Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [38]
“The papers seem to treat the Marconi method as all new. Of course you know better, [and] so long as my scientific confreres are well informed it matters but little what the public press says.
“The stress of business may however have caused you to forget some of the details published by me in 1894. I used brass filings in vacuo then too. It could all have been done 3 years ago had I known that it was regarded as a commercially important desideratum. I had the automatic tapping-back [and] everything.”
PREECE WENT AHEAD with his lecture at the Royal Institution. He and Marconi included a demonstration similar to what they had done at Toynbee Hall, with bells “ringing merrily” from refuse cans, as The Electrician put it. The journal called the experiments “wizard-like.”
Preece told the audience, “The distance to which signals have been sent is remarkable,” and added, “we have by no means reached the limit.” Here he aimed an attack at Oliver Lodge. Without identifying Lodge by name, Preece alluded to Lodge’s declaration of three years earlier that Hertzian waves probably could not travel farther than half a mile. “It is interesting to read the surmises of others,” Preece said. “Half a mile was the wildest dream.”
Here, as The Electrician reported, Preece “scored an effective hit.”
At the close of his lecture great applause rose from the audience. From Lodge and the Maxwellians came more fury. In a striking breach of the decorum that governed Victorian science, Lodge took his anger public. In a letter to The Times he wrote, “It appears that many persons suppose that the method of signaling across space by means of Hertzian waves received by a Branly tube of filings is a new discovery made by Signor Marconi. It is well known to physicists, and perhaps the public may be willing to share the information, that I myself showed what was essentially the same plan of signaling in 1894.” He complained that “much of the language indulged in during the last few months by writers of popular articles on the subject about ‘Marconi waves,’ ‘important discoveries’ and ‘brilliant novelties’ has been more than usually absurd.”
The attack startled even his friend and fellow physicist George FitzGerald, though FitzGerald shared Lodge’s opinion. Shortly after the Times letter appeared, FitzGerald wrote to Lodge and cautioned, “It would be important to keep it from becoming a personal question between you and Marconi. The public don’t care about that and will only say, ‘This is a personal squabble: let them settle it amongst themselves.’”
FitzGerald did not blame Marconi. “This young chap himself, I understand he is merely 20”—actually, he was twenty-three—“deserves a great deal of credit for his persistency, enthusiasm, and pluck and must be really a very clever young fellow and it would be very hard to expect him to be quite judicial in his views as to everybody’s credit in the matter.” Marconi had not been “very open,” he wrote, “but he is hardly to blame if his head is a bit swelled under the circumstances, and no Italian or other foreigner was ever really fair in their judgments so that it is quite unreasonable to expect them to be so.”
The real problem was Preece, FitzGerald charged. He urged that Lodge focus his attacks on him, in particular on how Preece and the post office—“absurdly ignorant, as usual”—had ignored the scientific discoveries on which Marconi had based his apparatus and instead had been seduced by a “secret box.”
He added, “Preece is, I think, distinctly and intentionally scoffing at scientific men and deserves severe rebuke.”
ON JULY 2, 1897, MARCONI received his full, formal patent and, without Preece’s knowledge, moved steadily closer to join with Jameson Davis to form a new company.
Preece may have believed he had stymied this plan. In a letter to superiors