Thunderstruck

“A GIGANTIC EXPERIMENT”

THE PLAN FLEW IN THE FACE of all that physicists believed about the optical character of electromagnetic waves. Like beams of light, waves traveled in a straight line. The earth was curved. Therefore, the physicists held, even if waves could travel thousands of miles—which they couldn’t—they would continue in a straight line far out into space. Sending waves across the ocean was no more possible than casting a beam of light from London to New York. There was another question: Why bother at all? How could wireless improve on the transoceanic telegraphy already in place via undersea cable? In 1898 fourteen submarine cables draped the sea floor. The dozen in daily use carried 25 to 30 million words annually, only half their potential capacity. Transmission was expensive but fast and efficient.

Now Marconi proposed to set up a wireless service to do the same thing, with unproven technology, in the face of established physical law, and at the risk of destroying his company. The cost of a pair of wireless stations big enough and powerful enough for Marconi’s plan to succeed would be immense and, if the effort failed, ruinous. And failure seemed a lot more likely than success. The scale of the stations Marconi now envisioned dwarfed anything he had built thus far. It was as if a carpenter, having erected his first house, set out next to construct St. Paul’s Cathedral.

To Marconi, however, the greater risk lay in not making the attempt. He recognized that from a commercial standpoint his company was inert. He had amazed the world, but the world had not then come rushing to place orders for his apparatus. In the public view, wireless remained a novelty. Marconi saw that he had to do something big to jolt the world into at last recognizing the power and practicality of his technology.

That his plan might be impossible did not occur to him. He saw it in his mind. As far as he was concerned, he already had proven the physicists wrong. With each new experiment he had increased distance and clarity. If he could transmit across the English Channel, why not across the Atlantic? For him it came down to the height of his antenna and the intensity of charge that he was able to jolt into the sky.

He recognized, however, that to achieve his goal he needed help. Winding wire to produce an induction coil capable of signaling thirty feet was one thing, but building a power plant capable of sending a message thousands of miles was something else altogether. For this he needed Fleming.

At first Fleming was skeptical, but by August 1899, after studying the problems involved, he wrote to Marconi, “I have not the slightest doubt I can at once put up two masts 300 feet high and it is only a question of expense getting high enough to signal to America.”

To better evaluate what it might entail, as well as to arrange another publicity event—coverage by wireless of the America’s Cup race off New York at the request of the New York Herald—Marconi booked his first voyage to the United States. On September 11, 1899, accompanied by three assistants, including W. W. Bradfield, Marconi sailed for New York.

ON ARRIVAL MARCONI WAS THRONGED by reporters, who were startled by his youth—“a mere boy,” the Herald observed—though at least one writer was struck by his alien appearance. “When you meet Marconi you’re bound to notice that he’s a ‘for’ner.’ The information is written all over him. His suit of clothes is English. In stature he is French. His boot heels are Spanish military. His hair and moustache are German. His mother is Irish. His father is Italian. And altogether, there’s little doubt that Marconi is a thorough cosmopolitan.” The passage was not meant as praise.

Marconi and his colleagues checked into the Hoffman House at Broadway and 24th Street in Manhattan, opposite a deepening triangular excavation that was soon to become the foundation of the Flatiron Building. They had just begun unpacking when the hotel’s steam boiler, in the basement, exploded. A frightened guest blamed it on Marconi and his mysterious equipment. To quash the guest’s concern, Marconi’s men opened their trunks to reveal the quiescent apparatus within—and only then realized that the most important trunk was missing. Without the coherers it contained, Marconi would be forced to cancel his coverage of the America’s Cup. His confident predictions of success had received a lot of attention from newspapers in America and abroad. His failure, with the weak excuse of lost luggage, would get at least as much publicity, perhaps even cause the price of his company’s stock to slide and thereby eliminate any hope of paying for his transatlantic experiment.

Ordinarily Marconi’s demeanor was cool and quiet. As the Herald noted, Marconi exuded the “peculiar semi-abstract air that characterizes men who devote their days to study and scientific experiment.” The New York Tribune called him “a bit absent-minded.” But now, upon finding the most important trunk missing, Marconi flew into a rage. With the petulance of a child, he proclaimed that he would leave for London aboard the next outbound ship.

His men calmed him. Bradfield and another assistant raced back to the wharf by horse-drawn cab to try to locate the trunk but failed. They returned to the hotel, no doubt fearing another outburst from their employer.

Now Bradfield remembered that on the day their ship left Liverpool, another liner also was scheduled to depart for America, but for Boston. He wondered if just possibly the trunk had gotten on the wrong ship. A reporter for the Herald headed north by train to check.

He found it, and Marconi’s coverage of the yacht race, between the famed Shamrock owned by Sir Thomas Lipton and its American opponent, Columbia II, seized the world’s attention. The Columbia won, and the Herald got the news first, by wireless.

DESPITE HIS SUCCESS, on November 8, 1899, when Marconi was scheduled to return to England, he had no new contracts to show for his effort. He had hoped to win the U.S. Navy as a customer, and while in America he had conducted a series of coastal trials, but the navy balked. Its report on the tests listed a host of speculative reasons to be wary of wireless, including this one: “The shock from the sending coil of wire may be quite severe and even dangerous to a person with a weak heart.” Also, the navy’s observers were peeved by Marconi’s refusal to reveal his secrets. He allowed them to examine only certain components. Others, the navy complained, “were never dismantled, and these mechanics were explained in a general way. The exact dimensions of the parts were not divulged.”

Far from being discouraged, Marconi arranged for yet another experiment, this one to take place during his voyage home aboard the St. Paul, a ship of great luxury and speed.

The ship’s owner, the American Line, agreed to allow Marconi to equip the vessel with wireless and to rig an antenna high above deck. Marconi planned to begin transmitting from the ship to his stations at the Needles and Haven hotels as the liner approached England, to see how far from shore messages could be received.

As Marconi’s assistants adjusted their shipboard equipment, Marconi demonstrated a paradox in his personality. Though he could be blind to the social needs of others, he also was able to command the allegiance of men older and younger and, as quickly became evident aboard ship, exuded a charm that women found compelling. One young woman, recalling the first time she met Marconi, said, “I noticed his peculiar, capable hands, and his rather sullen expression which would light up all at once in a wreath of smiles.” He was said also to possess a dry humor, though occasionally it emerged heavily barbed. During one experiment, frustrated with the keying skills of an operator, Marconi asked via wireless if that was the best he could do. When the man replied that it was, Marconi fired back, “Well try using the other foot.”

The St. Paul suited him. He had grown up amid luxury, conducted his first experiments amid luxury, and now, wealthy and famous, he did his traveling surrounded by something beyond luxury, for the designers of the great ships racing the Atlantic had sought to replicate in their first-class cabins and saloons the rich interiors of English country houses and Italian palazzi. Marconi associated with the wealthiest and most prominent of the ship’s passengers, including Henry Herbert McClure, a well-known journalist. Marconi was the focus of attention and the subject of admiring, though discreet, observation by the women of the first-class deck. Always a connoisseur of beauty, Marconi returned the scrutiny.

As the St. Paul approached England, Marconi and his assistants stationed themselves at their wireless system, located in a first-class cabin, and began hailing the shore stations over and over. Taking turns, they kept at it through the night. They heard nothing in response, and indeed no one expected much this early in the voyage. The system had a maximum range under ideal conditions of perhaps fifty miles.

On Tuesday, November 14, 1899, the new managing director of Marconi’s company, Maj. Samuel Flood Page, arrived at the Needles station on the Isle of Wight to observe the experiment. Jameson Davis, who several months earlier had retired from the post as planned, also came.

They calculated that the St. Paul would pass offshore at ten or eleven o’clock the next morning, Wednesday. Just in case, they assigned an operator to spend Tuesday night in the instrument room, where a bell rigged to the apparatus would announce the receipt of any incoming signals. No bells rang.

Flood Page returned to the instrument room at dawn as the sun began to bathe the Needles, a spine of chalk and flint sea-stacks from which the Needles Hotel took its name. “The Needles resembled pillars of salt as one after the other they were lighted up by the brilliant sunrise,” Flood Page wrote. Marconi’s men watched for ships to appear in the haze off the coast. “Breakfast over, the sun was delicious as we paced the lawn, but at sea the haze increased to fog; no ordinary signals”—meaning optical signals—“could have been read from any ship passing the place at which we were.”

They saw no sign of the St. Paul. The hours dragged past. Flood Page claimed “the idea of failure never entered our minds,” though this seems unlikely. Another hour passed, then another.

Then at 4:45 P.M. the bell rang.

The Needles operator signaled, “Is that you St. Paul?”

A moment later, an answer: “Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Sixty-six nautical miles away.”

It was a new record. At Needles and aboard ship there was celebration, but soon the men at both nodes began running out of things to say. Pressed for fresh material, the Needles men began sending the latest news of the Boer War in South Africa, which had begun in mid-October and was now gaining ferocity. They sent other news as well.

Someone—it’s not clear who—suggested publishing these dispatches in the form of a shipboard newspaper, the world’s first. The captain granted Marconi use of the ship’s print shop, which ordinarily had the more prosaic assignment of printing menus. The result was the Transatlantic Times, volume one, number one, a keepsake that passengers could purchase for a one-dollar contribution to the Seamen’s Fund. “As all know,” the newspaper’s opening section stated, “this is the first time that such a venture as this has been undertaken. A Newspaper published at Sea with Wireless Telegraph messages received and printed on a ship going twenty knots an hour!”

Anyone reading closely would have found several passengers identified in the masthead of editors, including Marconi’s assistant, Bradfield, as editor in chief and H. H. McClure as managing editor. But there was a third name as well, this one unfamiliar: J. B. Holman, treasurer.

As it happens, another momentous event had occurred during this crossing, albeit one of a rather more personal nature.

JOSEPHINE BOWEN HOLMAN was a young woman from Indianapolis—and from money. Though she lived now in New York with her mother, her roots lay in Woodruff Place, an enclave of some five hundred wealthy people incorporated as a distinct village within Indianapolis, occupying forested land once known locally as the Dark Woods.

Her hair was thick and dark, piled atop her head like a rich black turban. She had full lips and large eyes, and eyebrows that arced like gulls’ wings over a gaze that was frank and direct. Marconi, now twenty-five years old, had always been drawn to feminine beauty, and he was drawn now to her.

They dined and danced and, despite the cold of a mid-November crossing, took long walks around the first-class deck. He taught her Morse code. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. They kept their engagement a secret. When he disappeared into the wireless cabin for the last two days of the voyage, she was not troubled, though perhaps she should have been.

Once onshore, to evade discovery of the engagement by her mother, Holman inserted passages in her letters in Morse code.

BUOYED BY LOVE and by his success in signaling the Needles, Marconi prepared to reveal his idea to the company’s directors and ask approval to build the two gigantic stations. By summer he was ready.

The directors balked. They considered it too risky and too expensive, and they doubted that apparatus capable of generating and managing the required power could even be built—and if so, whether the resulting station would smother every other Marconi station with interference.

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.

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.