Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [41]
Meanwhile the public appeared to grow impatient with Marconi’s secrecy and his failure to convert his technology into a practical system of telegraphy, despite reports of his successes at the post office, Salisbury Plain, and the Bristol Channel. This was an age that had come to expect progress. “What we want to know is the truth about all these questionable successes,” one reader wrote in a letter published by The Electrician. “I say questionable, because this delay, this hanging fire, as regards practical results, raises in my mind certain doubts which in common probably with others I should like to have dispelled.
“Wherein are the present difficulties? Are they in the transmitter, in the receiver, or in the intervening and innocent ether, or do they exist in the financial syndicate, who upon the strength of hidden experiments and worthless newspaper reports, have embarked in this great and mysterious venture?”
Once Marconi could have counted on William Preece and the post office to come to his defense, but by now Preece had turned against him—though Marconi seemed oblivious to the change and to the danger it posed. In early September 1897, for example, the post office abruptly barred Marconi from tests it was conducting at Dover, even though the tests involved Marconi’s equipment. Marconi complained to Preece that if he were not allowed to be present, the tests likely would fail. He feared that in the hands of others his wireless would not perform at its maximum; he also knew that the post office’s engineers had not incorporated his latest improvements. He was twenty-three years old, Preece sixty-three, yet Marconi wrote as if chiding a schoolboy: “I hope this new attitude will not be continued, as otherwise very serious injury may be done to my Company in the event of the non success of the Dover experiments.”
Shortly afterward he hired George Kemp away from the post office and made him his personal assistant, one of the most important hiring decisions he would make.
So far all this had taken place out of public view, but early in 1898 the post office exhibited what appeared to be the first official manifestation of Preece’s disenchantment. The postmaster-general’s annual report for the twelve months ended March 31, 1898, disclosed that tests of Marconi’s apparatus had been conducted, “but no practical results have yet been achieved.”
Marconi was stung. He believed he had demonstrated without doubt that wireless was a practical technology, ready for adoption. In December 1897 he and Kemp had erected a wireless mast on the Isle of Wight, on the grounds of the Needles Hotel at Alum Bay—the world’s first permanent wireless station—and established communication between it and a coastal tugboat at a distance of eleven miles. In January 1898 they had erected a second station on the mainland, at another hotel, Madeira House in Bournemouth, fourteen and a half miles west along the coast. The two stations had been in communication ever since.
Seemingly blind to Preece’s changed attitude, Marconi offered to sell the post office rights to use his technology within Britain for £30,000—an exorbitant price, equivalent to about $3 million today. The offer smacked of impudence. The government rejected the offer.
Now Preece struck again. In February 1899 he turned sixty-five, the post office’s mandatory retirement age, but instead of retiring, he wrangled an appointment as Consulting Engineer to the Post Office, where circumstances contrived to make him an even more dangerous adversary. His superiors asked him to compile a report on Marconi’s technology with an eye to determining whether the government ought to grant Marconi a license that would permit his stations to begin handling messages turned in at telegraph offices operated by the post office. Existing law, which gave the post office a monopoly over all telegraphy in the British Isles, forbade