“Preece’s attempt”: Lodge to Thompson, January 21, 1900. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/104 ii.
the still-pervasive skepticism: One example: In a letter to Lodge, physicist Oliver Heaviside wrote, “I much question the usefulness of anything of Marconi’s kind in practice, save in exceptional circumstances. The heliograph will carry much farther by day, + a search light by night. No doubt a special field can be found for it. But wires are the thing, in general.” Heaviside to Lodge, June 23, 1897. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/50.
“Wireless is all very well”: Marconi, My Father, 45.
“The chief objection”: Kelvin to Lodge, May 5, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/107.
“I think it would be”: Kelvin to Lodge, June 11, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/107.
“In accepting”: Kelvin to Lodge, June 12, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/107.
“Today was only the beginning”: Muirhead to Lodge, June 4, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/77.
“This struck me”: Jameson Davis to Lodge, July 29, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/70.
ROYAL YACHT OSBORNE: Marconi to Lodge, August 2, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/70.
Anyone who could read: Marconi, My Father, 65–67; Weightman, Signor Marconi’s, 41–42.
“go back and around”: Marconi, My Father, 66; Wander, “Radio’s First Home,” 52.
“Alas, Your Majesty”: Ibid., 66.
“H. R. H. the Prince”: Ibid., 67.
“Could you come”: Weightman, Signor Marconi’s, 42.
“I am glad to say”: Marconi to Lodge, August 2, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/70.
“a lady’s house”: Kemp Diary, August 24, 1898.
“I wired to London”: Ibid., August 22, 1898.
“I sincerely hope”: Marconi to Lodge, November 2, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/70.
“I much regret”: Marconi to Lodge, October 11, 1898. UCL, Lodge Collection, 89/70.
At nine A.M.: Kemp’s account of the ordeal appears in his diary entries for December 17, 1898, through January 4, 1899. Kemp Diary.
In April: Baker, History, 42; Faulkner, Watchers, 6–7.
One night, during: Marconi, My Father, 71–72; Vyvyan, Marconi and Wireless, 20.
“WERE YOU HER LOVER, SIR?”
“Were you writing to her”: This exchange appears in Trial, 20–21.
FLEMING
“Glad to send”: Marconi to Fleming, March 28, 1899. UCL, Fleming Collection, 122/66.
“the region of uncertain”: Hong, Wireless, 56–57.
“My attention has been”: Lodge to Fleming, April 11, 1899. UCL, Fleming Collection, 122/66
an “indictment against”: Hong, Wireless, 57.
“I made no attack”: Fleming to Lodge, April 14, 1899. UCL, Fleming Collection, 122/66.
define “my position”: Fleming to Jameson Davis, May 2, 1899. UCL, Fleming Collection, 122/47.
“I have a strong conviction”: Ibid.
THE LADIES’ GUILD COMMENCES
“It was always agreed”: Trial, 89.
“with a free hand”: Ibid., 97.
One evening Miller: Miller Statement, 2. NA-DPP 1/13.
“I never interfered”: Trial, 37.
“Of course, I hoped”: Ibid., 89.
“She got an engagement”: Ibid., 36.
“She would probably”: Ibid., 36.
“There was hardly”: Macqueen-Pope, Goodbye Piccadilly, 300–1.
“When her hair was down”: Trial, 77.
“She wasn’t a top-rank artist”: Rose, Red Plush, 29.
“To fail at even an East End”: Machray, Night Side, 118.
A photographer captured: Goodman, Crippen File, 15.
“Oh Belle does it hurt”: Clara Martinetti Statement. Brief for the Prosecution. NA- DPP, 1/13.
“A GIGANTIC EXPERIMENT”
Why bother at all: For an excellent discussion of this, see Aitken, Syntony, 240–41. Aitken argues that the cable companies could have confronted any competitor with deep cuts in price. The business was lucrative, the companies profitable. They also had the capacity to handle far more business. In a price war, he argues, the cable trust would have proven a dangerous competitor.
He recognized: Interview, Francesco Paresce, Marconi’s grandson, Munich, April 11, 2005. “He had no limits,” Paresce told me. “I think he felt from day one that radio waves would be able to link any two points on the earth.” That Marconi would propose so grand an experiment was due largely to his personality and to his appraisal of his company’s prospects. “In order to win the race he could not continue as he had done before, with little steps,” Paresce said. “Commercially he was realizing it wasn’t working, the system really wasn’t working.”
Paths that might have seemed more prudent did exist, Paresce said. “You would have thought he would have pushed much harder simply to communicate with a ship farther and farther away.” But to settle for this and not test his vision would have run against the grain of Marconi’s character. “I think it was something that was really him,” Paresce said. “He was a very stubborn man, he was a very driven man, and he was self-educated.” But Marconi also understood on some deep level that what science held to be immutable law might easily with time prove to be false. “He learned very early on not to take too seriously the science of the moment,” Paresce said. Marconi perhaps believed “there were enough unknowns about the problem that there was something that would come to his rescue.”
However outlandish Marconi’s idea might have seemed, it did have a practical dimension. “He was an extremely able media manipulator,” Paresce said. “I’m almost certain that the basic reason he did it is he had to give a big impetus to his commercial operation. By making a big splash he could attract more attention to his effort, and attract the best people to help solve its problems.”
“I have not the slightest doubt”: Hong, Wireless,
