Challenging Marconi − A Bid to Span the Atlantic by Wireless:
Arthur Baxendale and the Universal Radio Syndicate
by Ian L. Sanders and Shane F. Joyce
The first wireless signal to be received across the Atlantic, the repetitive transmission of the three dots of the letter “S” in Morse code, was sent on December 12, 1901. The young Italian experimenter, Guglielmo Marconi, had defied the best scientific opinion of the day and demonstrated the feasibility of bridging the Atlantic by wireless. Academic opinion on both the legitimacy and the practical application of Marconi’s achievement was predictably skeptical. But the first irrefutable telegraphic message was sent just one year later on December 15, 1902, much to the chagrin of the established submarine cable interests who feared competition to their communications monopoly. A limited commercial public telegram service was inaugurated a few years later in 1907. Not surprisingly, potential competitors eyed the lucrative prospect to provide an alternative wireless service. None were successful in the short term and, for the next decade, the Marconi Company reigned supreme, dominating the transatlantic airwaves.
Marconi’s pioneering work has been the subject of countless volumes over the years. And while commentators have expressed a wide range of opinions on the originality of his apparatus or his fundamental understanding of the technology, there is general agreement that his achievements shaped the course of radio communications at the turn of the twentieth century. He received a Nobel Prize in 1909. What have received much less attention, however, are the attempts to compete with Marconi in the decades leading up to the First World War. Notwithstanding that such bids were by and large failures, their story provides a backdrop to the overall history of the development of long-distance wireless communications. This book sets out to chronicle one such bid to take on the Marconi Company. The Universal Radio Syndicate was not the first British enterprise to go head-to-head with Marconi, and it wasn’t the last. Neither was it the first British bid to exploit the arc system of generating continuous electro-magnetic waves, developed by the Danish inventor, Valdemar Poulsen, as a means to bridge the Atlantic. But arguably, although also unsuccessful, it came closest to establishing a competitive transatlantic service than any of its predecessors.
The Syndicate’s director, one Arthur Salisbury Baxendale, was a man steeped in the incongruities of Queen Victoria’s British Empire and, as an engineer, absorbed by the challenge it presented for global colonial communications. His life was spent in the furtherance of such communications – by cable telegraphy, telephone, the postal service (where he dabbled in early airmail schemes) and ultimately radio. Part engineer, part entrepreneur, failed novelist and avid economist, above all Baxendale was a committed humanitarian, unsuited to the melee of industrial altercation. His nickname, “Johnny,” by which he was affectionately known, especially during his time in Malaya, likely arose because of his reputation as a “johnny-on-the-spot” – the Good Samaritan given to supporting just causes even when they brought him into conflict with authority. By no means a key figure in the history of radio communications and certainly no match for the legendary wireless pioneers of the early 1900s, for a few years, at least, Arthur Baxendale became embroiled in the struggle to bridge the Atlantic by wireless using Poulsen’s arc.
Relying primarily on original source material available in contemporary journals, reports and scattered documents held in various archives, this work attempts to document both the history of the Universal Radio Syndicate and the personalities behind the venture. For context, the Company’s predecessors in the field form a crucial part of the narrative, culminating, ironically, with the eventual acquisition of the rights to the Poulsen arc technology by the Marconi Company itself.