The place is the historic
lecture theater of the Royal Institution in London. The date is the 4th
of June 1903, and the inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, is about to
demonstrate his new wireless system, which he claims can securely send
messages over a long distance, without interference by tuning the
signal.
The inventor himself was over 300
miles away in Cornwall, preparing to send the messages to his colleague
Professor Fleming in the theater. Towards the end of Professor Flemings
lecture, the receiver sparks into life, and the morse code printer
started printing out one word repeatedly: “Rats”. It then spelled out an
insulting limerick: “There was a young man from Italy, who diddled the
public quite prettily”. Marconi’s supposedly secure system had been
hacked.
The person behind this hack was Nevil
Maskelyne, an inventor, magician, and general troublemaker who was a
long-time rival of Marconi. He was the manager of a rival wireless
company and had been involved in a number of disputes with Marconi over
the patents that covered wireless telegraphy systems. He decided that the most effective way to show that Marconi’s claims were hollow was a practical demonstration.
In the trade journal The Electrician (the Hackaday of its time) he detailed how he hacked the system.
One of the fundamental claims of Marconi was that because his system
used a tuned signal, other signals would not interfere unless they were
tuned to the same frequency. This, however, had not been proven to the
satisfaction of Maskelyne, and he didn’t accept that the system was
really secure. So, he set out to demonstrate this. But how could you
prove this? In his account in The Electrican, he wrote that:
“When, however, it was
pointed out to me that the practical demonstrations accompanying the
lecture rendered independent tests possible, I at once grasped the fact
that the opportunity was too good to be missed…The only hope, then, was
to interpolate messages calculated to anger and “draw” somebody at the
receiving end. If that could be done, there would be proof positive.”
His plan involved setting up a transmitter not far from the lecture
(supposedly in the theater that his father, a famous stage magician,
owned) that would overwhelm the signals from Cornwall. His transmitter,
he claimed, was not run at full power: while it was capable of
outputting 8 or 9 Amps, he turned it down to 2.5 Amps. He didn’t simply
block the signal, but instead transmitted his own morse signal for a
short time, claiming that he “studiously refrained from all unnecessary
interference”.
His plan worked. Towards the end of the lecture, Maskelyne’s signals
were picked up by the receiver, decoded and noted by Fleming, who wrote
to the Times complaining of “Scientific Hooliganism”. A slew of letters
to and fro in the Times followed, where Maskelyne and Fleming argued
over if the interference was caused by Maskelyne or other phenomena,
such as ground loops or the electrical lighting in the theater.
In the end, it was discovered that the receiver that Fleming had been
using was not, in the phrasing of the time, syntonic. It wasn’t tuned
to a specific frequency, excluding all others, because a syntonic
receiver would have been too large to use in the demo. In effect,
Marconi was being at least a little deceptive. Maskelyne ended his
account with the latin phrase “Qui vult decipi, decipatur”, a legal
phrase that translates as “Let him be deceived who wishes to be
deceived.”
In the end, the hack did little to
dent Marconi’s reputation. Just the year before, he had sent the first
wireless signal across the Atlantic and started a commercial
transatlantic service a few years later in 1907. That same year he was
awarded the Nobel Prize with Karl Ferdinand Braun “in recognition of
their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy”. When he
died in 1937, the BBC observed two minutes of silence in respect, and
asked all radio transmitters to do the same.
What the hack did, however, was to
reframe the discussion on wireless security. Rather than accept
Marconi’s assertion that these signals were secure and could not be
interfered with, researchers afterward started looking into ways that
these could be monitored, jammed and otherwise manipulated. The ease
with which Maskelyne could monitor the signals was also an eye-opener
for governments and lead to the development of wireless encryption
systems that were used in World War I, II and beyond. Nevil Maskelyne died in 1924, and is best known for his other career as a magician. He wrote “Our Magic: the art in magic, the theory in magic, the practice in magic”, a magic textbook that is still in use. His son Jasper Maskelyne applied these magical skills in World War II, where he was involved in the development of the fake munitions, tanks, and other trickery that helped mislead the Nazis in the lead up to D-Day, and taught soldiers how to hide escape tools in everyday items.
If you want to read more about this fascinating period in the history of technology, Thunderstruck by Erik Larsen
is a great place to start. It details the history of radio by
discussing the life of Marconi and how his invention helped to catch the
notorious murderer, Dr Crippen.
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