Thunderstruck

THE GERMAN SPY

KAISER WILHELM II HAD INDEED taken notice of Marconi’s achievements. He long had resented Britain’s self-proclaimed superiority, despite the fact that he himself happened to be a nephew of Edward, the Prince of Wales, who would succeed Queen Victoria upon her death. He made no secret of his intention to build Germany into an imperial power and to hone his army and navy with the latest advances in science, including, if merited, wireless communication.

In the midst of a new series of tests at Salisbury Plain, during which Marconi set a new distance record of 6.8 miles, a German named Gilbert Kapp wrote to Preece to ask a favor. He was doing so, he stated, on behalf of a friend, whom he identified as “Privy Councillor Slaby.” This was Adolf Slaby, a professor in Berlin’s Technical High School. Kapp described him as “the private scientific adviser to the Emperor,” and wrote: “Any new invention or discovery interests the Emperor and he always asks Slaby to explain it [to] him. Lately the Emperor has read of your and Marconi’s experiments…and he wants Slaby to report on this invention.”

Kapp had two questions:

“1) Is there anything in Marconi’s invention?

“2) If yes, could you arrange for Slaby and myself to see the apparatus and witness experiments if we come over to London toward the end of next week?”

He added: “Please treat this letter as confidential and say nothing to Marconi about the Emperor.”

Even though by now Marconi’s fear of prying eyes was more acute than ever, Preece invited Slaby to come and observe a round of experiments set for mid-May 1897, during which Marconi would attempt for the first time to send signals across a body of water.

IN THE MEANTIME MARCONI contemplated a surprise of his own, for Preece.

Until now Marconi had considered that a contract with the post office might be the best way to profit from his invention and at the same time gain the resources to develop it into a practical means of telegraphy. But ever aware of each moment lost, Marconi had grown uneasy about the pace at which the post office made decisions. He told his father, “As far as the Government is concerned, I do not believe that they will decide very soon whether to acquire my rights or not. I also believe that they will not pay a great deal for them.”

In the wake of Preece’s lectures, investors had begun approaching Marconi with offers. Two Americans offered £10,000—equivalent to just over $1 million today—for his United States patent. Marconi evaluated this and other early proposals with the cold acuity of a lawyer and found none compelling enough to accept. In April, however, his cousin Henry Jameson Davis came to him with a proposal to form a company with a syndicate of investors linked to the Jameson family. The syndicate would pay Marconi £15,000 in cash—about $1.6 million today—and grant him controlling ownership of company stock, while also pledging £25,000 for future experiments.

Marconi gave the proposal the same scrutiny he had given all previous offers. The terms were generous. At the time £15,000 was a fortune. In H. G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay one character exults in achieving a salary of £300 a year, because it was enough to provide a small house and a living for himself and a new wife. Best of all, Jameson Davis was family. Marconi knew him and trusted him. The investors, in turn, were known within the Jameson empire. It was too compelling to refuse, but Marconi understood that by accepting the offer he risked alienating Preece and the post office. The question was, could anything be done to keep Preece’s sense of hurt from transforming the post office into a powerful enemy?

What followed was a carefully orchestrated campaign to depict this offer as something that Marconi himself had nothing to do with but that as a businessman he was obligated to take seriously, in the interests of his invention.

Marconi enlisted the help of a patent adviser, J. C. Graham, who knew Preece. On April 9, 1897, Graham wrote to Preece and told him the terms of the offer and added that Marconi had “some considerable doubts about closing with it lest apparently he should be doing anything which even appears to be ungrateful to you, for I understand from him that he is under a great debt of gratitude to you in more than one respect.

“As the matter is evidently weighing heavily on his mind, and as he appears to have only one object in view, viz., to do the right thing, I thought it was just possible that a letter from me might be of some use. I, of course, know nothing more of the case than I have set out above.”

From the text alone, Graham’s motive for writing the letter was far from obvious, and Preece must have read it several times. Was he asking Preece’s opinion, or was his intent simply to notify Preece obliquely that Marconi intended to accept the offer and hoped there would be no hard feelings?

The next morning, Saturday, Marconi stopped by the post office building but found Preece gone. After returning to his home in Talbot Road, Westbourne Park, Marconi composed a letter to Preece.

He began it, “I am in difficulty.”

The rest of the letter seemed structured to follow a choreography established by Marconi, Jameson Davis, and possibly Graham. It struck the same notes as Graham’s letter and, like Graham’s, said nothing about the fact that Jameson Davis happened to be Marconi’s cousin.

Marconi referred to Jameson Davis and his syndicate as “those gentlemen” and couched the letter in such a way that anyone reading it would conclude that all of this was happening without his involvement, certainly without his encouragement—that this poor young man had suddenly found himself pressed to respond to an offer from the blue, one so generous that he found himself forced to consider it, though it gave him no joy to do so.

After setting out the details, Marconi added, “I beg to state, however, that I have never sought these offers, or given encouragement to the promoters.”

Afterward he wrote to his father that he believed, based on what he had heard from Preece’s associates, “that he will remain friends with me.” In so doing, he revealed a trait of his character that throughout his life would color and often hamper his business and personal relationships: a social obtuseness that made him oblivious to how his actions affected others.

For in fact Preece felt deep personal hurt. Years later in a brief memoir, in which for some reason he described himself in the third person, Preece wrote, “Marconi at the end of 1897 naturally came under the influence of the business men who were financing his new Company, and it was no longer possible for Preece as a Government officer to maintain those cordial, and frequently almost parental, relations with the young inventor. No one regretted this more than Preece.”

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, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, and its decor, which featured life-size portraits of its namesake and of Bismarck and Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, whose nephew all too soon would lead Germany into global war. The launch was to be overseen by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself.

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 The Electrician put it. The journal called the experiments “wizard-like.”

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 dream.”

Here, as The Electrician reported, Preece “scored an effective hit.”

At the close of his lecture great applause rose from the audience. From Lodge and the Maxwellians came more fury. In a striking breach of the decorum that governed Victorian science, Lodge took his anger public. In a letter to The Times he wrote, “It appears that many persons suppose that the method of signaling across space by means of Hertzian waves received by a Branly tube of filings is a new discovery made by Signor Marconi. 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 signaling in 1894.” He complained that “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’ has been more than usually absurd.”

The attack startled even his friend and fellow physicist George FitzGerald, though FitzGerald shared Lodge’s opinion. Shortly after the Times letter appeared, FitzGerald wrote to Lodge and cautioned, “It would be important to keep it from becoming a personal question between you and Marconi. The public don’t care about that and will only say, ‘This is a personal squabble: let them settle it amongst themselves.’”

FitzGerald did not blame Marconi. “This young chap himself, I understand he is merely 20”—actually, he was twenty-three—“deserves a great deal of credit for his persistency, enthusiasm, and pluck and must be really a very clever young fellow and it would be very hard to expect him to be quite judicial in his views as to everybody’s credit in the matter.” Marconi had not been “very open,” he wrote, “but he is hardly to blame if his head is a bit swelled under the circumstances, and no Italian or other foreigner was ever really fair in their judgments so that it is quite unreasonable to expect them to be so.”

The real problem was Preece, FitzGerald charged. He urged that Lodge focus his attacks on him, in particular on how Preece and the post office—“absurdly ignorant, as usual”—had ignored the scientific discoveries on which Marconi had based his apparatus and instead had been seduced by a “secret box.”

He added, “Preece is, I think, distinctly and intentionally scoffing at scientific men and deserves severe rebuke.”

ON JULY 2, 1897, MARCONI received his full, formal patent and, without Preece’s knowledge, moved steadily closer to join with Jameson Davis to form a new company.

Preece may have believed he had stymied this plan. In a letter to superiors on July 15, in which he argued the time had come to consider acquiring the patent rights to Marconi’s system, he wrote: “I have distinctly told him that as he has submitted his scheme to the consideration of the Post Office, the Admiralty and the War Department, he cannot morally enter into any negotiation with anyone else or listen to any financial proposals which might lead to a species of ‘blackmailing’ of his principal, if not his only, customers. He accepts and recognizes this position.”

Preece recommended the government pay a mere £10,000 for the patent rights—about $1.1 million today—and doubted Marconi would feel himself in a position to argue. “It must be remembered that Mr. Marconi is a very young man…. He is a foreigner. He has proved himself to be open and candid and he has resisted very tempting offers. He has very little experience. On the other hand he cannot do much without our assistance and his system can scarcely be made practical for telegraphy by any one in this country but by ourselves.”

But just five days later Marconi founded his new company. His representatives registered its name as the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Co. and identified its headquarters as being in London. Jameson Davis became managing director, with the understanding that once the enterprise was well established he would resign. Marconi received sixty thousand shares of stock valued at one pound each, representing 60 percent ownership of the company. He also received the £15,000 cash, and the company’s pledge to spend another £25,000 developing the technology.

Within six months, the value of Marconi’s stock tripled and suddenly his sixty thousand shares were worth £180,000 pounds, about $20 million today. At twenty-three years of age, he was both famous and rich.

IN BERLIN ADOLF SLABY had been busy. On June 17, one month after witnessing the Bristol Channel experiments, he wrote to Preece, “I have now constructed the whole apparatus of M[onsieur] Marconi and it works quite well. After returning from my holidays, which I intend to spend at the sea shore, I will try to signal through some distance. I feel always indebted to your extreme kindness in remembering those very pleasant and interesting days at Lavernock.”

But Slaby’s warm thanks belied grander ambitions, both for himself and for Germany. Soon he and two associates would begin marketing their own system and, with the enthusiastic backing of the kaiser and a cadre of powerful German investors, would become locked in a shadow war with Marconi that embodied the animosities then gaining sway in the larger world.

For the moment, however, Slaby pretended that all that mattered was science and knowledge. He wrote to Preece, “We are happy men, that we need not care for politics. The friendship that science had made cannot be disturbed and I wish to repeat to you the truest feelings of my heart.”