The World’s First Technological Hack: The Marconi Telegraph Troll
In 1903, the “father of modern radio,” Guglielmo Marconi, was stationed on a cliff ready to demonstrate his new-fangled telegraph to the Royal Academy of Sciences. As he braced his fingers, ready to send a message more than 300 miles across the airwaves, the machine at the receiving end of the communication began pulsing strongly. The decoder spelled out the pulses into “RATS” several times before the messages launched into a seemingly random limerick. “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily,” it pronounced rudely, before launching into other miscellaneous quotations. It turned out a wireless engineer named Nevil Maskelyn from the Eastern Telegraph Company had set out to prove a point: that these telegraph messages weren’t private. Indeed, they weren’t.