A Welshman, born in 1834, William Henry Preece is best known as the Chief Engineer to the Post Office who supported Marconi’s work, and introduced him to the influential people he needed to turn his research into the successful technology it has become.
However, Preece was an experimenter in his own right and made several telephone-related discoveries. Of interest to us, as a radio amateurs, was his research into signals being fed through one telephone wire and being picked up on another, more distant, wire. Preece investigated this phenomena further as a form of long-distance wireless communication, and succeeded to some extent.
Before Preece
It was 1867 that James Clerk Maxwell predicted electromagnetic radio waves – a theory that he would never live to see in actual use. Like many new scientific predictions and discoveries, scepticism reigned. It wasn’t until 1870 that Edward Hughes (the first Shortwave Listener?) actually received them on a crude handheld device, but still few accepted their existence, let alone their usefulness.
1879 saw Heinrich Hertz purposefully transmit and receive radio waves and went on to prove Maxwell’s theories that they could indeed be reflected, absorbed and focussed, just like light.
Hertz is the real father of radio. Those that came after him improved on the original discoveries and pushed the boundaries of what was possible. For example, Oliver Lodge managed to receive radio waves over a distance of more than 150 yards in 1885. The following year Alexander Popoff was successful in sending messages over a distance of three miles.
This is the timeline we accept as that of the official the development of wireless communication. However, there was another experimenter on the scene; William Henry Preece.
William Henry Preece – the early days
Preece joined the Electric Telegraph Company in 1853 were he worked with one Michael Faraday. Reputed to be one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, Faraday experimented with the magnetic fields generated around conductors carrying current. This led him to develop the first electric motor, but further along in his career he also studied induction and this led to the creation of the first dynamo.
1870 saw Preece join the Post Office as an engineer in the Southern District and by 1880 he was President of the Society of Engineers.
Preece’s interest in wireless communication started 1882 when he reported that he was aware of conductive communication were current would flow from one point to another along a cable and then back to the original point through the earth; making a complete circuit through which communications could be established. He put this to the test when a telegraph cable broke between Southhampton and Newport on the Isle of Wight. Using copper plates in salty sea water a complete circuit was completed and communication was established – wirelessly.
In 1884 it was discovered that messages were being detected on a telegraph cable stretching from Grays Inn Lane, London, to Bradford, and it turned out that the source of these messages was a parallel telegraph cable some 80′ away.
What had been discovered is a phenomena we refer to today as as inductive crosstalk, but whilst this was a problem to be solved in the world of wired telegraph circuits, not least from a security perspective (the first wireless hacking?), Preece appreciated that this might have positive uses for wireless communication and decided to experiment further. He was interested in its use as a bridge between wired communications systems over expanses of water with islands and lighthouses.
Experimenting in wireless communication
In 1885 Preece started to conduct experiments using electromagnetic induction in Newcastle (Town Moor) with another Post Office engineer, Arthur West Heaviside; nephew of Sir Charles Wheatstone (of Wheatstone Bridge fame) and brother of Oliver West Heaviside who is famous for, amongst other things, filing a patent to solve crosstalk. Together Preece and Heaviside (Arthur) successfully extended the distance of wireless communication using induction to over a quarter of a mile, with feint detections of the signals being observed up to ten miles away.
During 1886 reliable wireless communication had been established over 40 miles between Shap (Westmorland) and Gretna (just over the border in Scotland) and in 1887 experiments over bodies of water. In 1889 experiments took place over Menai Straights in Wales, between Cemlyn and the Skerries Islands, and across the lake at Coniston (Lancashire) over a distance of about 1 mile.
Some five years before Marconi’s successful transmission of wireless communications between Flat Holm Island (Bristol Channel) and Lavernock Point (South of Cardiff), Preece achieved the same feat with his assistant, John Gavey. Gavey designed and built the ring transformer used to achieve the communication over a distance of 4 miles.
Eventually, Preece came to the conclusion that whilst the experiments he performed had proven his method of wireless communication to be practical, it was only so under certain conditions. He realised that it did not lend itself to communication from the shore to isolated lighthouses and light-ships as he had hoped. This was because of the considerable ‘antenna’ lengths required as distances between them grew and the fact that the equipment used was cumbersome and expensive. It must have pained him to say that it was probably more cost-effective to lay an ordinary submarine telegraph cable across the sea floor.
Whilst it is true to say that no significant commercialisation of Preece’s inductive method of wireless communication took place, it was successfully used to keep communication between the Isle of Mull and Oban, in Scotland, open when the cable joining the two broke. The average distance between the two wires on the opposing coasts was about two miles and communication between the two locations was stable for a whole week until a repair could be effected.
Enter Marconi
It was around this time that a young Italian walked into Preece’s office, his mother having gotten him an appointment. The visitor brought with him a new system of wireless telegraphy that used Hertzian waves and Lodge’s coherer – welcome Guglielmo Marconi, a 22 year old of Italian and Irish descent who’s ideas on wireless communication had been shunned by the Italian government. The year was 1896 and Preece was impressed with what he observed.
Between 1896 and 1899, Preece supported Marconi’s work, providing him with assistants and help in improving his equipment. Preece arranged meetings were the young Italian could demonstrate his equipment and methodologies. Later in 1896 Marconi applied for patents for his ‘inventions’, which were granted the following year, when he also obtained sufficient financial support to found the Wireless Telegraph Company, later to become Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company.
During this period, relations between Preece and Marconi became more and more strained as Marconi took every opportunity he had been given and used it to maximum benefit, then poached some of Preece’s best staff. Preece felt Marconi had used him. Eventually, in 1899, as Marconi was opening his first wireless station in Chelmsford, Preece retired and was knighted for his work and contribution to the Post Office and the field of communication. With more time on his hands, Preece became more involved with his sons and Major Philip Cardew, himself an inventor of communications devices, in their joint venture, Preece and Cardew, in Westminster.
Not finished yet
However, Preece wasn’t finished with his own experiments into wireless communication and during 1899 he returned to Cemlyn, on the Isle of Anglesey. Having previously communicated across Loch Ness using parallel wires approximately 4 miles long, communication over 1.34 miles distance had been achieved. Preece set out to enhance his system and improve communications using shorter base lines to achieve communication across a distance of 2.8 miles. He accomplished this by grounding the ‘antennas’ in the sea using earth-plates, enhancing inductive effects through the air with conductivity through the salty water. Furthermore, equipment bulk and expense were drastically reduced by using ordinary telephone transmitters and receivers. He later achieved similar success between Rathlin Island and the Irish coast over a distance of 4 miles.
Marconi’s ‘new’ communication systems were, by now, well established. They were adopted by the military in the second Boer War and went on to become an amazing success.
The end of a brilliant career
Preece finally retired, for good, in 1904 and moved back to his home town in North Wales. He died there in 1913.
Marconi is the one that goes down in history as the ‘father’ of radio, but we have shown in this article that, whilst he was the one who got wireless communication the commercial success it so richly deserved, there were many more people before him that conducted important work on which Marconi was able to base his own work.
Amongst those is Sir William Henry Preece who, to quote a 1914 obituary by the Institution of Electrical Engineers, was “a prolific writer, an admirable lecturer, and he acquired a world-wide reputation as one of the foremost electrical engineers of the age”. Not forgetting that without his help, Marconi may have never got his ideas off the ground.
Sir William, we salute you and remember you.
Celebrate the life of Sir William Henry Preece with us
Every year on the August Bank Holiday Saturday, the Quantum Technology Club decamp from Ormskirk to Consiton. Whilst there they run GB9WHP, an amateur radio special event station to celebrate the packed life and career of Sir William Henry Preece.
Discover more about the events we have held in Coniston over the past years and about those that are to come on our GB9WHP Special Event page. Starting 2023 we hope to have more stations on the air from around the UK to celebrate with us.
References relating to William Henry Preece
Radio and British Telecom. A booklet for students from British Telecom.
From a Spark to a Flame: Wireless Telegraphy in their North East up to and including World War 1. Elizabeth Bruton.
From theory to engineering practice: shared telecommunications knowledge between Oliver Heaviside and his brother and GPO engineer Arthur West Heaviside. Elizabeth Bruton.
Marconi’s first wireless message transmitted over sea, from Flat Holm to Lavernock Point. We are Cardiff.
Ring transformer, 1892. Science Museum Group.
A History of Wireless Telegraphy (2nd edition, revised), J. J. Fahie
WHP. Grace’s guide to British industrial history.
Acknowledgements
The image of the ring transformer is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.