Wireless Communications: Past, Present, and Future

III.THE “BIRTH OF RADIO”

1. 
   Marconi and the Wireless Telegraph
   

With total justification Guglielmo Marconi is called the pioneer of wireless, freeing communications from the constraints imposed by fixed cable and visible distance. Conquering distance, he facilitated commercial and mass communication, bringing all parts of the world closer together. In an era when all intercontinental transport was entirely marine, Marconi's achievements in wireless meant that ships at sea were no longer isolated and beyond reach of communication once they left sight of land. Marconi personally was regarded as a great benefactor and was accorded recognition and decorations wherever he went.

His background and upbringing were undoubtedly privileged. Born on 25 April 1874 in Bologna, he was the second son of a runaway marriage between Giuseppe Marconi, a wealthy Italian landowner, and Annie Jameson of the Irish whiskey distillery family. The young Guglielmo Marconi shared his mothers' fair hair and blue eyes, and although baptized as a Roman Catholic, he was brought up as an Anglican. His interests as a child were often solitary pursuits, in which he displayed a certain manual dexterity. Among these were devising scientific toys, taking apart mechanical objects and reassembling them, playing the piano and fishing for trout.

Marconi's education was disjointed. It took place in England and Italy, sometimes in school and sometimes with private tutors. After his failure to qualify for the Italian Naval Academy, he was encouraged by his mother and brother Alfonso to concentrate on his scientific interests. He attended lectures by Augustus Righi, professor of physics at Bologna University, a pioneer of work on wireless waves, and a friend of Marconi's family. When Heinrich Hertz, who discovered wireless waves, died in 1894, Righi wrote an obituary that fired Marconi with the idea of deploying these waves for 'wire-less' telegraphy. "So elementary, so simple in logic," he said later.

However, while Marconi was conducting rudimentary experiments in the attic of the Villa Griffone, the family home, a British physicist in Oxford, Professor Oliver Lodge had already succeeded in transmitting detectable Morse signals over a range of 150 meters. For Professor Lodge, however this was an academic exercise, for which he envisaged no commercial application and did not follow up. Marconi, undeterred by accepted academic wisdom or conventional methods, continued to experiment.

In 1895, Marconi had increased his own range of transmission from a few yards in the attic to more than two kilometers across the fields, and he persuaded his family to launch him in business. The Italian Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs proved indifferent to his experiments and Marconi left with his mother for London, capital of the world's leading maritime nation and greatest trading empire.

Shortly after arriving in February 1896, Marconi met A.A. Campbell-Swinton, a leading engineer in the field of electrical communications. In early March he filed an interim specification for a holding patent for a wireless telegraphy system before Campbell-Swinton introduced him to William Preece, Engineer-in-Chief of the General Post Office (GPO), who offered him support and assistance. Then, on 2 June 1896, Marconi submitted a revised, full specification for the world's first wireless patent for a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves.
2. Patents and Radio Station
By the end of 1896, Marconi had demonstrated his system to the GPO and to the armed services. He had also given a public demonstration with Preece at the Toynbee Hall in London. This caused a sensation and Marconi became a celebrity.

For Professor Lodge, the growing fame of Marconi as the 'inventor of wireless', was deeply hurtful, particularly so when Marconi was granted his British patent (No.12039) in March 1897. According to one journal, what Marconi had publicly described were the products of Lodge's brain, not his own. But the writer had missed the point: Professor Lodge had lacked the vision to see the potential application of wireless; Marconi, however, had quickly understood and sought to exploit it.

In July 1897, the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company was registered in the United Kingdom (UK). Shrewdly, having transferred his UK patent rights to the company for a cash payment of £15,000 and 60 per cent of the shares, Marconi held the Italian rights in reserve as he wished to remain an Italian subject. But he still had the shadow of military service hanging over him. It was lifted, personally, by the King of Italy, who had him assigned as a 'naval cadet in training' to the embassy in London.

Commercial success depended on extending the range of transmission and Marconi soon trebled it. Expenditure also rose: on accommodation costs for the head office, on salaries for the technicians and scientists whom Marconi began to recruit and on the world's first pair of coastal wireless stations. These were established at a hotel near the Needles on the Isle of Wight and, in January 1898, at another hotel in Bournemouth, where William Ewart Gladstone, eminent elder statesman of the Victorian era, lay dying. When journalists who had assembled there were unable to file their reports by telegraphic means after a snowstorm had brought down the wires, Marconi transmitted their reports by wireless to the Isle of Wight for onward relay by line and cable to Fleet Street, thus making news himself. Afterwards Marconi moved this station from Bournemouth to a hotel near Poole, in Dorset.

His system won many important admirers. These included the Italian Navy and Queen Victoria. During Cowes week in 1898, despite her age and frailty, the Queen granted Marconi an audience before exchanging messages by wireless between her Isle of Wight residence and the Prince of Wales, who was convalescing nearby on the Royal yacht.

In December 1898, the Company opened the world's first wireless factory at Chelmsford in Essex. The building still stands today. By then, Marconi was carrying out tests between a Trinity House Lighthouse near Dover and the East Goodwin Lightship, to demonstrate that wireless could be used to protect lives at sea by means of ship-to-shore communication. Then, with the agreement of the French government, a wireless station was set up at Wimereux near Boulogne and on 27 March 1899, Marconi transmitted the first international wireless message across the Channel, from Wimereux to the station at the South Foreland Lighthouse near Dover. The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company changed names several times to:

• 
  1900: Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company
  
• 
  1963: Marconi Company Limited
  
• 
  1987: GEC- Marconi Limited
  
• 
  1998: Marconi Electronic Systems Limited
  
• 
  1999: Marconi plc.
  

In the United States of America, after successfully reporting on yacht races in The America's Cup, Marconi then achieved less success with trials on warships. For fear of revealing secrets not yet patented, he appeared unable to prevent wireless signals from jamming each other. The US Navy decided, for the time being, to stick to homing pigeons. In South Africa, where the Boer War had just begun, the first use of wireless during military conflict on land was no more convincing.

These were but temporary setbacks and Marconi was undaunted. Before he left the USA he made preparations to register the name of the company's American subsidiary, The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, which was incorporated two years later and eventually became the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

On the way home to England in November 1899, on board the SS St Paul, he arranged for news of the Boer War to be transmitted to the ship from his station on the Isle of Wight. This news was then printed on board the vessel in the first ever ship's newspaper produced as a result of a shore-to-ship wireless transmission.