Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [37]
Slaby arrived at Lavernock. Generously, if unwisely, Marconi sent a small transmitter to Slaby so that he could monitor the experiments firsthand.
On Thursday, May 13, one week after the tests began, Marconi keyed the message, “So be it, let it be so.”
The sparks generated by his transmitter jabbed the air. Those present had to cover their ears against the miniature thunder of each blue discharge. The resulting chains of waves raced over the channel at the speed of light, from Flat Holm to Lavernock, where Marconi’s main receiver now captured them without distortion.
Slaby realized how much the kaiser would value this new information. Slaby adored Wilhelm. In a letter to Preece, he would write, in unpolished English, “I can’t love him more than I [do], he is the best and loveliest monarch who ever sit on a throne with the deepest understanding for the progress of his time. More than ever I regret, that those horrid politics have made him a stranger to your countrymen and to your whole country, that he is loving so very deeply.”
But this adoration transformed Slaby from neutral academic into de facto spy. In Berlin Slaby had been experimenting on his own with coherers and induction coils to generate electromagnetic waves. He knew the fundamentals, but now he took detailed notes on how Marconi had designed, built, and assembled his apparatus. There can be little doubt that if Marconi had known just how much detail Slaby had harvested, he would have barred him from the tests, but apparently he was too deeply engrossed to notice.
More messages followed.
“It is cold here and the wind is up.”
“How are you?”
“Go to bed.”
“Go to tea.”
And of course, this early example of wireless humor, possibly the first: “Go to Hull.”
Next Marconi tried sending signals all the way across the channel. Though barely legible, they did reach the opposite bank nine miles away, a new record. To Slaby, such a distance seemed incomprehensible. “I had not been able to telegraph more than one hundred meters through the air,” Slaby wrote. “It was at once clear to me that Marconi must have added something else—something new—to what was already known.”
After the experiments Slaby returned quickly to Germany. He was back in Berlin within two days and immediately wrote to Preece to thank him for arranging his visit. “I came as a stranger and was received like a friend and experienced once more, that people may be separated by politics and newspapers but that science unites them.”
Marconi did not share these warm feelings. Just as Preece felt betrayed by Marconi, Marconi now felt betrayed by Preece, for inviting Slaby to witness the experiments. Outwardly, however, he and Preece appeared still to be allies. With post office help Marconi continued his experiments, and Preece prepared for his talk at the Royal Institution, one of the most anticipated lectures in London.
In Berlin, Slaby immediately got to work replicating Marconi’s equipment.
IN LIVERPOOL OLIVER LODGE roused himself from his dalliances with X-rays and ghosts. Angered by the attention being heaped upon Marconi, and by Preece’s patronage, he hired his own attorney. On May 10, 1897, he filed an application to patent a means of tuning wireless transmissions so that signals sent from one transmitter would not interfere with those from another. In the same application he sought also to patent his own coherer and a tapping device that automatically thumped the coherer after each transmission to return its filings to their nonconductive state.
He had to withdraw these last two claims, however. Marconi’s patent had priority.
This did nothing to quell Lodge’s mounting resentment; nor did