Hacking in 1903. Scientific Hooliganism!
Hacking in 1903. Scientific Hooliganism!?
One afternoon in June 1903, the audience in the theatre of the Royal Institution in London waited with great anticipation. A demonstration of a new method to send messages over vast distances was about to take place. This new technology used electromagnetic waves to represent and transmit the dashes and dots of Morse code without the need for telegraph poles and wires.
The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi was preparing to transmit his message from Cornwall almost 500 kilometres away in the South-West corner of England all the way to the theatre at the Royal Institution in London where physicist John Fleming was ready to receive his Morse code message. The public had been assured that this was a secure method of communication and only the intended recipient would receive the message with no risk of it being intercepted or tampered with. However, before the demonstration was due to commence, the tap, tap, tap of a Morse code message could be heard with the same repeated message over and over. For those who could understand the message, they heard the word “rats, rats, rats” repeated. Then, in Morse code a short limerick was received, “There was a young man from Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily”. The interference stopped just before the intended message from Marconi arrive.
Marconi had assured the public that by using a tuned signal, it was not possible to interfere with the transmission unless someone was tuned to the same frequency. This ‘security by obscurity’ meant that anyone with some technical skill and the right equipment was able to transmit a message on the same frequency. Nevil Maskelyne, an inventor and a magician had used radios and Morse code in his magician acts to secretly communicate with his assistants and astound his audiences. Maskelyne was also a competitor of Marconi and managed a rival wireless company and was in dispute with Marconi over wireless patents. Maskelyne saw an opportunity to expose the potential security flaws in Marconi’s method of wireless communication. Prior to the demonstration, Maskelyne set up a more powerful transmitter in a theatre at West End and transmitted his rogue signals.
After the event, a flurry letters of complaints and accusations were printed in The Times newspaper with Fleming labelling the intrusion as an act of “Scientific Hooliganism” and seeking to identify the person responsible. Maskelyne happily revealed himself as the perpetrator.
Maskelyne later wrote a full account of his activities in “The Electrician – Volume 51, 1903”. In the article, he wrote: “When, however, it was pointed out to me that the practical demonstrations accompanying the lecture rendered independent tests possible, I at once grasped the fact that the opportunity was too good to be missed…The only hope, then, was to interpolate messages calculated to anger and “draw” somebody at the receiving end. If that could be done, there would be proof positive.”
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Marconi only suffered temporary reputational damage with him soon becoming known as the developer of long-distance wireless transmissions and starting a commercial transatlantic wireless service in 1907. This was long before the days of security frameworks, penetration testing and bug bounties. Maskelyne might now be considered a hacker wearing a hat on the darker shade of grey?
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Great article Darren Arnott - competition, the mother of all invention?