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The story of electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) continues with the discovery of wireless telegraphy and how it forever changed the global landscape. In this episode, we trace the life of Guglielmo Marconi through his dreams and determination as a young engineer who believed the experiments of Heinrich Hertz could change the world, to the shrewd businessman who ushered us into the Dawn of the Electronic Age. From experiments at home in Italy to helping nations communicate wirelessly across the Atlantic Ocean, Marconi helped the world become globally interconnected in a way that many thought impossible at the turn of the 20th Century.
The Evolution of Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO)
This podcast will take you on a journey throughout time and around the world to meet the inventors, the battles, and the technology that has not only shaped military operations - how we fight - but also how we live. The History of Crows will cover some of the most important discoveries, battles, and events that shaped what we know today as electromagnetic spectrum operations. Episodes that take you deeper into our history will be added periodically.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This episode is sponsored by BAE Systems, the global leader in next generation electronic warfare systems. With more than 60 years of experience and 33,000 people as part of its global defense, aerospace, and security business, BAE Systems electronic warfare systems are found on the most advanced military platforms in the US and around the world. Learn more at baesystems.com/ew.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Welcome to the History of Crows, a podcast on the evolution of electromagnetic spectrum operations, or EMSO, and the men and women, the crows, who changed the way we conduct military operations and the way we live around the world. The History of Crows will help you navigate the intersection of military history, technology, and scientific discovery through insights and stories from the people and war fighters who know how to fight in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
We take you through the important discoveries, inventions, battles, and developments that make the crow motto true, to be the first in and the last out, in any military operation today. The History of Crows is brought to you by the Association of Old Crows, or the AOC, an international professional association comprised of people who are experts in the fields of electromagnetic warfare and signals intelligence. To learn more about the AOC, please visit www.crows.org. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Today in Sparks Across The Atlantic, we continue the story of electromagnetic spectrum operations and how the discovery of wireless telegraphy changed the way we communicate and send information around the globe. We take you into the life of the man who pioneered this revolutionary technology, Guglielmo Marconi. By discovering how to send messages using electromagnetic energy, traveling at the speed of light, Marconi spurred advances at electronics that would impact World War I, World War II, and lead to the use of microwave technology, radar, and what we know today as the electromagnetic spectrum operations.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
To share the story about Marconi and his impact on military and commercial communications, we welcome Harry Klancer and Al Klase from the Information Age Learning Center, a nonprofit organization located at the historic site of the American Marconi Belmar Wireless Station, which ultimately became the US Army Camp Evans Signal Laboratory.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
In early 1894, a young ambitious 20 year old was traveling by train. His name was Guglielmo Marconi, and he was a budding scientist, dreaming of how he could send messages across great distances. He was familiar with the experiments and discoveries of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. As he sat on this train, he opened the newspaper and saw that another leading physicist, Heinrich Hertz, had died. So he read the obituary.
Henry Klancer (03:26):
The obituary was written by a Professor at the University of Bologna, Augusto Righi, and Marconi became absolutely fascinated with, by and obsessed with, Hertz's experiments. They would in fact, be the foundation for everything he later did. He was particularly taken by his spark gap experiments and very excited about the practical application of it to the point where he tracked down Professor Righi and asked him very excitedly about Hertz and about the obituary and what Righi thought of Hertz's work.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
But Marconi's excitement was short-lived.
Henry Klancer (04:09):
And to his dismay, Righi was very dismissive. He thought, "Well, Hertz, this is really a dead end. And I wrote him a glowing biography or a obituary because you speak no ill of the dead." But he didn't think there was any real future in Hertz's experiments.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Marconi was too ambitious, however, and saw connections and potentials where others didn't. And so he began a journey where he would dedicate the rest of his life to advancing the discoveries of Hertz, Maxwell, and others who had gone before him.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Marconi's boldness and his ability to see beyond the limits of prevailing science came from somewhere peculiar, his parents, for they too had seen the amazing possibilities that could happen when one took risks, and they passed this trait onto their son. Marconi's mother, Annie Jameson, was the granddaughter of John Jameson, the founder of the Irish whiskey company. She grew up in a castle in Ireland. She was beautiful, talented, and had big dreams.
Henry Klancer (05:15):
And wanted she to go into opera and theater, which was simply not done in London in those days, or in Ireland. And so her parents arranged through family contacts for her to go live with a family friend who was part of the business in Italy. And so Annie Jameson, the granddaughter of John Jameson, the founder of the Irish whiskey company, went to Bologna, Italy to study at the conservatory there.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
As she studied, she met a man through the Jameson's family friend. His name was Giuseppe Marconi, and their relationship quickly turned controversial.
Henry Klancer (05:57):
He fell in love with this young girl and she with him, to the absolute horror of both sets of parents. Nothing could have been further from the eminently Protestant Northern Irish Jameson family than for her to marry an Italian Catholic. So she had to go back to Ireland. Her sister, however, facilitated contact between the two young lovers. And when she turned 18, they snuck out of the castle one night and caught a boat across the Irish Sea and then across England and eventually to the French coast where young Marconi had taken the family carriage, ridden across the Alps, and met her on the beach and they were married in Bologna. So the story has a very human romantic aspect to it and it also tells us something about the relative characters of the two parents, both of whom would have a tremendous influence on Marconi growing up.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
As young Guglielmo Marconi grew up, his relationship with his father shaped his early education and professional pursuits, although at first they did not see eye to eye.
Henry Klancer (07:05):
His father wanted a practical person who would be able to take over the family estate and run it as a successful business and maintain the respect of his peers, the other land owners. Marconi on the other hand was a dreamer and an experimenter, someone who had a great deal of interest in the world around him.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Marconi did become successful in business, but not in the way his father originally intended. His father was skeptical of the practical application of Marconi's pursuits. And while Marconi didn't take over the family estate, he knew that he needed to prove to his father why his ventures were worth it.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
But Marconi had another obstacle. As he had found with Augusto Righi, some people in academia believed Hertz's experiments were a dead end. Marconi felt like there was a future in them, however, and set out to prove it. So he started using a spark gap transmitter to send messages wirelessly over increasing distances.
Henry Klancer (08:07):
What Hertz, did, of course arranges this spark transmitter, which is an antenna, maybe as far as you spread out your arms, with the spark in the middle. And his receiver was essentially the same length of wire curved around into a loop with a spark gap at the end of it so you could detect a signal. Now it's very, very crude, not very sensitive, but it was sufficient that he could prove the optical nature of electromagnetic radiation. That is he could show reflections, refraction, and you could measure the wavelength by observing the standing waves in a reflection. So that pretty much proved Maxwell's theories.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Marconi kept building on Hertz's experiments and the theories of Maxwell, eager to prove the practicality behind them.
Henry Klancer (09:08):
And he began attempting first to duplicate Hertz's experiments, which he succeeded at doing, and also in incorporating the improvements that others had made on Hertz's original spark gap experiment. He tried some 500 different combinations of gear and technique to arrive at increasing distance and strength of signal, incorporating things like the coherer and the detector and a primitive capacitor so that he could eventually ring a bell, first from across the room, and then from his villa out to the garden, and he finally felt he was ready to present this to his father. And so he demonstrated it first to his mother, then to his father and said, "Look, I can send energy across great distances." And his father said, "So what?" And Marconi said, "No, you don't understand. If I can send energy, I can send information." He was thinking about using Morse code. And again, Marconi Senior said, "Well, that's all very well and good, but I can see you and hear you. And I don't really need a machine to communicate with you."
Henry Klancer (10:22):
So Marconi conceived an experiment where he would be out of sight and out of hearing. And he got his brother and a donkey and a rifle and he put half of his gear on the donkey and he handed the rifle to his brother, and they went over the crest of a hill with half the equipment while Marconi kept the other half with him. And he was able to communicate with his brother out of sight and out of hearing with his parents witnessing the experiment. And that finally convinced the very practical, very stolid, Marconi Senior, who said, "Okay, I'm convinced, I think this has practical application. How can I help you bring this to fruition?"
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Now, with his father's support Marconi's career in wireless communications took off. With the help of his father, Marconi met with leaders in Italian industry and government, including the Italian Navy. The Italian Navy, however, did not see much use for this revolutionary capability.
Henry Klancer (11:24):
The Italian Navy was not taken with it. They basically said, "We have a long thin country that's already well supplied with telegraphs, and we can communicate with our ships at sea by semaphore, so we really don't see the need," for what would become wireless communication.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
But all was not lost with the Italian Navy's rejection. Marconi's mother remembered her connections in England, which led Marconi to William Preece, the chief electrical engineer of the General Post Office in London. With William's support, Marconi now had the chance to run experiments over greater and greater distances. In 1897 after many experiments he received a patent for his work and formed the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy company.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
At BAE Systems, we're developing full spectrum, multi-domain, electronic warfare capabilities that outpace the threats. Our electronic warfare systems are designed to be open, reprogrammable, and exportable to deliver on the US Air Force's operational vision of the electromagnetic spectrum. We're committed to delivering electromagnetic spectrum superiority to the war fighter where it matters most. Learn more at baesystems.com/ew. That's baesystems.com/ew.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
While Marconi was innovative, he was not alone. Wireless communications turned out to not be the dead end some had thought it to be only years earlier. Increasing competition filled the industry, but Marconi excelled at taking his ideas and blending them with others to stay ahead, and he was willing to do the work.
AL Klase (13:12):
Marine telecommunications turned out to be a very important one that his ideas matched very precisely. His approach in creating work in marine telecommunications was to create entire systems, including transmitters, receivers, providing crews, and so on to operate the system.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Marconi began demonstrating how his technology would allow ships to do what they could never do before.
AL Klase (13:42):
In 1899, he successfully provided that equipment to three ships in the Royal Navy, and they operated over 75 or more miles. And in fact, that was such a successful enterprise that in 1900 he formed the Marconi International Maritime Communications Company under his main company.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
People began noticing that Marconi's technology could transmit messages over increasing distances, and they saw that there was potential in commercializing this technology. So in 1899, Marconi was invited to a very important yacht race in the United States to demonstrate just how far wireless communication could go. The America's Cup was to be held about 10 miles off the coast of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, completely out of sight from onshore spectators.
AL Klase (14:34):
Now the race was going to be, it's essentially a grudge match. It was between the Colombia, which was owned by JP Morgan of the US, and the Emerald, which was owned by Sir Thomas Lipton of the UK.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
A local newspaper was anxious to know the results before its competitors and they had an idea for how they could use Marconi's technology to their advantage.
AL Klase (14:58):
He was invited by James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald newspaper to provide reporting on that. The reporting that he was going to do was planned in this way. He would put a transmitter on the SS Ponce, which was a ship he had been able to acquire, to transmit to the receiver at the Navesink lighthouse, or the Twin Lights, which is just south of Sandy Hook itself, and to send the information by telegraph, wired telegraph, to the New York Herald. So the race was held in November 1899. And the reporting that Marconi did was very successful. The messages went to the lighthouse as planned and then was telegraphed to the Herald and were published almost immediately. And in fact, the New York Times actually complained that the results got there too fast. It's an odd complaint to make, but they did.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
But in 1901, two years later, at a rematch of the America's Cup, Marconi's competitors joined him to try and make a name for themselves in wireless transmission. The result was a total fiasco. It revealed a fundamental limit of spark transmitters used in early wireless telegraphy, a problem they had also encountered in previous and unsuccessful demonstration to the US Navy. The wireless signals were very broadband and interfered with everything, a problem that future military operations would have to consider.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
With competition growing, Marconi reflected on his successes, his lessons learned, and the future of his business. He started wondering was any distance too great? How many people could he connect? And what if one nation could talk to another? He saw possibilities and this led to his most well-known pursuit, intercontinental wireless communications.
AL Klase (16:56):
Another potential business was competing in intercontinental communications. There were 14 telegraph cables under the Atlantic Ocean at that time, from England, or from the continent, to the US, and there had apparently been an agreement that the pricing for sending information for newspapers, businesses, et cetera, across the ocean would be a shilling a word, that's about, at the time apparently it was about 25 cents a word. I've heard unattributed that Marconi thought he could do that business for about 5 cents a word via wireless. I've heard it unattributed, so I've actually found some data from one of the managers of the Marconi Company on costs and prices, and I recalculated that, and in fact, it's not far off. So Marconi could have done it for about 20, 20% of the cost of the undersea cable people.
AL Klase (17:56):
So he proposed a demonstration, a demonstration to transmit signals across the ocean from Poldhu, which is in on the Cornwall coast in England, and Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a distance of about 3000 miles. The demonstration was supposed to be in early December of 1901. But before that, all of the antennas at both Poldhu and Wellfleet were destroyed by windstorms, totally destroyed, knocked down. At Poldhu he managed to have another smaller antenna built, but by the time Wellfleet was knocked down, he could not replace the antenna, and 3000 miles, which is the distance to Wellfleet was a long way. So he found the closest point in North America, which was St. John's, Newfoundland, about 2000 miles from Poldhu. And he went there, and using makeshift antennas, held up by kites and balloons instead of towers, he declared that he and his assistant, Kemp, George Kemp, had a successful transmission on the frequency which turns out today to be about 800 kilohertz, kilo cycles. At the time, it wasn't known precisely, but a lot of analyses have shown it to have been about that. That's very short waves compared to things he would do later. 1
Speaker 2 (19:24):
The world could now transmit messages across the Atlantic Ocean. Marconi went on to establish wireless communications aboard British ships, and it dramatically changed how ships communicated with each other, and how they could respond to crises.
AL Klase (19:37):
He had a chance to demonstrate that in 1909. The RMS Republic had collided with the SS Florida off Nantucket Island in January of 1909. And using the Marconi Wireless that the Republic had, the Republic called for help, and of over 1500 people, 1500 were saved, roughly, and six were lost. A tremendous, tremendous success.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
However, with new technology comes new problems, and not every ship had this success. A major event would happen that would further shape how ship to ship communications were handled.
AL Klase (20:16):
In 1912, the more famous case of the Titanic, unfortunately, was not quite so successful. The Titanic in April 1912, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic as people know. They called for help using their Marconi Wireless, and the nearby SS California had closed their radio room for the evening. They only had one shift operating their radio room. The Carpathia, which was much, much further away and took four or five hours to get to him, heard the calls and came. But by that time, the Titanic itself had sunk. Almost immediately the radio laws were rewritten and the 1912 Radio Law was written which declared that the radio room must be staffed for 24 hours a day and all radio operators must be licensed.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
The world began integrating radio communications into its global infrastructure more and more. In 1913, the New York Times reported Marconi's announcement that he was going to girdle the earth with radio stations.
AL Klase (21:21):
And in fact, there was an article in the New York Times to that effect, and he built stations all around the world so that one could communicate with the next and with the next and with the next and so on. In 1913, he started building such stations, and in fact, we are in one of those stations here in Belmar. It was known as the Belmar New Brunswick station.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Guglielmo Marconi spurred the growth of wireless communications from the beginning of the 20th century until World War I, a time known as the dawn of the electronic age. The world became globally interconnected through radio stations thanks to Marconi's ability to see potential where others did not, and take risks to advance science into practical use.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Join us in our next episode, as we continue the story of the crows, and look at how military operations began exploring the use of wireless communications and direction finding equipment that would pave the way for early radar. This podcast is brought to you by the Association of Old Crows. Thank you to our episode sponsor BAE Systems. Learn more at crows.org/podcast. Thanks for listening.