The depth of his hurt and its consequences would not become apparent for several months. For the moment Marconi’s news did nothing to shake Preece’s intention to make Marconi the centerpiece of his talk at the Royal Institution in June; nor did Preece immediately withdraw his support for Marconi’s experiments. The new company had not yet formed, and Preece believed there was still a chance the government could acquire Marconi’s patents. A decade later a select committee of Parliament would conclude that Preece should have tried harder. Had he done so, the committee reported, “an enterprise of national importance could have been prevented from passing into the hands of a private company and subsequent difficulties might have been avoided.”
IN APRIL 1897, with Marconi’s over-water tests still a month off, Britain was again wracked by a spasm of fear about the mounting danger of anarchists and immigrants. A bomb exploded on a train in the city’s subterranean railway, killing one person and injuring others. The bomber was never caught, but most people blamed anarchists. Foreigners. Italians.
The world was growing more chaotic and speeding up. Rudyard Kipling could be spotted in his six- horsepower motorcar thundering around at fifteen miles an hour. The race among the great shipping companies to see whose liners could cross the Atlantic in the shortest time intensified and grew more and more costly as the size and speed of each ship increased and as the rivalry between British and German lines became freighted with an ever-heavier cargo of national pride. In April 1897 at the Vulcan shipyard in Stettin, Germany, thousands of workers raced to prepare the largest, grandest, fastest oceanliner yet for its launch on May 4, when it would join the stable of ships owned by North German Lloyd Line. Everything about this new liner breathed Germany’s aspiration to become a world power, especially its name,
In early May, Adolf Slaby sailed from Germany for Britain and made his way to the Bristol Channel, between England and Wales, where Marconi, with the help of a postal engineer named George Kemp, prepared for his next big demonstration.
MARCONI HOPED TO SEND messages across all nine miles of the Bristol Channel, but first he planned a more modest trial: to telegraph between Lavernock Point on the Wales side and a tiny island in the channel called Flat Holm, some 3.3 miles away. On Friday, May 7, Kemp traveled by tug to the island carrying a transmitter and took lodging “at a small house owned by the person in charge of the Cremation House.”
Slaby arrived at Lavernock. Generously, if unwisely, Marconi sent a small transmitter to Slaby so that he could monitor the experiments firsthand.
On Thursday, May 13, one week after the tests began, Marconi keyed the message, “So be it, let it be so.”
The sparks generated by his transmitter jabbed the air. Those present had to cover their ears against the miniature thunder of each blue discharge. The resulting chains of waves raced over the channel at the speed of light, from Flat Holm to Lavernock, where Marconi’s main receiver now captured them without distortion.
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.
IN LIVERPOOL OLIVER LODGE 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.”
PREECE 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
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
