This is Poldhu, in Cornwall.
This is about as far south and west as you can get on the British mainland:
from here you have an uninterrupted line due west to Newfoundland in Canada.
And from here, Guglielmo Marconi and his team proved
that you could transmit radio signals over the horizon.
In 1903, though, Marconi turned his attention in another direction.
Literally. About 400km east from here.
He was going to produce the first public demonstration
of long-range wireless transmission.
Signals from here,
from this now-ruined building in Cornwall,
would be detected in Chelmsford, rebroadcast,
and then picked up at a very public event in London.
And so, in the prestigious lecture hall of the Royal Institution,
where Faraday and many, many others gave public talks on science -- and still do --
the well-respected physicist, John Ambrose Fleming,
was getting ready to receive Marconi’s Morse code signal.
They’d added a special, 60-foot antenna to the roof for the occasion.
And this is more than a century ago, remember.
Marconi was sending a signal powerful enough to be picked up 300 miles away.
And more than that: he’d claimed that he’d solved the problem of people listening in.
In a letter to the St James Gazette, Marconi claimed:
“I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned
can tap my messages.” Which is technically true,
but what he’s describing there is tuning into a radio station.
Get the frequency right, and the whole world can listen.
That’s not encryption: that’s broadcasting.
So let me tell you about Nevil Maskelyne.
Music hall magician, like his father.
Interested in wireless technology, used it in his illusions,
managed to do wireless transmission himself --
but the problem was, Marconi had patented it.
I know, it sounds ridiculous now,
but the very idea of wireless transmission was brand new,
and Marconi had a patent.
You want to send Morse Code through the air? You had to license it.
Maskelyne was not happy about this.
He'd already built a 50-foot mast near one of Marconi's stations in Cornwall
and managed to intercept transmissions.
And he'd written to a journal with the wonderfully scientific insult that
"the problem was not interception, but how to deal with the enormous excess of energy".
Marconi and Fleming knew who Maskelyne was,
and they were worried about him.
I'm making this sound just like a couple of rivals,
by the way, because I'm simplifying:
there were many scientists working on similar projects,
and all of them had to deal with Marconi's patents.
Competition was fierce. But only one of them actually went on the attack.
So in the Royal Institution,
a few minutes before Marconi's signal was due to arrive,
as the audience waited and listened to Fleming make
what we now know to be slightly dubious claims about the system,
there was a quiet tapping noise from the receiver.
Fleming was somewhat deaf. He didn't notice.
But his assistant did, and his assistant knew Morse Code.
And that receiver was saying "rats". "Rats, rats, rats, rats, rats".
And then it tapped out an insulting rhyming couplet about Marconi,
and then a few suitably sarcastic quotes from Shakespeare.
And then it stopped, just in time for Marconi's actual transmission to come through.
Marconi and Fleming were angry.
They thought they'd been sabotaged by some subtle method,
perhaps by sending slightly out-of-phase signals,
or grounding an earth current nearby, but no.
Maskelyne had just rigged up a simple but powerful transmitter
in his music hall a little way away.
He'd not bothered with frequencies,
he'd just sent out a broad-spectrum transmission that
-- if it was sent today --
would have shown up on every analogue radio for miles around,
no matter what station it was tuned to,
and probably blown any sensitive equipment nearby.
Their arguments went on in the press,
in angry letters in the Times:
Fleming called it "scientific hooliganism",
and Maskelyne owned up and defended his hacking --
because that’s what it was -- as a necessary demonstration.
But it was the public’s opinion that mattered: and to them,
Marconi's credibility had taken a big hit.
Even the famous satirical magazine, Punch,
decided to take a shot at him,
publishing deliberately jumbled fake “Marconigrams”.
In modern security, we talk about responsible disclosure.
About how, if you find a security hole,
you should quietly go to the company in question, let them know,
and give them time to fix it.
But if, after a reasonable amount of time,
the flaw is still there, and they are not going to fix it,
and if you can demonstrate it in a way that doesn't break the law or cause harm...
well, sometimes it's okay to cause a little bit of drama.
After all, you've got more than a century of history behind you.
The Royal Institution's YouTube channel has a load of great videos on it,
including Tales From The Prep Room,
which is a series I recommend you go check out.
Have a look at their channel, go and subscribe,
and thank you very much to them for letting me film in this historic theatre.
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