Waves Over Waves


   It is yet another great irony that what gave the allies one of it’s greatest weapons was a man who was a citizen of a nation that they found themselves at war with. It was quite fortunate for them that a twenty-one year old electrical engineer, from Italy, Guglielmo Marconi, had chosen to visit Great Britain less than two years before hostilities broke out. It was a further irony that this trip was both suggested and facilitated by another man who was not only a national of an enemy of Great Britain but, even an honorary official of the United States Government. While being ironic it is, however, not surprising that a young Marconi and his mother would make the trip. Even Marconi’s own government had turned a blind eye to his break thru and the only official, in Rome, that even knew about it had labeled the report as, “for the loony bin,” and not given it another seconds thought.
Marconi had traveled to Great Britain for one reason only. He was looking for money. None was forth coming in Italy and Marconi had managed to do something amazing and, for the time, unbelievable to anyone outside of the academic pursuits of physics. His trip would be successful in that he found his patron before he had even cleared customs in Dover. Marconi had brought his equipment with him and upon inspection of their cases, the customs officials immediately recognized that this might be something important. They had long since been alerted to look for any new technology that was entering Britain. It was quite a tall order considering that Marconi was not exactly unique in his quest for funds. The difference was, unlike Marconi’s equipment, most of the other potentials would never amount to anything.
The Royal Navy was very quick to oblige Marconi an audience. Once again, Marconi proved to be lucky since, in 1896, the admiralty was a little less than progressive. He was fortunate that one of his many demonstrations was too the royal post office and it’s chief engineer, a Welshman by the name of William Preece, a man that was familiar with the theories behind the contraption that Marconi had brought with him. He was also very impressed because, it seemed, that this contraption proved many theories that Preece had developed while working on standard telegraphs and under water cables that now linked the continents. This too would be ironic in that these theories, that were much supported by Preece, would not only be wrong but, sound much like the magical musings of Merlin rather than science or, at least, they would to a modern ear.
Marconi’s work would rapidly progress as he would eventually receive funding, resources, and support from not only the Royal Navy but several civilian agencies as well. Despite this, the Navy was unwilling to use any of it until a certain Admiral, Jacky Fisher, was reassigned from the Caribbean to the ordinance bureau and first heard of this marvelous new “toy.” It was something of a miracle that Fisher became aware of the project since very few outside of Marconi’s lab even knew it existed.
This fact seems to suggest that the older Admirals took this invention seriously enough and actually believed that, one day, it might actually work. How could they not? They received regular updates on Marconi’s progress. They kept very tight security around the project and this was aided by the fact that it seemed ridiculously fantastical to begin with. Anyone outside the project, who did hear about it, simply scoffed like those back in Italy.
Fisher, whose career began in a navy that had nothing but wooden warships, and muzzle loading cannon, had seen enough change to form the belief that just about anything was possible. As soon as he was promoted to Second Admiral, in the wake of the disaster at Yellow Sea, he was following Marconi’s work daily and now he had the authority to employ this power. This would not be long before he discovered the existence of the German flying trains.
If Tirpitz had an almost insurmountable problem, of explaining to Fisher, the idea of a steel locomotive with wings then Fisher’s task was near impossible in trying to get across the idea of what the British had labeled the, “lightening detector.” The name hailed from Marconi himself, and it had been the original idea and success behind his work. The British kept the name for security reasons and used it to casually refer to the project. Why anyone would even want to detect lightening was, initially at least, beyond the Germans. Apparently, this was the case for everyone else because the security on the project was never breeched. While this new technology really did do as the name suggested, it’s potential was far greater. Today we call this technology, the radio.
Despite what is commonly accepted, in 1900, the radio was not a new idea. Work had been going on to make a successful “wireless telegraph” for almost five decades at this point. This work was going on in virtually every nation on the planet and had started no sooner than some physicists realized you could build a device that detected magnetic radiation. Today we simply call that “static” and find it annoying. In 1854, when it was first discovered, people stood in lines to listen to it for as long as they could. It was simply a curiosity though. The real trick would be to manipulate those waves into something useful. Magnetic waves could be generated so, as many scientists realized, this was not an impossible dream. Unfortunately for people like Marconi, who understood this, very few people outside of academia did.
The real problem, almost from the start, was not in the generation or reception of the radiation. The real problem was one of range and Marconi was the man who figured it out and turned a toy into a powerful technology that changed the world. Before he had turned twenty years old he had already built a device that clicked every time lightening would discharge in the vicinity of his parents house. By the time he was twenty-one he demonstrated his latest adaptation to his father. From across the room, Marconi could make a bell ring and do it, quite literally, out of thin air. Upon seeing this his father emptied his pockets of cash and gave it all to his son. Of course, it was going to take substantially more to make this into a practical device and, eventually, a weapon.
By the time that Fisher traveled to Germany, and had his meetings with the Kriegsmarine, the British had already equipped the HMS Mercury with a single transmitter. This ship was an older, second line, light cruiser that operated out of Portsmouth and had been given a single job. Mercury was past her days of slugging it out with even ships of her own class. Her armor was substandard and her design did not incorporate some of the latest features that made modern cruisers so deadly, that mostly being compartmentalization beneath her decks. What made Mercury uniquely suited for this job was actually one of her obsolete features and it was also one that had been scheduled to be removed. Despite having been built with boilers, and a steam driven engine, Mercury was built with masts for sails. Fisher had the modifications canceled and the ships main mast became the tower for her antenna.
Mercury sailed form Portsmouth with orders not to engage the enemy. She could still build up sufficient speed to outrun most ships that would pay her any attention but, her real defense lay in her obsolescence. No Cruiser or battleship were likely to attack her because sinking her would be more trouble than it was worth. The French fleet, operating out of Brest, ignored Mercury and it would prove to be to their own peril. The French would never guess that Mercury was the real reason they were starting to loose ships for, what appeared to them to be, nothing more than simple “bad luck.”
In the first three months of Mercury’s mission, the British had managed to isolate and sink a French cruiser, a destroyer, and two coastal gun boats. The French never caught on to the real source of the danger and, while this did not represent a significant threat to their fleet, at large, it did force the French to rethink their operations. As a result, they became far less aggressive in the Channel. This gave the Royal Navy some much needed breathing room.
Another irony was that most British officials were just as clueless as their French counterparts. It was fortunate for the British that only one man needed to be impressed and he was the man that originated the operation in the first place, Jacky Fisher. He wasted no time in formulating and expanding his program. Mercury was simply a test and now he needed to upgrade his lightening detectors and make them a standard for the Royal Navy.
It was far more challenging than it sounded. Strangely enough, the problems encountered by the British were not so much on the material side since they had what they needed to build as many set as required. The problems were one of having trained labor to build them. There was also the equally challenging problem of training technicians to operate the sets once they were built. There was no way to get around the time required to develop the human factor into a viable resource. Fisher went full steam on the project anyway.
There were technical challenges however. This was mostly due to the unreliability of any new technology. It was also the primary reason that the radio was limited to the navy. Despite the perceptions of weaknesses in the designs of the early sets, it is now believed that most of the break downs were due to the inexperience of the operators who had very little understanding of the technology and even electricity. This compounded the problem of rushed training under the pressures of war.
Even if human error was a major factor, these early sets were still delicate technology. They had a very limited range and were highly vulnerable to mother nature. Storms, which are very common at sea, rendered them almost useless. There were also other natural factors that interfered with their effectiveness and, at that time, were not fully understood by most. The single biggest of these was the normal activity of the sun and it’s own radio discharges. It would be years before anyone, in the radio field, would figure out what was causing these unexplained breakdowns, let alone, shield the receivers from it.
Despite all of these problems though, the radio’s did not have to work perfectly. They only had to work well enough. When Fisher learned of the Zeppelins, he had inadvertently discovered a way to make his radio work even better even if, at the time, he had no idea that was the case. It would soon be discovered that by raising the point of transmission, high into the air, you got a far better range out of your set. It was only an added benefit though.
While Tirpitz might have been mostly unclear, on exactly what this new technology was, he had no problem understanding the implications of putting these lightening detectors on his flying trains. It was not a popular notion with men like Schlieffen who wanted to only drop bombs from the Zeppelins. By putting radio sets on the new air fleet, it seemed to some as if the airships were simply coming full circle and were now little more than “super expensive observation balloons.” This argument did not dissuade Tirpitz who, also, pointed out that there was no reason the Zeppelins could not have bombs and radios.
Still, what was obvious to Tirpitz, and something Schlieffen was entirely unwilling to admit, was the fact that the Zeppelin bombing attacks had failed to produce any viable results on land. It was most certainly not enough to justify continuing the program. Even the Confederate attack on Cincinnati had yielded no significant results. Tirpitz made his case, personally, to the Kaiser. The most powerful weapon that could be wielded from the air were not bombs nor soldiers, it was information. The best place to use this weapon was in the one theater where information was always lacking and at a premium.
This place was the domain of Tirpitz. He wanted his new air fleet to ride a new kind of wave, much as the old fleet did those of the sea. Powered flight made balloon technology useful to fleets at sea. Not only could they attack from above but, more importantly, just like with the HMS Mercury, they could report on the enemies movements and, in effect, speed up the reaction times of friendly vessels. The limiting factor with such technology, till now, was that towing balloons from a ship was not practical. The Zeppelins did not need such a thing. With the radios they could also scout out ahead of formations and even perform independent actions of their own.
The plan sounded good. Unfortunately the implementation would prove to be a bit more problematic, however, just like with the radios, the system did not have to work perfectly. It only had to work well enough. The only obstacle left, that Tirpitz and Fisher had in their path, was a situation that would allow them to force a major naval action. Not only was their own respective governments unwilling to do such a thing but, their enemies were also not so eager. As long as that was the case, the major fleets of the world would sit safely in their protective harbors. Luckily for the allies though, a situation was brewing in the Balkans that would eventually give Tirpitz exactly what he wanted.