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

not only that his system worked, but that it could span distances which the leading scientists of the day insisted were unattainable. Unless he could send messages hundreds of miles, he could never compete with the cable telegraph, and wireless would have only a restricted value for ships at sea. The widely accepted view was that because the earth was round, a spark signal transmitted from any point on land would head off over the horizon, keep going until it reached the upper atmosphere and head out into space. There was no reason to believe that electro-magnetic
waves would ‘hug’ the surface of land or sea. However high you raised your transmitting and receiving aerials, the signal could be picked up no further than the line of sight between the topmost points. Marconi, and those working with him, had no theory to contradict the received wisdom. All they could do was carry on blindly, in the hope of demonstrating that the theory was wrong.
    The degree to which Marconi was able to inspire confidence in his assistants, most of whom were a good deal older than him - he was just twenty-five in 1899 - was remarkable. Quiet and modest though he was in his dealings with the press, Marconi evidently had a messianic quality in his workshops in the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight and the Haven Hotel in Poole. He led by example, often working into the night.
    The detective writer turned wireless sleuth for McClure’s , Cleveland Moffett, visited both these stations in 1899, and chatted to Marconi and the engineers working with him. One of these was Dr Erskine Murray, based at the Haven Hotel, where he sometimes tuned up his cello to make up a trio with Marconi and his brother Alfonso. Moffett wrote:
    . . . after a breezy ride across the Channel on the self-reliant side-wheeler ‘Lymington’, then an hour’s railway journey and a carriage jaunt of like duration over gorse-spread sand dunes, I found myself at the Poole Signal Station, really six miles beyond Poole, on a barren promontory. Here the installation is identical with that at the Needles, only on a larger scale, and here two operators are kept busy at experiments, under the direction of Mr. Marconi himself and Dr. Erskine-Murray, one of the company’s chief electricians. With the latter I spent two hours in profitable converse.
    ‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘this is a fine day for your work?’ The sun was shining and the air mild.
    ‘Not particularly,’ said he. ‘The fact is, our messages seem to carry best in fog and bad weather. This past winter
we have sent through all kinds of gales and storms without a single breakdown.’
    ‘Don’t thunder-storms interfere with you, or electric disturbances?’
    ‘Not in the least.’
    ‘How about the earth’s curvature? I suppose that doesn’t amount to much just to the Needles?’
    ‘Doesn’t it though? Look across, and judge for yourself. It amounts to 100 feet at least. You can only see the head of the Needles lighthouse from here, and that must be 150 feet above the sea. And the big steamers pass there hulls and funnels down.’
    ‘Then the earth’s curvature makes no difference with your waves?’
    ‘It has made none up to twenty-five miles, which we have covered from a ship to shore; and in that distance the earth’s dip amounts to about 500 feet. If the curvature counted against us then, the messages would have passed some hundreds of feet over the receiving-station; but nothing of the sort happened. So we feel reasonably confident that these Hertzian waves follow around smoothly as the earth curves.’
    ‘And you can send messages through hills, can you not?’
    ‘Easily. We have done so repeatedly.’
    ‘And you can send in all kinds of weather?’
    ‘We can.’
    ‘Then,’ said I after some thought, ‘if neither land nor sea nor atmospheric conditions can stop you, I don’t see why you can’t send messages to any distance.’
    ‘So we can,’ said the electrician, ‘so we can, given a