Marconi, masculinity and the heroic age of science: wireless telegraphy at the British Association meeting at Dover in 1899

Abstract

In September 1899, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Dover, Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system was used to transmit messages across the English Channel (and across a national border) for the first time. This achievement represented a highly effective performance of scientific masculinity and constitutes a key turning point in an important struggle between competing interpretations of invention and innovation as masculine practices within British science. The British Association tended to favor a narrative of scientific research as a collectivist, international, gentlemanly-amateur pursuit, largely confined to the laboratory. Marconi, by contrast, explained the development of wireless telegraphy as the achievement of his own genius. Appealing not only to the established scientific elite but to a range of non-traditional audiences, and stressing the possibilities or ‘imagined uses’ of his technology even more so than his actual results, he succeeded in commanding unprecedented influence.

Keywords:

• Wireless telegraphy
• masculinity
• Marconi
• British Association
• science

Notes

1. Aitken, Syntony and Spark, 219.

2. Aitken wrote that ‘For the historian there is, with Marconi’s arrival, the feeling of entering into a different world – the world, not of the scientist but of the engineer and the entrepreneur.’ Aitken, Syntony and Spark, 26.

3. Hunt, ‘“Practice vs. Theory,” 341–55. As Bruce J. Hunt has well shown, the world of electrical telegraphy in the late 1880s and 1890s was riven by a deep divide between what he terms the ‘theoreticians’ and the ‘practical men’. The theoreticians were, in general, university-trained professors, advocates of Clerk Maxwell’s theory, whose experiments remained largely confined to laboratories rather than being exploited for commercial gain. The practical men, by contrast, were the old guard of electrical engineers, men with little formal training, who had left school early and learned ‘on the job’. The relationship of these men with the scientific establishment in the late nineteenth century was sensitive. Their recognised leader was the Post Office’s chief electrical engineer, Sir William Preece. Although Preece was an active contributor to the BAAS, he had never pursued the study of electricity theoretically and felt increasingly excluded from the rising generation of theoreticians like Oliver Lodge, George Francis FitzGerald and Silvanus Thompson.

4. See, for example, Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 17 August 1889; Pall Mall Gazette, 17 August 1889; The Standard, 17 August 1899; Yorkshire Herald, 17 August 1899; Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 18 August 1899; The Sheffield and Rotheram Independent, 18 August 1899; The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 19 August 1899; Nottinghamshire Guardian, 19 August 1899; The Morning Post, 21 August 1899; The Standard, 21 August 1899; Huddersfield Daily Chronicle, 22 August 1899; The Yorkshire Herald, 22 August 1899; The Penny Illustrated Paper, 26 August 1899; The Morning Post, 12 September 1899; Sheffield and Rotheram Independent, 13 September 1899; The Morning Post, 13 September 1899; Liverpool Mercury, 22 August 1899; The Belfast News-Letter, 14 September 1899; Glasgow Herald, 14 September 1899; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 14 September 1899; The Sheffield and Rotheram Independent, 14 September 1899; Nottinghamshire Guardian, 16 September 1899; Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 21 September 1899; The Times, 18 September 1899; The Times, 19 September 1899.

5. Fleming, “Wireless Telegraphy,” 6, cited by Hong, Wireless, 56–7.

6. Rose, Feminism and Geography; on ‘scientific masculinity’, see also Ikonen and Pehkonen, “Explorers in the Arctic,” 127–52.

7. David Livingstone famously spoke before the BAAS in Dublin in 1856 and Bath in 1864; Samuel Baker, another famous African explorer, acted as president of the Geographical Section (E) at the meeting in Dundee in 1867.

8. See Hong, Wireless; Gooday and Bruton, “Marconi the Monopolist?”

9. One article discussed whether Marconi had an ‘ulterior object … in his visit to America.’ See The Morning Post, 13 September 1899.

10. See, for example, “Wireless Telegraphy: An Interview with Signor Marconi” (The Morning Post, 21 August 1899); “Wireless Telegraphy” (Sheffield and Rotheram Independent, 13 September 1899).

11. Hong, Wireless, 56.

12. Gooday and Bruton, “Marconi the Monopolist?,” 8–9; Hong, Wireless, xii.

13. For a different view, stressing the extent to which British science had begun to act like a profession by the late nineteenth century, see Barton, “‘Men of Science’,” 73–119.

14. “Opening Address of the President,” 500.

15. For Bacon’s influence upon the BAAS, see Morrell and Thackray, 268–9.

16. Pancaldi, “Scientific Internationalism,” 145–69.

17. First Report of the Proceedings, 10.

18. Aitken, Syntony and Spark, 230.

19. Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 14 September 1899.

20. Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 21 September 1899.

21. Sotheby, Lines Suggested, 3.

22. The Times, 19 September 1899.

23. Rutherford, “The Electrical Structure of Matter,” 1–24.

24. The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 13 September 1898.

25. Pall Mall Gazette, 17 August 1899.

26. The Sheffield and Rotheram Independent, 18 August 1899.

27. For more on the ‘great man’ theory of invention, see Moon, Social Networks in the History of Innovation and Invention.

28. See, for example, Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel eds. Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment.

29. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, 3.

30. Ibid., xi.

31. It is important to remember, however, that in the early nineteenth century prominent figures within elite science, men like Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, did carry out dramatic and carefully staged electrical experiments in front of large audiences, albeit middle and upper-class audiences in fashionable locations like the Royal Institution. On this, see Golinski, “Humphry Davy: The Experimental Self”; Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918, especially chapter 2.

32. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, xiii.

33. North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 19 August 1899. For more on the history of technology as spectacle, see Morus, Frankenstein’s Children; Nye, American Technological Sublime.

34. British Architect, 15 September 1899.

35. Nye, American Technological Sublime, xvi–xvii.

36. “Wireless Telegraphy: Interview with Signor Marconi.”

37. The Standard, 21 August 1899.

38. The Penny Illustrated Paper, 26 August 1899.

39. “At Dover”, 196–7.

40. Nottinghamshire Guardian, 16 September 1899.

41. Marconi, “The Practicability of Wireless Telegraphy,” 931–41.

42. Ibid., 931.

43. See, for example, Ibid., 931: ‘The success of my various trials led me to desire some opportunity of testing the practical application of my system on a more extended scale.’.

44. Ibid., 931.

45. Ibid., 932.

46. Ibid., 934.

47. Ibid., 935.

48. Ibid., 940.

49. Gooday and Bruton, “Marconi the Monopolist?”, 27.

50. Lodge, “The Wireless Telegraphy Conference,” 10.

51. “Notes,” 229.

52. “The Month: Science and Arts,” 829–831.

53. “The New Telegraphy,” 778.

54. Ibid., 780.

55. Ibid., 778.

56. Ibid., 779.

57. Report of the Seventieth Meeting, 639.

58. Lodge, 179.

59. Marconi, “The Practicability of Wireless Telegraphy,” 936.

60. Cited in Baker, Sir William Preece, F.R.S., 107.

61. “Discussion,” 644–5.

62. Cited in Hunt, ‘“Practice vs. Theory”’, 350.

63. Lodge, “Sketch,” Electrician, 1888, 622.