An Ocean of Air

by Gabrielle Walker

  All the while, Marconi was finding new ways to improve the power of his transmitters and the sensitivities of his receiver. From his permanent stations on the south coast, he was sending his messages farther and farther; nothing seemed to stop them. Even the curvature of Earth didn't seem to stand in their way. This was particularly surprising since Hertzian waves were supposed to travel in a straight line. Any that skimmed the horizon should simply shoot out into space.

  And yet Marconi's messages didn't seem to care. Though the lighthouse at the Isle of Wight was some one hundred feet above sea level, the curving Earth meant that its tip was barely visible from the mainland at Poole. But wireless waves skipped effortlessly over this apparent barrier. Then Marconi sent messages from ship to a shore that was fully twenty-five miles away, over an intervening "hill" of water that was effectively five hundred feet high.

  This awakened an extraordinary idea in Marconi's mind. Could wireless solve the problem of communicating between ships? This was the dawn of the twentieth century. Yet while telegraph wires had connected entire continents, ships were still forced to rely on signaling techniques that were embarrassingly and hopelessly ancient. Flags, flickering lamps, and semaphore were the only voices a ship could use, and the moment it disappeared from sight, it lost all touch with the world.

  Until the twentieth century, one commentator later wrote, "ships burned or foundered in storms with not so much as a whisper reaching land to tell their fate ... Wireless telegraphy with its magic powers was to wrest from the sea its ancient terror of silence and to give speech to ships which had been mute since the dawn of navigation."

  That was Marconi's dream. But to achieve it, he needed to prove that the mathematicians were wrong, and that wireless waves really could span mighty curving distances. Twenty-five miles wasn't a stirring enough demonstration of wireless's powers. Marconi decided to send a wireless message over a mountain of water that, because of Earth's curvature, would seem more than 150 miles high. He would prove that wireless could compete with cable, even across the three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. The mathematicians of the time were still declaring this to be impossible, but Marconi adopted the same policy as with every other experiment: I believe it will work. Let's see if I'm right.

  The Anglo-American Cable Company was watching Marconi's work with hostile attention. They were the owners of the fourteen cables that presently spanned the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Each one had cost about three million dollars to lay, and though the price of sending messages along their vast lines was beyond the reach of most people, the cables were all working to full capacity transmitting Morse blips between the continents. If wireless worked, however, cable would be out of business. The commercial stakes were huge. Marconi felt it imperative that he say nothing until he had proved that waves could leap the 150-mile mountain that was the curving Atlantic Ocean.

  Thus, in January 1901, a London newspaper reporter asked Marconi, "Is there any truth in reports that you are contemplating the sending of messages between this country and America?" "Not in the least," Marconi had replied. "I have never suggested such an idea and though the feat may be accomplished some day, it has as yet hardly been thought of here."

  Yet that same month, Marconi took a map of America and marked out Cape Cod, where "a man can stand and put all America behind him." This, he decreed, was to be the place where the first transatlantic wireless signal would be heard.

  The British side of the transmission was to be at the foot of Cornwall, from a town called Poldhu (pronounced "Pol-ju"). Engineers had already begun to erect the gigantic transmission aerial that Marconi believed he would need. He had designed a semicircular structure containing twenty massive wooden masts, each two hundred feet high and strung around with wires. But after eleven months of hard effort, just as the structure was near completion, disaster, in the form of a gale, struck the windswept Cornish coast. The masts were tall, but not strong. They tumbled like dominoes.

  A few weeks later, in October 1901, a storm tore through the receiving station at Cape Cod. One of the great pine masts punched through the roof of the transmitting hut, narrowly missing one of Marconi's chief engineers. Now, the receiving aerial, too, lay smashed on the shore like so much driftwood.

  Marconi swiftly changed his plans. He ordered a new, simpler, and more robust transmission aerial to be built at Poldhu. It would have two masts, not twenty-four, to be strung at either side with fifty-five lengths of copper wire, like guy ropes on a tent. He waited just long enough to test the new aerial, having it broadcast messages to a station at Crookhaven, Ireland, which was 225 miles away. This marked a new record for wireless, but Marconi scarcely noticed.

  On November 26, 1901, he boarded the liner Sardinia at Liverpool. He had changed his mind about the receiving station. The liner was bound not for Cape Cod, but for Newfoundland, which was the closest point on the North American continent to England. With him were two of his most trusted engineers, Percy Paget and George Kemp, each of them sporting a splendid black handlebar mustache. (Marconi's own mustache was much more discreet.) It was far too late in the stormy Atlantic season to think about erecting another set of vulnerable aerial masts, but Marconi had no intention of waiting until spring. Instead, he had decided to try a different strategy for creating an instant, 600-foot aerial. In his luggage were six kites, two balloons, and a very large amount of copper wire.

  After looking over several sites in St. John's, Newfoundland, Marconi picked Signal Hill, a high crag overlooking the port, which protected St. John's from the fierce Atlantic storms. Atop the hill was a small plateau, which would be suitable for kite flying. There was also Cabot Memorial Tower, used for signaling ships, and a two-story stone building that was formerly a military barracks, now used as a hospital.

  Marconi was about to try to extend his distance record by a factor of ten. The weather was awful; wind and sleet slammed against the walls of the hospital building. Marconi and his team inflated a balloon with hydro gen to see if it could rise high enough, trailing its ten pounds of wire beneath it. But the winds were so strong that the balloon's heavy mooring rope snapped like a piece of thread and it disappeared out to sea.

  On Friday, December 12, 1901, Marconi decided to try again, this time with a kite bearing an aerial wire six hundred feet long. He cabled Poldhu with his instructions. They were to send the letter S, dot-dot-dot in Morse code, beginning at 11:30 Newfoundland time and continuing for the next three hours.

  A little before noon, the experiment began. Paget was outside, battling with the kite's rope. Icy rain fell on his upturned face as he watched the kite struggle with the wind, now surging up to four hundred feet, now tumbling again to just above the heaving Atlantic.

  Inside the small dark room, Marconi's other assistant, Kemp, was sitting at the single chair. In front of him on the table were a few coils and a condenser. Around him were only packing cases. Marconi swallowed a cup of cocoa and then took his turn at the receiver. He placed a single earphone in his ear and started listening. It was now just after midday.

  Marconi was fully focused on his task. One reporter said of him that no portrait could convey "the peculiar luster of his eyes when he is interested or excited ... One of the first and strongest impressions that the man conveys is that of intense activity and mental absorption." He had risked more than fifty thousand pounds to prove something that had been declared impossible by many of the world's leading physicists. All he had on his side were the short hops that the waves had managed back in Europe, and his absolute confidence that he was right.

  He listened intently, but the minutes passed and there was nothing but crackles. Then, at half past twelve, after more than an hour of broadcasts from the team at Poldhu, Marconi heard something. Surely, three sharp clicks had sounded in his ear. He handed the earphone to Kemp. "Can you hear anything, Mr. Kemp?" he asked, calmly. Yes, Mr. Kemp could indeed hear the same three clicks. Paget was immediately called in. He heard nothing, but he was, after all
, slightly deaf. And then, though Poldhu had been instructed to send the signals continuously, they suddenly stopped.

  Marconi continued his vigil. At 1:10 the signals repeated, and again at 1:20. By the end of the day's broadcasting period, Marconi had heard that Morse "S" twenty-five times.

  But he still wasn't sure if that was enough. The signals had been faint and erratic, and Marconi wanted something a little more substantial. The next day, Saturday, December 13, the team tried again. This time, however, the wind was too strong, and the kite aerial was useless. The weather was getting worse. Marconi decided that he'd done enough. He had definitely heard the signal, and now was the time to issue a formal statement.

  The press went wild. Under the heading "Wireless Signals Across the Atlantic—Marconi says he has received them from England," the New York Times wrote, "Guglielmo Marconi announced tonight the most wonderful scientific development in modern times."

  A reporter in McClure's magazine captured the public wonder at the announcement. "A cable, marvelous as it is, maintains a tangible and material connection between speaker and hearer; one can grasp its meaning. But here is nothing but space, a pole with a pendant wire on one side of a broad and curving ocean, an uncertain kite struggling in the air on the other—and thought passing in between."

  Even many of the usually sober scientists could hardly contain themselves. Sir Oliver Lodge, a British pioneer of electrical research, wrote: "One feels like a boy who has been long strumming on a silent keyboard of a deserted organ, into the chest of which an unseen power begins to blow a vivifying breath. Astonished, he now finds that the touch of the finger elicits a responsive note, and he hesitates, half-delighted, half-affrighted, lest he should be deafened by the chords which it seems he can now almost summon at his will."

  Stocks in cable companies plummeted. The frantic efforts of the Anglo-American Cable Company to discredit Marconi's experiment only made his results seem more reliable. None of his peers doubted him.

  A few weeks later, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers held a glittering dinner for Marconi in the Astor Gallery of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Behind Marconi's table was a black tablet studded with electric lights spelling out his name. At the eastern end of the gallery, the word "Poldhu" was similarly picked out in lights, and at the western end,

  "St. Johns." All three tablets were linked by a cable bearing electric lamps, bunched together in threes to form the letter "S" in Morse code. The toastmaster read out a letter from the great inventor Thomas Alva Edison: "I am sorry not to be present to pay my respects to Marconi. I would like to meet the young man who has had the monumental audacity to attempt and succeed in jumping an electric wave across the Atlantic." To much laughter, the toastmaster went on to say that he himself had been chatting with Mr. Edison a few days earlier: "He said to me, 'Martin, I'm glad he did it. That fellow's work puts him in my class. It's a good thing we caught him young.'"

  Marconi's modest response to this toast, and his generous acknowledgment of the work of his electrical predecessors, drew praise two days later from the New York Times, which also commented that for the proof of Marconi's achievement, "nothing more was needed than Signor Marconi's unsupported and unverified statement. Immediately on receipt of telegraphic intelligence from Newfoundland that this feat had been accomplished and representative engineers of the world were interviewed, without exception their response was: 'If Marconi says it is true, I believe it.'" The same report went on to say: "He makes no boasts and indulges in no extravagant promises. He does not understand the art of promotion, perhaps, but he has established a character for truthfulness and conservatism, and ... we venture to say that he will have no need of the services of a promoter to capitalize on his invention."

  Marconi was an astute businessman, and he certainly had no need of help to exploit his invention. He was determined to people the world with Marconi stations, all sending their messages over whatever looping paths it took to surmount Earth's curvature. He had confounded his mathematical critics. The only trouble was, he had no idea how.

  ***

  Back in Britain, a certain mathematician heard the news and immediately guessed the truth. Oliver Heaviside was a striking man. Though not very tall, he was arrestingly handsome, with a thick head of sandy-brown hair and sharp, disconcerting eyes. He was also very, very strange.

  Tales of his oddities were legion. He furnished his rooms with blocks of granite; he dyed his hair black and then wore a tea cozy on his head until it was dry; he kept his nails exquisitely manicured and painted them cherry red. He lived most of his life as a recluse in a small Devonshire village, where the local adults regarded him with indulgence and the village louts catcalled after him and threw stones at his windows.

  And yet Heaviside's bizarre, sideways view of the world was also part of his genius. At school, in the same impoverished Camden slums that had produced Charles Dickens, Heaviside had railed against the conventional rote learning that was all his teachers could imagine. To him, grammar was filled with "unutterably dull and stupid and inefficient rules," and learning mathematics by mindless repetition had turned some of his fellows into "conceited logic-choppers."

  There was nothing of that in Heaviside's weird yet wonderful inner world. An editorial in The Electrician in 1903 wrote poetically of Heaviside's way of thinking: "The ability to follow Mr. Oliver Heaviside in his solitary voyages 'on strange seas of thought' is given to few. Most of us do get but glimpses of him when he comes into some port of common understanding for such fresh practical provisions as are necessary for the prosecution of further theoretical investigation. These obtained, he steams fast to sea again. Some of us in our puny way paddle furiously after him for a little distance, but we are rapidly left astern, and, exhausted, laboriously find our way back to the land through the fog created of our own efforts."

  Heaviside was impatient with people less bright than he—which included most of the population. He would sometimes try to make his work more intelligible, but he found it hard to believe that others couldn't grasp what seemed self-evident to him. "In his most deliberate attempts at being elementary," one scientist wrote, "he jumps deep double fences and introduces short-cut expressions that are woeful stumbling blocks to the slow-paced mind of the average man." When a friend implored him to put a few extra words of explanation into a brilliant but fiendishly difficult piece of writing on electromagnetic theory, after his original "it follows" he simply added "(by work)." Perhaps that was just an example of his impish humor. When another perplexed reader complained, "You know, Mr. Heaviside, your papers are very difficult indeed to read," he replied, "That may well be, but they were much more difficult to write."

  Still, he could be charmingly self-deprecating. Even amid a ferocious 3,000-word diatribe against someone he believed had earned his censure, he wrote, "I am full of nonsense, and, if it does not show, it is only because it is suppressed." Heaviside was a prolific writer of letters, when indignant certainly, but also to amuse his friends. Perhaps surprisingly, his writing was always extremely neat, the words beautifully formed. Even his pages of mathematical equations were tidy, though they were occasionally enlivened with a quick sketch if he thought his formula suggested a funny face or figure. He also enjoyed playing with letters as well as numbers. He once signed himself: "I am, Sir, Yours very truly and anagrammatically, O! He is a very Devil."

  In spite of his reclusive tendencies, Heaviside craved visitors, but his strangeness and sarcasm frightened many of them away. One scientist recalled his visit in 1914: "I was very deeply impressed by Heaviside, even in my brief encounter. I never met anyone who, in spite of surface eccentricities, impressed me more deeply with the feeling that I was in contact with a really great mind. I have always been glad I made the visit, but I never had the courage to call again."

  One of his best friends, electrical scientist George Searle, was unafraid of Heaviside's oddities and visited many times. The two of them talked of much more than science.
Heaviside had become caught up in the recent craze for a new device called a bicycle. He and Searle would take their bicycles and go out "scorching," a Victorian pastime that involved freewheeling perilously fast, to the imminent danger of any pedestrians. "We used to put our feet on foot-rests on the front forks," said Searle, "and then let the cycle run down hill. Oliver put his feet up, folded his arms and let the thing rip down steep and quite rough lanes, leaving me far behind."

  Once, realizing that Heaviside needed spectacles, Searle insisted on finding a suitable pair. (Heaviside refused to go to the shop or even to listen to the possible options, but Searle found some anyway.) However, they had a difficult time of it. In the peculiar cod Latin that Heaviside often employed in his letters for humor, he later wrote to Searle and his wife: "Georgio Searlio et Spousio. Salutem. Te igitur. Specs. Glass came out. Long hunt. Found accidentally in pocket."

  Much of Heaviside's work involved complex theoretical aspects of the relationship between electricity and magnetism. He took the famous equations that had inspired Hertz's experimental work and reinvented them, changing the formulation so that they were infinitely simpler to manipulate. Even now, these same equations appear in textbooks in the form that Heaviside developed. He also proved that adding deliberate faults to telegraph wires could make them transmit messages more efficiently. This was a twisted side effect of the way electricity and magnetism reinforce one another and was so counterintuitive that nobody would believe him. In the end, an American scientist used Heaviside's reasoning to file a patent. When American telegraph manufacturers began using this technique and showing how effective it was, the British eventually followed suit—but not before Heaviside had lost both the money and the credit for his invention.

  When Heaviside heard about Marconi's achievement, he guessed immediately how the radio signals were traveling so far. He had already heard that short-distance wireless waves seemed to be bending beyond the horizon and had been fiddling a little with the problem. Some people thought the waves might actually be bending a little around the corners in a process called diffraction—the same way that a point of light seems to spread out if you half close your eyes. Heaviside, though, was sure this wouldn't be enough.