Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

  Marconi countered that success in the venture would assert the company’s dominance for once and for all. His confidence impressed the board, but so too did news from America that Nikola Tesla might be on the verge of attempting the same feat. In a much-read article in the June 1900 issue of The Century Magazine, Tesla alluded to things he had learned from experiments at his laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which he claimed could generate millions of volts of electricity, the equal of lightning. He wrote that in the course of his experiments he had found proof—“absolute certitude,” as he put it—that “communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable.”

  The article prompted J. P. Morgan to invite Tesla to his home, where Tesla revealed his idea for a “world system” of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,” Tesla wrote in the Century article. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.”

  That word: television. In 1900.

  In July Marconi’s directors voted their approval.

  The month provided another milestone as well. On July 4 Britain’s Admiralty agreed to have Marconi’s company supply and install wireless sets for twenty-six ships and six shore stations, at a cost of £3,200 pounds per installation—$350,000 today—with an additional annual royalty. The company would train the navy’s men in how to use the apparatus. It was Marconi’s first major order, but more important, it helped convince him and his directors of the need for a fundamental change in how the company operated.

  As welcome as the contract was, providing first revenue just as Marconi’s greatest quest was about to begin, it embodied the threat that the Royal Navy might now use Marconi’s equipment to develop its own system, something it had the right to do under a British law that allowed the government to adopt any technology it wished, patented or not, in the interests of the empire’s defense.

  The contract caused Marconi to rethink the company’s strategy for generating revenue through the manufacture and sale of apparatus to customers. As things stood, the post office monopoly barred the company from collecting fees for private telegrams sent by wireless and further blocked the automatic relay of telegrams from conventional land lines to Marconi’s wireless stations. Thus the only likely customers were government agencies, of which only a few could be expected to see a need for wireless.

  A loophole in Britain’s telegraph laws suggested a possible new course. Instead of selling equipment, Marconi could provide customers with a wireless service that, if structured carefully, would skirt the postal monopoly. A shipping line, for example, would pay not for individual messages but for the rental of Marconi’s apparatus and operators, who would receive their salaries from Marconi and communicate only with Marconi stations. Marconi argued successfully that the law allowed such an arrangement because all messages would be intracompany communications from one node of the Marconi company to another.

  This change in strategy suited Marconi’s personality. Ever since his days in the attic at the Villa Griffone, he had been worried about competitors. He saw this new approach as a means of erecting a bulwark against the competition. His new strategy included the requirement that any ship using his wireless service would communicate only with other ships likewise equipped, except in case of emergency. This meant that if a shipping line leased Marconi wireless for one vessel, it would have to do so for the rest of its fleet as well, if it wanted its ships to be able to communicate with one another. In theory the approach would also simplify things for shipowners, who would not have to pay for the construction and maintenance of their own networks of shore stations. Once fully equipped, a shipping line would be unlikely to switch to a competitor.

  The new strategy seemed sound in principle, but now the question became, Would the change at last dispel the still-widespread reluctance to embrace wireless? Would customers come?

  It seemed even more imperative now for Marconi to do something big to assert his dominance of the field and to publicize his technological prowess. If successful, the transatlantic bid would achieve both goals, as well as serve a third, more concrete purpose: It would demonstrate that his wireless could reach not only ships traveling near the coast but also liners far out in the deepest blue.

  If successful. Marconi’s certainty aside, the company was taking a grave gamble, betting its future and Marconi’s reputation on a single experiment whose success nearly every established physicist believed to be impossible.

  LATE THAT SUMMER Marconi and Flood Page and a recently hired engineer named Richard Vyvyan set out for Cornwall to search for a suitable location for the station that would serve as the English node of Marconi’s transatlantic experiment. After tramping the coast, through fog and along paths that crossed mounds of heather and gorse and wildflowers, they settled on land atop Angrouse Cliff, near the village of Poldhu and adjacent to the large and comfortable Poldhu Hotel. Marconi did not mind remote locations, provided that a source of fine food and wine lay near at hand.

  The first construction on the cliff began soon afterward, in October, directed by Vyvyan. Marconi planned the antenna; Fleming worked out details about how to amplify power to provide a spark intense enough to create waves capable of jumping the Atlantic, and how to do so safely, for with so much voltage coursing through the system even the act of keying a message could prove lethal. No ordinary Morse key could handle the power. This key would be a lever requiring muscle to operate, and courage as well, especially when sending Morse dashes—which required longer pulses of energy and increased the threat that uncontrolled sparks, or arcs, would be unleashed.

  The extreme power of the station raised anew the board’s concern about how its signals would affect transmissions from other, smaller wireless stations. Marconi by now had devised a means of tuning transmissions, for which he had received British patent no. 7777, often referred to as his “four sevens” patent. But the technology was fallible, as Fleming and Marconi well knew. In fact, they were sufficiently concerned that Marconi ordered George Kemp to build a second, far smaller station six miles away on a stretch of coast known as the Lizard, to gauge whatever interference might occur and to provide a receiver for trial messages once the new station began operation. Here Kemp directed the construction of an antenna consisting of three ships’ masts secured end to end and stayed against the wind, rising to a height of 161 feet.

  No reader of The Times would have guessed Fleming’s concern, however, from reading his latest letter to the editor, published October 4, 1900, in which he praised a recent series of experiments that he claimed demonstrated Marconi’s ability to tune transmissions to avoid interference. Interestingly, Fleming at no point identified himself in the letter as Marconi’s scientific adviser. He described how operators had sent messages simultaneously and how they had been captured on two receiving antennas “without delay or mistake.”

  “But greater wonders followed,” Fleming wrote—at which point Oliver Lodge, reading The Times as he always did, must have spat his morning coffee onto the floor.

  Fleming reported that the operators sent another round of simultaneous messages, one in English, one in French. This time both messages were received on a single antenna. Fleming gushed, “When it is realized that these visible dots and dashes are the results of trains of intermingled electric waves rushing with the speed of light across the intervening 30 miles, caught on one and the same short aerial wire and disentangled and sorted out automatically by the two machines into intelligible messages in different languages, the wonder of it all cannot but strike the mind.”

  Anyone reading the letter closely, however, would have seen that it presented anything but an objective, verifiable account of the experiments and instead derived its credibility entirely from the fact that its author was the great Ambrose Fleming. In effect, Fleming once again was asking the audience to trust him.
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  This letter—its glowful praise, its failure to note that Fleming was a paid employee—would prove costly. Not immediately, however. For now it merely kindled the curiosity, and professional skepticism, of Nevil Maskelyne, the magician.

  MARCONI SHUTTLED BETWEEN the Poldhu Hotel at Land’s End and the Haven Hotel at Poole, though he spent most of his time at the latter. No railway ran directly from Poldhu to Poole, so Marconi had to travel first to London then catch another train south. This left him a lot of time for thinking and not a lot for his American beauty, Josephine Holman.

  The engagement was still secret, and with nearly all Marconi’s time consumed by travel and work, Holman must at times have wondered whether it was real or an artifact of imagination.

  They wrote letters and sent telegrams. Marconi knew the news of their engagement would upset his mother, but he seemed not to realize that the longer he kept the engagement a secret, the more likely she was to feel hurt at his not sharing so important a part of his life. Annie Jameson had been his earliest and strongest ally, and she believed herself still to be his protector even in small things. Though he by now had turned twenty-six and was wealthy and famous the world over, she doted on him as if he were still a boy sequestered in his attic laboratory. She stayed often at the Haven Hotel. In one letter to him, written from there, she wrote, “After you left this morning I found you had not taken your rug with you…. I sent it to you at 3 o’clock today and hope you will get it all right by tomorrow.” She urged him to keep “plenty of blankets” on his bed. “I have put all your things as tidy as possible in your room, and the key to your wardrobe I have put in one of the little drawers of your looking glass on the dressing table, but indeed there is little use in locking the wardrobe for all the keys are the same.”

  Later, from Bologna, she wrote, “I am thinking if it has got warmer at the Haven Hotel you will want your lighter flannels. Mrs. Woodward has the keys of your boxes. Your flannels are in the box with the two trays. Summer sleeping suits on the first tray. Summer vests under the two trays. Summer suit, jacket, waistcoat and trousers in the wardrobe (side of window).”

  In London Ambrose Fleming awoke to the fact that he had taken on something far more involved and consuming than he had expected when he agreed to become scientific adviser. In a letter to Flood Page he complained that the company was making “extreme demands on my time” and cited by way of example a long letter from engineer Richard Vyvyan “which will take several hours to answer.” His pay, he complained, was “in no way adequate.”

  He wrote, “I am willing to do this work on a scale of payment proportional to the responsibility. You are engaged in a gigantic experiment at Cornwell which if successful would revolutionize ocean telegraphy.”

  For him to continue, he wrote, his pay would have to be increased to £500 a year—more than $50,000 today. Further, he needed a promise of additional reward “if my work and inventions are of material assistance in getting across the Atlantic.”

  One week later, on December 1, 1900, Flood Page wrote back to notify Fleming that the directors had approved the increase. He added, however, that the board wanted assurance that Fleming understood a crucial point.

  “I am desired to say,” Flood Page wrote, “that while they recognize fully the great assistance you have given to Mr. Marconi with reference to the Cornwall Station, yet they cannot help feeling that if we get across the Atlantic, the main credit will be and must be Mr. Marconi’s. As to any recognition in the future in the event of our getting successfully across the Atlantic, I do not think you will have cause to regret it, if you leave yourself in the hands of the Directors.”

  That Fleming truly understood the point—understood the lengths to which Marconi and his company would go to train the spotlight on Marconi alone—is doubtful. Fleming’s roots lay in the loam of British academic science and in the British ideal of fair play. In his acceptance note, which he mailed to Flood Page two days later, Fleming wrote, “As regards any special recognition in the event of my services assisting in the accomplishment of transatlantic wireless telegraphy I can confidently leave this to be considered when the time arrives, assured that I shall meet with generous treatment.”

  As if on cue, the company now changed its name, from the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Co. to Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Co., though the name change would not become official until February.

  SPEED WAS ESSENTIAL. Each week’s issue of The Electrician brought some new and disturbing evidence of a groundswell of competition. Experiments involving wireless were occurring around the world, and in Britain there were troubling developments.

  The Royal Navy installed thirty-one of its thirty-two new Marconi sets, but it shipped the last to an electrical equipment company where engineers, without authorization from Marconi, built fifty duplicates for the navy’s use.

  In December Nevil Maskelyne conducted tests in the Thames Estuary with his own wireless apparatus. The distance wasn’t great—a few miles—but the customer who arranged the tests was impressive indeed, Col. Henry Montague Hozier, secretary of Lloyd’s of London, a post he had held since 1874. He was the Lloyd’s official who in 1898 had invited Marconi to conduct experiments on Rathlin Island, which, despite their success, failed to generate a Lloyd’s contract. Now Hozier and Maskelyne formed an independent syndicate to develop and market Maskelyne’s technology.

  And there was Lodge: He continued to experiment with wireless and talked with his friend Muirhead, the instrument-maker, about possibly forming a new company to market the system. Happily for Marconi, however, Lodge became distracted once again. In 1900 he was appointed principal—the equivalent of president—of Birmingham University.

  He accepted the position only after receiving assurance that he would be allowed to continue his investigations of the paranormal.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  CRIPPEN BECAME CAUGHT UP in the social web of the Ladies’ Guild. He attended parties thrown by music hall artists, visited their clubs, and when Belle felt it necessary to have a companion, dined out with other guild members and their husbands.

  One afternoon Seymour Hicks, the performer and memoirist, encountered Crippen at London’s Vaudeville Club. An acquaintance of Hicks’s introduced them, and they spent half an hour together, over cocktails. Hicks knew something of Crippen and of the dynamics of his marriage to Belle. It was hard to understand—so large and robust a woman, exuding energy from every pore, coupled with so mild and self-erasing a man as Crippen.

  “The most noticeable thing about him was his eyes,” Hicks wrote. “They bulged considerably and appeared to be closely related to some kind of ophthalmic goiter. Added to this, as they were weak and watery he was obliged to wear spectacles with lenses of more than ordinary thickness, which so magnified his pupils that in looking at him I was by no means sure I was not talking to a bream or mullet or some other open-eyed and equally intelligent deep sea fish. He spoke with a slight American accent.”

  On this occasion Hicks’s acquaintance complained of a toothache, and Crippen immediately handed him one of Munyon’s remedies, “assuring him that it would instantly relieve the acute toothache from which he was suffering.”

  Hicks wrote, “There is no doubt that as the years rolled on, the home life of this little peddler of patent medicines must have been anything but a rest cure, and one for which even Dr. Munyon himself could not have found a remedy.”

  Hicks felt sympathy for Crippen. Looking back from the darkling year 1939, knowing by then all that had come to pass, Hicks mused, “Miserably unhappy, he would not have been human if he had not sought consolation elsewhere.”

  SO INTENSE WAS THE WORK and the fear of competitors—of Tesla, Lodge, Slaby, and now Maskelyne—that Marconi and his men seemed unaware of the passing of the nineteenth century, the age of Victoria. Out in the world beyond the windblown cliffs of Cornwall and the snug Christmas hearths of the Poldhu and Haven hotels, the first shadows of a long melancholy dusk had begun to gat
her.

  In 1898, spurred by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and by widespread ill will among the German populace toward England, the German Reichstag passed the First Navy Law, which called for the production of seven new battleships. Two years later, in June 1900, much to the alarm of the British Admiralty, the Reichstag went further and passed its Second Navy Law, which doubled the number of battleships in the German navy and set in motion a cascade of events that over the next decade and a half would align the world for war.

  There was wide agreement that some kind of war in Europe was inevitable, although no one could say when or between which nations; but there also was agreement that advances in science and in the power of weapons and ships would make the war mercifully short. The carnage would be too great, too vast, too sudden for the warring parties to endure. One voice dissented. In 1900 Ivan S. Bloch wrote, “At first there will be increased slaughter—increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue.” At the onset of hostilities armies would try to fight under the old rules of warfare but quickly would find them no longer applicable. “The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never able to deliver a final and decisive attack.”

  They would dig in and hold their ground. “It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle.”

  In January 1901 something greater than fear of war settled over the nation. Twenty-three days into the new century, Queen Victoria died. Britain was cast into literal shadow as men and women donned black and thick black lines appeared along the edges of each page of The Times. A sense of dread shaded life. Henry James wrote, “I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I felt her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol—the wild waters are upon us now.”