Q: Tell me about Gordon Bennett. Who he is, and now he gets involved in
promoting wireless?
SD: James Gordon Bennett was, of course, the son of James Gordon Bennett,
Sr., the founder of The New York Herald. He followed in his father's
footsteps, he was a great newspaper entrepreneur, the guy who thought it was a
great idea to send Stanley out to find Livingstone, etc. He was also an avid
yachtsman. And when Bennett heard about Marconi's success in covering a yacht
race in Ireland, he offered to pay him $5000 to cover the America's Cup Races
in 1899, in New York Harbor.
Q: Tell us about that yacht race and the coverage and what
happened.
SD: The yacht races occurred just a few days after Admiral Dewey returns
triumphant from the Philippines. So the New York City area has basically been
in one massive celebration all week. It's this environment that Marconi walks
into, with his contraptions, gets on board a ship, and begins following the
yacht races for The "Herald." The "Herald" considers this to be an enormous scoop,
and has huge full-page coverage of Marconi's success in reporting the yacht
races faster than anybody else. And what he does is he
wirelesses--and that's the language that was used--the progress of the yacht
races back to the "Herald" headquarters in Manhattan. They immediately post the
point by point progress up on bulletin boards, so people who are outside the
"Herald" offices can follow the progress of the yacht races almost
instantaneously, compared to what was available otherwise, and this is
proclaimed, of course, by Bennett and The Herald as an enormous communications
coup.
Q: What was Bennett's motivation?
SD: Bennett was not just going after a one time scoop. Bennett and the
other New York newspapers felt that the transatlantic cable companies were
charging them extortionate rates for transatlantic service, and they were
hoping that wireless telegraphy would prove to be a powerful competitor that
would undercut in price the cable companies and provide an alternative method
of news gathering.
Q: What's in it for Marconi? I mean, here you have this first demonstration
in America, right? Marconi is kind of being a bit daring in saying he can pull
it off.
SD: Marconi is trying to do two things. First, of course, he's trying to
provide ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communications. This is an enormous
untapped market. The other thing he's trying to do is compete with the cable
companies to provide transatlantic news service from Europe to the United
States, using no wires. This seems extraordinary at the time, and Marconi
boasts that he can do it. So you can see that there's quickly a symbiotic
relationship that emerges between the press and Marconi. They're happy to give
him tons of publicity because they want him to provide a cheaper service,
providing transatlantic news. And he, of course, needs the publicity to
promote his apparatus and his companies and to sell stock.
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