the limits of his own as of all scientists’ knowledge as to the mysterious powers of electricity and ether. At his instrument his face shows a suppressed enthusiasm which is a delightful revelation of character. A youth of twenty-three who can, very literally, evoke spirits from the vasty deep and despatch them on the wings of the wind must naturally feel that he had done something very like picking the lock of Nature’s laboratory. Signor Marconi listens to the crack-crack of his instrument with some such wondering interest as Aladdin must have displayed on first hearing the voice of the Genius who had been called up by the friction of his lamp.
There was just as much fascination with the shore station, where Marconi’s ‘chief assistant’ George Kemp, a stocky little Englishman with a handlebar moustache, an indefatigable worker who knew his masts and his ropes from his time in the Navy, and who Marconi had met through Preece at the Post Office, was tracked down by another Daily Express journalist. The ‘old navy man’ gave a down-to-earth account of the state of the art: ‘The one thing to do if you expect to find out anything about electricity is to work,’
said he, ‘for you can do nothing with theories. Signor Marconi’s discoveries prove that the professors are all wrong, and now they will have to go and burn their books. Then they will write new ones, which, perhaps some time they will have to burn in their turn.’ Of Marconi, Kemp said: ‘He works in all weather, and I remember him having to make three attempts to get out past the Needles in a gale before he succeeded. He does not care for storms or rain, but keeps pegging away in the most persistent manner.’
Yet another reporter on board the Flying Huntress described Marconi standing by the instruments ‘with a certain simple dignity, a quiet pride in his own control of a powerful force, which suggested a great musician conducting the performance of a masterpiece of his own composing’. Though he had been determined not to be overawed by this wonderful invention, the reporter confessed to a thrill when he joined Marconi in a little cabin to send a message to the shore. Having witnessed this remarkable demonstration, a devilish impulse to play with wireless overcame him.
Is it the Irish characteristic, or is it the common impulse of human nature, that when we find ourselves in command of a great force, by means of which stupendous results can be produced for the benefit of mankind, our first desire is to play tricks with it? No sooner were we alive to the extraordinary fact that it was possible, without connecting wires, to communicate with a station which was miles away and quite invisible to us, than we began to send silly messages, such as to request the man in charge of the Kingston station to be sure to keep sober and not to take too many ‘whiskey-and-sodas’.
All the English newspapers reported Marconi’s triumph at the Kingston Regatta, and the glowing descriptions of this modest young inventor and his magical abilities impressed Queen Victoria and her eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales, known affectionately as ‘Bertie’.
The Prince of Wales spent much of his time with rich friends,
and had been a guest of the Rothschilds, the banking millionaires, in Paris, where he had fallen and seriously injured his leg. In August he was to attend the Cowes Regatta on the royal yacht, and a request was made to Marconi to set up a wireless link between the Queen at Osborne and her son on the ship moored offshore. Marconi was only too happy to oblige: it was excellent publicity, and it was no concern of his if, for the time being, wireless was employed frivolously. In any case, as he later told an audience of professional engineers, it offered him ‘the opportunity to study and meditate upon new and interesting elements concerning the influence of hills on wireless communication’.
With an aerial fixed to the mast of the royal yacht and a
There was just as much fascination with the shore station, where Marconi’s ‘chief assistant’ George Kemp, a stocky little Englishman with a handlebar moustache, an indefatigable worker who knew his masts and his ropes from his time in the Navy, and who Marconi had met through Preece at the Post Office, was tracked down by another Daily Express journalist. The ‘old navy man’ gave a down-to-earth account of the state of the art: ‘The one thing to do if you expect to find out anything about electricity is to work,’
said he, ‘for you can do nothing with theories. Signor Marconi’s discoveries prove that the professors are all wrong, and now they will have to go and burn their books. Then they will write new ones, which, perhaps some time they will have to burn in their turn.’ Of Marconi, Kemp said: ‘He works in all weather, and I remember him having to make three attempts to get out past the Needles in a gale before he succeeded. He does not care for storms or rain, but keeps pegging away in the most persistent manner.’
Yet another reporter on board the Flying Huntress described Marconi standing by the instruments ‘with a certain simple dignity, a quiet pride in his own control of a powerful force, which suggested a great musician conducting the performance of a masterpiece of his own composing’. Though he had been determined not to be overawed by this wonderful invention, the reporter confessed to a thrill when he joined Marconi in a little cabin to send a message to the shore. Having witnessed this remarkable demonstration, a devilish impulse to play with wireless overcame him.
Is it the Irish characteristic, or is it the common impulse of human nature, that when we find ourselves in command of a great force, by means of which stupendous results can be produced for the benefit of mankind, our first desire is to play tricks with it? No sooner were we alive to the extraordinary fact that it was possible, without connecting wires, to communicate with a station which was miles away and quite invisible to us, than we began to send silly messages, such as to request the man in charge of the Kingston station to be sure to keep sober and not to take too many ‘whiskey-and-sodas’.
All the English newspapers reported Marconi’s triumph at the Kingston Regatta, and the glowing descriptions of this modest young inventor and his magical abilities impressed Queen Victoria and her eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales, known affectionately as ‘Bertie’.
The Prince of Wales spent much of his time with rich friends,
and had been a guest of the Rothschilds, the banking millionaires, in Paris, where he had fallen and seriously injured his leg. In August he was to attend the Cowes Regatta on the royal yacht, and a request was made to Marconi to set up a wireless link between the Queen at Osborne and her son on the ship moored offshore. Marconi was only too happy to oblige: it was excellent publicity, and it was no concern of his if, for the time being, wireless was employed frivolously. In any case, as he later told an audience of professional engineers, it offered him ‘the opportunity to study and meditate upon new and interesting elements concerning the influence of hills on wireless communication’.
With an aerial fixed to the mast of the royal yacht and a
Similar Books
