Nobel or no Nobel, Telefunken and Marconi are locked in a trade war over who has the biggest antenna. A war briefly suspended in 1912 by an international agreement standardising radio frequencies, a fragile truce between the two giants of the airwaves.
In early 1912, Marconi decides to list its American subsidiary, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, on the London Stock Exchange. The share price is initially pencilled in at around £2 when the listing date is set for 19 April. Two listings had already taken place between 1910 and 1912: the Spanish Marconi Company and Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company of Canada. The American subsidiary was absorbed as early as 1919 by RCA4, which had a long life after this story. Bought by General Electric, it was gradually absorbed by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (the future AT&T), and after branching out across the whole broadcasting industry, all the way to launching satellites in the 80s, it also became one of the biggest film and music producers of the 20th century. That is how the company ended up inside Sony Music, today the last remnant of the RCA name, home over the years to Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys and Elvis Presley. The Canadian subsidiary, for its part, carried on and still exists as CMC Electronics.
Godfrey Isaacs, appointed managing director by Marconi, is very proud of these successes, achieved after only 2 years in the job. No doubt his parents, Joseph Isaacs and Sarah Davis, were proud too, especially as their second son, Rufus, was Attorney General in Asquith’s government!
When he arrived, Godfrey had pitched the Colonial Office a plan to fit Britain’s colonies with wireless and link the whole Empire in just 3 years. The problem was that the British had paid a fortune for undersea cables, which they were not too keen to give up…
But the idea caught on. And in March 1912, Marconi signs a private-law contract after Parliament ruled out creating a state monopoly. The project was nothing less than an ambitious worldwide wireless network linking every British colony, then valued at several million pounds. A windfall that probably explains the speculative frenzy around the company’s shares.