Following from the 1910 advertisement for tenders to construct the first two Coastal Radio Stations - one at Sydney and the other at Fremantle - The Australasian Wireless Company acting in association with Telefunken (Germany) was announced as the successful company on 8 April 1911. The Company's shore station - and the first wireless station to be opened in Australia for commercial traffic with ships at sea - was established on the top floor of the Australia Hotel in Sydney. Its call sign was "AAA". It had a German Telefunken set and remarkable distances were obtained. The mast was attached to the Hotel's chimney. Naturally the letting of a contract to a company working with a German Company and intending to use German equipment rather than British equipment raised questions in various quarters.
The background and the details of the first contract between the Government and A.W.A. are discussed as follows:
1. The British Post Office and Telefunken.
Guglielmo Marconi had experimented with his idea of sending messages "through the air" for some time (see Weightman (2004)). In mid-1896, he was sufficiently advanced to demonstrate his apparatus to William Preece, the Chief Electrical Engineer at the British Post Office. Preece was impressed and supported Marconi's work for a short time. In May 1897, Preece asked Marconi to demonstrate his apparatus to send a message from Flatholm Island to Lavernock along the Bristol Channel and he asked a colleague - Professor Aldophus Salby of the Technical High School at Charlottenberg near Berlin - to witness the demonstration. After two days of being unable to get the transmission to work, Marconi moved his 120 foot mast from the top of the cliff to sea level and clear signals were produced. Although Preece did not grasp the significance of the demonstration, Salby did and he returned immediately to Germany. Hence Preece "had unwittingly enabled the nation which was for may years to be a bitter rival of Britain in the development of wireless telegraphy to indulge in a blatant piece of industrial espionage"(Weightman, p. 29).
At that time in Germany, there were two groups of researchers working on wireless telegraphy. One, led by Salby, was at AEG working on the development of marine wireless systems. The other group, led by Ferdinand Braun, was at Siemens working for the German Army. By 1902, there were difficulties in patents between the two groups and so, in May 1903, Kaiser Wilhelm II urged them to combine to form Gesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie System Telefunken (The Company for Wireless Telegraphy Ltd). In April 1923, this company was officially renamed Telefunken although it was often referred to with that name after its establishment.
2. The start of the Marconi Empire.
Petty arguments were surfacing by mid-1897 between a number of researchers and Preece about who did what first, etc. That slowed Marconi's progress. Hence the extended Marconi family connections supported Guglielmo by establishing The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company with substantial assets. They bought the patents and provided Marconi with the funds he needed. In effect, that move substantially diminished the need for support from Preece and the British Post Office as from about mid-1897.
On 15 December 1902, Guglielmo Marconi succeeded in transmitting a clear message from Poldhu in Cornwall, Wales to Glace Bay in Canada. Previous attempts at transmission - following years of short range experimentation - had either produced no signals or at best very weak signals. Soon after, Marconi sent a message to The Times newspaper as well as to King Edward VII in London and to King Victor Emmanuel in Italy (Weightman, p. 148). Techniques were subsequently refined to produce better and more consistent signals.
Marconi developed his instrumentation further - especially by experimenting with different amounts of power and with different windings on the coils. He gained quick acceptance of his approach especially over short land distances. It took longer to convince the skeptics of the feasibility of longer range transmission and transmission over water .
Even by 1906, the British Post Office was not interested in using wireless technology and were instead dedicated to cables for telegraphic transmission. Wireless operator's certificates were unknown in the Post Office and indeed any amateur wanting to use a crystal set or develop their own wireless telegraphy had to obtain a licence from the Post Office. That was a major problem for Marconi because the British Post Office retained a monopoly on telegraphic messaging.
The Isle of Wight had for many years been a place for aristocratic and royal families to live or at least spend their holidays. Marconi and his mother would go there and, in November 1897, Marconi established the world's first equipped and functioning wireless telegraphy station at the Royal Needles Hotel at Alum Bay. Later, he opened a second station on the Isle of Wight at the Madeira Hotel in Bournemouth.
Marconi used these stations when the former Prime Minister William Gladstone became seriously ill in Bournemouth in January 1898. Reporters were unable to send their stories to London because a snow storm had brought down the telegraph lines from Bournemouth. Marconi therefore offered the facility of wireless telegraph to the Royal Needles so that the messages could then be transferred to the still-operational telegraph link from Alum Bay to London.
In 1907, in a similar incident, the British postal authorities first took notice of wireless telegraphy as having commercial value. A main cable became interrupted and arrangements were made with the Marconi Company for the Bournemouth station to handle all messages between England and the Channel Islands. During the interruption, which lasted nearly three weeks, hundreds of messages were exchanged and the postal authorities were not slow to appreciate that first commercial test.
In 1910, the Marconi companies appointed Godfrey Isaacs to be the new Managing Director. He was a man of vision and, about August 1911, he was assessing the significant division between Marconi and Telefunken. Isaacs saw that the rivalry must end for the good of both companies. "All Germany's efforts to force Marconi to communicate with ships carrying Telefunken equipment had failed. At the same time, Marconi's companies around the world came up against what they called "the Telefunken Wall" whenever they sought new customers. The licences for Marconi patents ... faced collapse when the German company banned Marconi wireless from their own ships" (Weightman, p. 239). Isaacs successfully organised an agreement to end the stalemate. The compromise created a new company in 1911 which was owned jointly by the British and Belgian Marconi companies (45%) and Telefunken (55%). All resources on ships and on shore stations were pooled and Austrian stations were absorbed.
These developments were at the same time as the A.W.A. contract and negotiations.
3. The AWA-Telefunken partnership.
There was considerable disquiet expressed by a number of people about the contract for the construction of the Coastal Wireless Stations being let to a A.W.A. which had linked to the German company Telefunken.
In an adjournment motion in the House of Representatives in November 1910, Mr. Hedges (W.A.) "dared the Government to accept the Telefunken system which (he noted) could not communicate with a British man-of-war in a time of trouble. It was disgraceful that such a system should be accepted ... The Commonwealth Government alone had absolute control over wireless telegraphy and it should install the only system which could communicate with British vessels. Even the Australian destroyers coming here had been fitted with the Marconi system and they could not communicate with the stations proposed to be fitted in the Commonwealth with the Telefunken system". See elsewhere for further details.
In the Senate of the same day, Senator Findlay stated that "the Admiralty had advised the Commonwealth that it could adopt what system it pleased. The Telefunken system was not essentially a short-range system. The Postmaster-General was informed that it was in use in at least nine stations. He was aware that there were wireless systems the invention of Australians, but at the present time he was not in a position to say whether they were inferior to any other. He was told that the Telefunken system was interchangeable with the Marconi system".
A letter to the Editor of the West Australian of 14 July 1911 from J. H. Wilbur noted "Under the Commonwealth Act, the Postmaster-General has the sole right to establish wireless telegraphy in Australia and yet these people are to install a system which will not enable us to communicate with the British vessels ...
The German Government are about to establish the Telefunken system in Samoa, and a number of the German warships have also installed the same system. On the other hand, the Marconi system has been adopted by the steamship companies to which I have referred, many of which may be called upon at any time to supply transports for the British Government. In the circumstances, it must be recognised that they would adopt only such a system as would work in harmony with that adopted by the British Admiralty".
It is unfair for us to ask the British Admiralty to co-operate with us if we are going to install the Telefunken system. If the authorities here consider that system the best, why was the Marconi system installed on the Parramatta and the Yarra"?
These arguments were frequent and contemporaneous with the developments in Europe. As is noted above, the drawing together of the various systems really made these arguments superfluous.
4. The contract negotiations and terms for the first two Coastal Radio Stations.
The Government placed £10,000 on the Estimates to cover the cost of erecting two coastal wireless stations - at Sydney and Fremantle - in 1906. Decision making was slow with the new Government and the amount was rolled over in the Estimates until 1910 when it was increased to £15,000. Tenders were finally called for the construction in 1910 and The Australasian Wireless Company acting in association with Telefunken (Germany) was announced as the successful company on 8 April 1911.