'Scien ce
Marconi centenary
Rertiard Dixon
Although he was one of the earliest Nobel prize winners in PhYsics, Guglielmo Marconi was
really an entrepreneur-inventor rather than orthodox theoretical scientist. Born 100 years ago this week, on April 25, 1874, Marconi received little formal education. But he did have wealthy parents, and was thus able to spend as much time as he wished messing about in a laboratory constructed at their villa near Bologna. So it was that, at the age of twenty, he read in a periodical about some earlier experiments by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz which suggested to him the possibility of what we now call radio transmission. Marconi set to work and within a year had established 'wireless' communication over distances of more than a mile.
It was also as a comparative youngster of thirty that Hertz had carried out the investigations that later caught Marconi 's attention. Briefly, he showed that sparks produced by an induction machine created unseen waves that could be detected a few yards away — also by sparking, across the metal balls of a resonator. Hertz made no effort to put his discovery to practical use. But between then and his death seven years later — when Marconi first came across an account of Hertz's work in an obituary notice — several other investigators toyed with the newly discovered phenomenon and contributed their own ideas.
The crucial breakthrough, however, was very much that of Marconi, who learned how to send signals over much greater distances than was possible previously. Tradition has it that the actual historic moment occurred in the middle of one night, when Marconi woke his mother and asked her to help with an
experiment. This was a very simple demonstration — she simply pressed a Morse key, which made a bell ring at the other side of the attic, without any wires or other tangible link — but it was to lead directly to radio and television broadcasting as we know it today.
Events moved rapidly after that initial success. First, Marconi tried his equipment out of doors and, helped by his brother, showed that the signals could be sent across a hillside — eventually as far as two miles. Then in 1896 Marconi's mother (an Irish-born daughter of whisky distiller Andrew Jameson) suggested that he took his invention to Britain. It was, she argued, likely to be of great interest in this country for communication between ships and lightships at sea.
. That same year, Marconi registered a UK patent on his discovery, and demonstrated wireless transmission over a distance of eight miles on Salsiburv Plain, before army and naval authorities. Despite public ridicule as the "organ-grinder without a monkey," Marconi went from strength to strength and was soon famous not only in Britain but also throughout Europe. In 1897 he opened the world's first wireless telegraph station at Lavernock Point near Cardiff, which received Morse signals from Flat Home Island in the Bristol Channel, and elsewhere. The first successful transatlantic link-up was on December 12, 1901, when messages were sent from Poldhu in Cornwall to St. John's, Newfoundland, where they were received via an aerial suspended from a kite. Already, the practical and social value of the new invention was clear. In 1898 a Dublin newspaper employed Marconi to cover the Kingstown regatta from a tug following the boats — the earliest press report ever to be made by radio. The following year, human lives were saved for the first time by wireless telegraphy, when a patrol boat was able to signal the South Foreland lifeboat to report a steamer stranded on the Goodwin sands.
Meanwhile, Marconi became involved in much unsavoury publicity, including the famous 'Marconi scandal,' which almost caused the fall of Lloyd George and the then Liberal Government. Nonetheless, he continued to show his remarkable flair, improving his system and incorporating features devised by others. By April, 1912, when SOS radio signals helped to save 700 passengers from the Titanic, Marconi's central place in the history of radio was assured. The earliest tests on the transmission of speech and music, rather than simply Morse messages, were alreadyunder way, and only ten years later the arrival of full-scale public broadcasting was signified by the establishment of the BBC.
By then, alas, further technical development of radio was in the hands of the scientists. True, another inventor, John Logie Baird, was about to devise television, but he too would soon be overtaken by the technocrats.The days of the potterer were numbered.
Dr Bernard Dixon is editor of New Scientist and writes fortnightly in The Spectator.
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