LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.
Read on at The New Scientist about Nevil Maskelyne, who interrupted Marconi's demonstration by transmitting on the same frequency. Or read an original 1903 account, from The Electrical World And Engineer:
For some weeks the correspondence columns of our London contemporary, The Electrician, have been the medium of a controversy which in bitterness of spirit displayed by the participants and, per contra, in amusement to the disinterested reader is unique. The controversy had its origin in a letter written to the London by Prof Fleming who complained of a "cowardly and concealed attempt" to spoil a demonstration of the Marconi system of telegraphy at a lecture delivered by him on June 4 before the Royal Institution. A Mr Nevil Maskelyne immediately admitted that he was an accomplice in the aforesaid attempt, the disturbance consisting in the simple "interjection of the word 'rats'".
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