince of Wales, who was living on board. More than 115 messages of great significance passed among the royal household in this way. The queen was able to ask her son if he had slept well, and members of her entourage sent invisible wireless messages through the ether to invite members of the prince's entourage for tea. Marconi was awarded a "handsome scarf pin" by the prince in recognition of this particular service to the nation. And the press was once again enchanted.

All the while, Marconi was finding new ways to improve the power of his transmitters and the sensitivities of his receiver. From his permanent stations on the south coast, he was sending his messages farther and farther; nothing seemed to stop them. Even the curvature of Earth didn't seem to stand in their way. This was particularly surprising since Hertzian waves were supposed to travel in a straight line. Any that skimmed the horizon should simply shoot out into space.

And yet Marconi's messages didn't seem to care. Though the lighthouse at the Isle of Wight was some one hundred feet above sea level, the curving Earth meant that its tip was barely visible from the mainland at Poole. But wireless waves skipped effortlessly over this apparent barrier. Then Marconi sent messages from ship to a shore that was fully twenty-five miles away, over an intervening "hill" of water that was effectively five hundred feet high.

This awakened an extraordinary idea in Marconi's mind. Could wireless solve the problem of communicating between ships? This was the dawn of the twentieth century. Yet while telegraph wires had connected entire continents, ships were still forced to rely on signaling techniques that were embarrassingly and hopelessly ancient. Flags, flickering lamps, and semaphore were the only voices a ship could use, and the moment it disappeared from sight, it lost all touch with the world.

Until the twentieth century, one commentator later wrote, "ships burned or foundered in storms with not so much as a whisper reaching land to tell their fate ... Wireless telegraphy with its magic powers was to wrest from the sea its ancient terror of silence and to give speech to ships which had been mute since the dawn of navigation."

That was Marconi's dream. But to achieve it, he needed to prove that the mathematicians were wrong, and that wireless waves really could span
mighty curving distances. Twenty-five miles wasn't a stirring enough demonstration of wireless's powers. Marconi decided to send a wireless message over a mountain of water that, because of Earth's curvature, would seem more than 150 miles high. He would prove that wireless could compete with cable, even across the three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. The mathematicians of the time were still declaring this to be impossible, but Marconi adopted the same policy as with every other experiment: I believe it will work. Let's see if I'm right.