Less than a year after the death of Hertz, Marconi had a working wireless system. But if it was to be of any real use, he had to discover if the sparks of his transmitter could send out waves that a receiver could pick up at a distance of more than a few yards. In the searing heat of the summer of 1895 he first took his boxes outside into the parched fields and neatly trimmed vineyards of the Villa Griffone to discover what the limits of his invention were.
There was nothing in any of the electrical magazines he had read which could help him. All he could do was try different arrangements of transmitter and receiver. Possibly recalling Benjamin Franklin’s experiment with the kite in a thunderstorm, Marconi had the idea that if he raised a wire in the air and put another in the earth, there might be extra power. He was thrilled to discover that this arrangement worked, and he found that the higher the wire, and the more powerful the spark, the further signals would travel. His brother Alfonso moved the receiver and transmitter further and further apart. When the distance reached about a mile, Alfonso was out of sight on the brow of a hill which rose gently behind the villa, and he or one of the farmhands who was helping had to fire a gun to confirm that a signal had got through. Marconi’s father, who had funded his son’s madcap experiments with disgruntled reluctance, was at last impressed enough to discuss how this intriguing invention might be turned into a commercial venture.
From the moment he developed his primitive, home-made wireless system, Marconi felt he was in a race against time. If he could achieve the results he had working in the attic and the grounds of the Villa Griffone, surely someone in a university or a telegraphy company would soon come up with the same thing, or something better. If Marconi failed to make his name and his fortune with this invention, he had nothing to fall back on. His father had wanted him to join the Italian navy, but Guglielmo, preoccupied with his experiments, had failed the examinations for entry to the naval college.
Now old Giuseppe accepted that his youngest son’s future, if he had one, was with the odd bits of wire and batteries strewn about the attic of the villa, and the strange-looking antennae erected in the grounds of the estate. But who would be interested in Guglielmo’s magic boxes? And would anyone invest in them, so that the family fortune would not dwindle away? The Italian ministry of posts? Or the navy, perhaps? According to Marconi family legend, approaches were made, but after a wait of several months they received a polite refusal. This is possible, although no records have been found of any contacts with the government. Perhaps the story was invented later to protect Marconi’s reputation as a staunch Italian patriot. As it was, Guglielmo and his mother were soon on their way to London, where there was a much greater chance that his invention might be taken up, with the help of Annie Marconi’s many wealthy and influential relatives.
London, the heart of the British Empire, was a huge metropolis in the last decade of the nineteenth century, with a population of more than six million. The smoke from tens of thousands of chimneys filled the air with the sooty haze that so attracted Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, who captured on canvas the strange light that hung about the Thames, the great railway stations and the Houses of Parliament. London had had a steam-driven underground railway since the 1860s, and the first of the new electric underground lines had been opened between the suburb of Stockwell and the City in 1890. But the open-topped buses, carriages and goods wagons were still horse-drawn, as were the trams which provided cheaper fares out to the new working-class suburbs. Though gas and petrol engines had been devised, and the first imported motor-car had made a brief appearance on the streets in 1894, the only familiar motorised road transport was steam-driven. These lumbering, steam-engine-like vehicles were kept to a speed limit of four miles per hour in the countryside, and two miles per hour in London and other towns, and were required to have a man walking twenty yards ahead of them; the stipulation that he carry a red flag, first made law in 1865, was dropped in 1878.
Most of the metropolis was still gas-lit, though electric light in one form or another had been around for a number of years. The first experimental electric street lights had been of the carbon arc variety: a fierce, crackling white glow was produced by passing a current through two carbon rods separated by a small gap. These had been used as early as 1878 to floodlight a football match in the northern town of Sheffield, an experiment that was abandoned when the players complained that they were blinded by the glare and could not see the ball. The little town of Godalming in Surrey, to the south of London, had been the first in the world to have public electric street lighting in 1881, but the electric supplier found it uneconomical, and Godalming returned to gas. The façades of one or two London theatres, such as the Gaiety, were brilliantly lit with arc lamps, which were described as like ‘half a dozen harvest moons shining at once in the Strand’.
The forerunner of the modern electric lightbulb had been invented simultaneously in the 1870s by Thomas Edison in the United States and Joseph Swan in England, and in 1879 they joined forces as ‘Ediswan’ and were turning them out in their thousands. But only large institutions and the grander private houses could afford to have a generator installed, whether it was steam-driven or water-powered – the first hydro-electric system was fitted by Edison in Cragside, the stately home of the English arms magnate William Armstrong, in 1880. There were no large power stations in Britain – nothing to compare with the massive turbines driven by Niagara Falls in the United States – and only a handful of people in London could flick a switch to turn on domestic lights. In fact, so unfamiliar were light switches that notices were sometimes placed next to them, warning that no attempt should be made to ignite them with a match.
It was in February 1896 that Guglielmo Marconi and his mother Annie left Bologna and travelled by steam train across Europe, then by ferry to England, arriving at Victoria station in London where the air was thick with the reek of coal-smoke and horse-dung. Henry Jameson-Davis, the son of one of Annie’s sisters, who had known Guglielmo as a boy, agreed to find them a place to stay, and was intrigued by his young cousin’s wireless equipment.
Jameson-Davis was an engineer himself, specialising in the design of windmills, and invited his friends to see Marconi’s invention. One of them, A.A. Campbell Swinton, knew William Preece, Chief Electrical Engineer at the Post Office, and agreed to give Marconi a letter of introduction. Dated 30 March 1896, the letter stated:
I am taking the liberty of sending to you with this note a young Italian of the name of Marconi, who has come over to this country with the idea of getting taken up a new system of telegraphy without wires, at which he has been working. It appears to be based upon the use of Hertzian waves, and Oliver Lodge’s coherer, but from what he tells me he appears to have got considerably beyond what I believe other people have done in this line. It has occurred to me that you might possibly be kind enough to see him and hear what he has to say and I also think that what he has done will very likely be of interest to you. Hoping that I am not troubling you too much …
In April Marconi wrote home to his father that he had had a meeting with a Mr Price – he got the name wrong – who had shown an interest in wireless. It is not clear exactly when Marconi demonstrated his working model to Preece. A description of Marconi’s arrival at the General Post Office building in St Martin’s-le-Grand in the City was given years later by a lad who was one of Preece’s assistants, P.R. Mullis. While Mullis was going to and fro unloading Preece’s brougham, he noticed Marconi examining a little scale model of an ingenious bag-catching device used by the Post Office which enabled trains to take on post without stopping. He recalled that Marconi had with him two large bags. Preece emerged,