Free Signor Marconi's Magic Box by Gavin Weightman Page A

code’ went into service in the United States. It was in truth Alfred Vail who devised it, but he allowed Samuel Morse to take the plaudits and enjoy the innumerable international honours which were showered upon him.
    Operating Morse keys was an entirely new skill, as was the interpretation of the dots and dashes. With the invention of the telephone receiver a tape printer was no longer necessary, for
the operator could simply listen to the urgent staccato of the Morse messages, translating them instantaneously from dots and dashes to letters and words. Very soon those with experience found they could recognise the styles of other individual Morse operators; some claimed they could tell the difference between the styles of men and women. Competitions were held to find the most skilful operators, and, ever attentive to the texture of contemporary life, McClure’s magazine sent a reporter to one such public demonstration held in New York at the turn of the century. It was a ‘fast sending competition’, held in a great hall in which ‘sets of shining telegraph instruments’ had been set up. Most of the audience were themselves telegraph operators, there to see which of the dozen young male contestants was adjudged the best. McClure’s described the scene:
    One by one the contestants stepped to the test table, and manipulated the key. There was a tense stillness throughout the hall, broken when ‘time’ was called by a trill of metallic pulsations read by most of the audience as from a printed page. The text of the matter is of no concern, an excerpt from a great speech, a page of blank verse, or only the ‘conditions’ found at the top of a telegraph form. Speed and accuracy alone are vital. Forty, forty-five, fifty words a minute are rattled off, seven hundred and fifty motions of the wrist and still the limit is not reached. The contestants show the same evidences of strain that characterise the most strenuous physical contest - the dilating nostril, the quick or suspended breathing, the starting eye.
    Presently a fair-haired young man takes the chair, self confidence and reserve force in every gesture. Away he goes, and his transmission is as swift and pure as a mountain stream . . . The audience, enthralled, forgets the speed, and hearkens only to the beauty of the sending. On and on fly the dots and dashes, and though it is clear that his
pace is not up to that set by the leaders, nevertheless there is a finish - an indefinable quality of perfection in the performance that at the end brings the multitude to its feet in a spontaneous burst of applause; such an outburst as might have greeted a great piece of oratory or acting.
    Marconi was at this time using exactly the same shining Morse keys as the contestants used for their New York sending competition. But he could not hope to match their speed, and certainly nobody would hearken to the beauty of his sending. Each dot and dash sent by wireless was created by a deafening spark - the operators soon took to wearing earplugs. At the receiving end, if the operator was using headphones, which was soon the regular practice, the noise of interference was also disturbing and uncomfortable. It was like listening intently to a station improperly tuned on the radio. There was no tuning in the modern sense of finding the exact point on the wave spectrum to receive a transmitter’s signal. And wireless telegraphy was painfully slow. When in 1897 Marconi returned briefly to Italy to fulfil his obligation to carry out his military service, he demonstrated his invention to the navy at La Spezia. On that occasion each Morse dot required the transmitting lever to be held down for five seconds, and each dash for fifteen seconds. The letter ‘H’ alone (dot, dash, dot, dot, dot) took more than half a minute to send. The messages relayed to and from the royal yacht Osborne were equally laborious.
    Lack of speed was not, however, Marconi’s greatest concern. He needed to prove