Thunderstruck

FLEMING

ONE OF THE EARLIEST MESSAGES Marconi sent across the English Channel was a brief telegram transmitted from his French station at Wimereux to the South Foreland station, where one of his men took it to an office of the post office telegraphs for relay by conventional land line to London. A messenger boy carried it to University College in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, and there the telegram made its way to its intended recipient, John Ambrose Fleming, a professor of electrical engineering and friend of Oliver Lodge. On the date of the telegram, March 28, 1899, Fleming was forty-nine years old and possessed a degree of public fame and academic prominence just shy of what Lodge possessed. He was an expert in the amplification and distribution of electrical power.

The telegram read, simply,

Glad to send you greetings

conveyed by electric waves through

the ether from Boulogne

to South Foreland twenty-eight

miles [and] thence by

postal telegraphs Marconi

Though it seemed the most neutral of greetings, in fact it marked the start of Marconi’s next attempt at seduction, and his most important, as future events would show.

Marconi recognized that with no revenue and no contracts and in the face of persistent skepticism, he needed more than ever to capture an ally of prominence and credibility. Through Fleming, however, Marconi also hoped to gain a benefit more tangible. His new idea, the feat he hoped would command the world’s attention once and for all, would require more power and involve greater danger, physical and fiscal, than anything he had attempted before.

When it came to high-power engineering, he knew, Fleming was the man to consult.

UNLIKE LODGE OR KELVIN, Fleming was susceptible to flattery and needful of attention, as evidenced by the fact that upon receiving Marconi’s telegram he made sure the London Times got a copy of it. The Times published it, as part of its coverage of Marconi’s English Channel success. Next Fleming visited Marconi’s station at South Foreland. He was deeply impressed, so much so that he wrote a long letter to The Times praising Marconi and his technology and acknowledging how the inventor had removed wireless from “the region of uncertain delicate laboratory experiments.” Now, he wrote, it was a practical system marked by “certainty of action and ease of manipulation.”

For Marconi, the letter was an affirmation of his strategy to gain credibility by refraction. Oliver Lodge too recognized that Fleming’s letter had bestowed upon Marconi a new respectability and saw it as an act of betrayal. He wrote to Fleming, “My attention has been called to a letter of yours in the Times, in which it is suggested that you are attacking me and other scientific men who retain some jealousy for the memory of Hertz.” He called the letter an “indictment against men of science” and asked Fleming for an explanation.

Fleming bristled. “I made no attack on you or any other scientific men in my letter to the Times,” he replied. “I called attention to certain important achievements which in the public interest I thought should be noticed and described.” He wrote that he was simply raising a point acknowledged by others, “that the time had arrived for a little more generous recognition of Signor Marconi’s work as an original inventor. That after all is a matter on which different views may be held and if you dissent from it you are quite entitled to your opinion.”

Soon afterward Marconi asked Fleming to become scientific adviser to his company. On May 2, 1899, Fleming wrote to Jameson Davis to set out certain conditions and to define “my position and views a little carefully.”

If Jameson Davis cringed at this sentence, fearing a reprise of Lord Kelvin’s qualms, he was soon reassured. Fleming wrote: “I have a strong conviction of the commercial possibilities of Mr. Marconi’s inventions apart from their scientific interest provided they are properly handled. I should desire to see a genuine business of a solid character built up.” He added a paragraph that later events would show to be in contradiction to elements of his character, especially his own deep need for recognition. Fleming wrote, “All that a scientific adviser does in the way of invention, suggestion or advice should be the sole property of those retaining him so far as their own affairs are concerned. I have noticed that any other course invariably leads sooner or later to difficulties and perhaps disputes.”

Fleming agreed to work under a one-year contract, renewable at each party’s discretion, for a fee of £300 a year. For the moment it seemed generous.

Now, Marconi revealed to him the nature of the grand experiment that had begun to occupy his thoughts. It would require two gigantic wireless stations and demand the production of more electrical energy than anything Marconi previously had attempted.

Though his maximum distance so far had been only thirty-two miles, what Marconi now proposed was to transmit messages across the full breadth of the Atlantic.