FLEMING AND LODGE

IN THE SUMMER OF 1911 Oliver Lodge, sixty years old, began building what he called “a fighting fund” to bring a lawsuit against Marconi for infringing on his tuning patent. As of June 15, he and his allies had contributed £10,000 to the fund, more than $1 million today. Lodge wrote to William Preece, “They are clearly infringing, and we have a moral right to royalty. Accordingly I am actively bestirring myself to that end.” Marconi had already approached Lodge with an offer to acquire his patents, apparently concerned that Lodge might indeed prevail in a court test, but Lodge had turned him down.

Preece, now seventy-seven, counseled caution, even though, as he put it, “I agree with every word you say and I am sure you are taking the proper attitude.”

That summer Preece put aside his own antipathy toward Marconi and brokered a settlement, under which the Marconi company acquired Lodge’s tuning patent for an undisclosed sum and agreed to pay him a stipend of £1,000 a year for the patent’s duration. On October 24, 1911, Preece wrote to Lodge, “I am delighted to hear that matters are settled between you and the Marconi Company. I am quite sure you have done the right thing for yourself and that you will now get your deserts. But you will have to bring Marconi down a peg or two. He is soaring too much in the higher regions.”

Lodge lost his youngest son, Raymond, to World War I and sought to reach the boy in the ether. He claimed success. He believed that during sittings with certain mediums he had conversed with Raymond. On one occasion, shortly before Christmas 1915, he heard his son say, “I love you. I love you intensely. Father, please speak to me.” The conversation continued, and a few moments later Lodge heard, “Father, tell mother she has her son with her all day on Christmas Day. There will be thousands and thousands of us back in the homes on that day, but the horrid part is that so many of the fellows don’t get welcomed. Please keep a place for me. I must go now.”

Lodge published a book about his experience in 1916, called Raymond, in which he offered comforting advice to the bereaved: “I recommend people in general to learn and realize that their loved ones are still active and useful and interested and happy—more alive than ever in one sense—and to make up their minds to live a useful life till they rejoin them.”

The book became hugely popular owing to the many parents seeking contact with sons killed in the first of the real wars.



OVER TIME THE RELATIONSHIP between Ambrose Fleming and Marconi grew more distant, but Fleming maintained his allegiance to the idea that Marconi deserved all credit for the invention of wireless. The company kept him as an adviser until 1931, when it endured one of its many periods of fiscal duress and told him his contract would not be renewed. He saw this as a new betrayal and now changed his opinion. He decided that the man who invented wireless was actually Oliver Lodge and that Lodge had first demonstrated the technology in his June 1894 lecture on Hertz at the Royal Institution.

On August 29, 1937, Fleming wrote to Lodge, “It is quite clear that in 1894 you could send and receive alphabetical signals in Morse Code by Electric Waves and did send them 180 feet or so. Marconi’s idea that he was the first to do that is invalid.”

By this point Fleming was eighty-eight years old but could not resist giving vent to a long-festered bitterness. “Marconi was always determined to claim everything for himself,” he told Lodge, who was now eighty-six. “His conduct to me about the first transatlantic transmission was very ungenerous. I had planned the power plant for him and the first sending was carried out with the arrangement of circuits described in my British patent no 3481 of 1901. But he took care never to mention my name in connection with it.

“However,” Fleming added, “these things get known in time and justice is done.”

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