Thunderstruck

DISASTER

AT POLDHU THE WEATHER CONTINUED rough. Kemp noted in his diary that on the morning of September 17 a gale from the southwest raked the station. Marconi was there. He, Kemp, and Fleming conducted experiments involving the generation of sparks. The wind intensified. “At 1 p.m.,” Kemp wrote, “the wind suddenly changed to N.W. with a heavy squall which struck the circle [of masts] with increasing violence.”

The masts rocked. The triatic stays that linked each mast to its neighbor caused them all to dance at once. Wind moaned through the wires.

One mast broke, but the triatics held—and transmitted the jolt of the collapse to the rest of the circle. All the masts failed. Half collapsed entirely, slamming onto the rain-soaked ground like great trees. The rest jutted from the ruin at haphazard angles.

No one was hurt, and somehow even the condensers, transformers, and generators in the buildings below escaped damage.

Marconi showed little emotion. Inside, however, he was impatient, nearly desperate. The disaster posed a wrenching challenge to his dream of transmitting across the Atlantic. He refused to postpone the attempt.

At his direction, the men at Poldhu erected two new masts, each 160 feet tall, and strung a thick cable across the top. From it they hung fifty-four bare copper wires, each 150 feet long, that converged over the condenser house and formed a giant fanshell in the sky. No particular law of physics dictated the design. It just struck Marconi as right.

Seven days after the disaster the new antenna was finished, and soon afterward, Marconi used it to make his first test transmissions to his station at the Lizard.

With this temporary antenna in place, he gave orders to build a new permanent station to consist of four towers each two hundred feet tall, constructed of cross-braced struts of pine. The four towers would anchor the corners of a piece of ground two hundred feet square. A thick cable of twisted wire would link the tops, and from it Marconi planned to string at least two hundred more wires to form a gigantic inverted pyramid reaching down to the roof of the condenser house. This time Marconi made sure the towers were designed to withstand the worst weather Cornwall was likely to deliver.

But construction of such an immense station would take months. He could not bear so long a delay in his transatlantic experiment. Partly his impatience was fueled by practical considerations. He worried that his board of directors would lose faith. So far the board, with reluctance, had allowed him to spend £50,000 on the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet—$5.4 million today. He needed to prove it was money well spent, though now with one station in ruins that proof would be harder to generate. He worried as always about the growing competition, especially from companies in America, and he still smarted from his failure at the last America’s Cup. He knew also that the secrecy of his transatlantic plan could not be maintained much longer.

But the overriding motivation came from within. On an instinctive level he knew that his signals could cross the Atlantic, even though nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible.

The fact that his temporary antenna at Poldhu still allowed communication with a station he had built at Crookhaven, Ireland, 225 miles away bolstered his confidence. So too did a bit of new technology that had fallen into his hands. In August a friend and fellow countryman, Luigi Solari, an officer in the Italian Navy, had paid a visit to Poldhu and brought with him a new coherer developed by a navy signalman. Marconi tested it and found it to be far more sensitive to transmissions than even his own best receivers.

He devised a new plan. On November 4, 1901, he sent Kemp a conventional telegram: “PLEASE HOLD YOURSELF IN READINESS TO ACCOMPANY ME TO NEWFOUNDLAND ON THE 16TH INST. IF YOU DESIRE HOLIDAYS YOU CAN HAVE THEM NOW. MARCONI.”

He said nothing of the new plan to Fleming.

MARCONI WAS ENOUGH of a realist to recognize that his temporary station was unlikely to be able to generate the power and the wavelengths that he believed would be necessary to produce waves capable of traveling all the way to Cape Cod. But Newfoundland was a different matter. It was far closer to Britain, yet still at the opposite side of the Atlantic. It was also well served by undersea cable, through the Anglo-American Telegraph Co., which held a monopoly on telegraphy between Britain and Newfoundland. This fact was vital to Marconi. He needed to be able to send and receive conventional telegrams in order to direct his operators in Poldhu and to gauge the progress of his experiments.

But now he faced the most important hurdle. Somehow, quickly, he had to erect a receiving station in Newfoundland with an antenna tall enough to receive signals from the temporary station at Poldhu. The antenna would have to be hundreds of feet high.

He came up with a novel solution. It was a good thing that he kept the whole effort secret, because if the shareholders had known of his plan, their confidence in him and his company likely would have plummeted.

KEMP PACKED HIS BAGS, as did another engineer, Percy Paget, and on Tuesday, November 26, 1901, at the wharves in Liverpool, they and Marconi boarded the Allan Line’s Sardinian, bound for Newfoundland. Marconi carried his own coherers and versions of the Italian signalman’s device given him by Solari. Tucked in the ship’s baggage hold were two large balloons made of cotton and silk that, once inflated, would each have a diameter of fourteen feet. Here also the crew stowed a number of large canisters containing hydrogen to fill the balloons, and spools containing thousands of feet of copper wire, along with materials to assemble six kites measuring seven by nine feet, each capable of lifting a man.

The balloons and kites, Marconi wrote later, were a necessary concession to time and the elements, “as it was clearly impossible at that time of the year, owing to the inclement weather and especially in view of the shortness of the time at our disposal to erect high poles to support the aerial.” Marconi envisioned using kites and balloons to loft a wire four hundred feet into the sky—twice the height of the masts at Cape Cod. At his instruction, the operators at Poldhu would send signals over and over at designated times until detected. Once he received a message, he planned then to go to his station at South Wellfleet to send a reply, thereby achieving at least a semblance of two-way communication across the Atlantic.

That evening, before the Sardinian sailed, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget sat down to dinner, their first meal onboard. It was a sumptuous affair, with excellent food and wine. The ship was warm and comfortable, the service attentive—not surprising, given that the three men comprised about half the ship’s roster of passengers. Paget and Kemp shared a cabin; Marconi had his own.

In the middle of the meal a telegram arrived, addressed to Marconi.

AT SOUTH WELLFLEET, November was proving ferocious. The Weather Bureau called it the coldest November “for many years,” with a mean temperature that was “phenomenally low.” All month there was wind, rain, sleet, and snow, but the last week proved especially violent. On Saturday night, November 23, a nor’easter blew in and continued raging all the next day. Over the following two days the wind on Block Island reached eighty miles an hour, hurricane force. Storm flags went up and stayed up.

On Tuesday, November 26, the storm reached its peak. Powerful gusts of wind tore across the clifftop and caused the masts to undulate and twist. The triatic stays linking the tops of the masts caused them to move in unison, like dancers in some primitive ceremony.

The dance turned jagged. Eerily, the South Wellfleet station now experienced the same disaster that had destroyed its sister station in Poldhu. One mast failed; then all failed. A segment of mast the size of a tree trunk pierced the roof of the transmitting room. Another nearly struck Richard Vyvyan. It fell, he wrote, “within three feet of where I was standing at the time.”

Now this station too lay shattered. Marconi’s lavish investment had yielded only a dozen shipwrecks’ worth of damaged spars, royals, and topgallants.

VYVYAN SENT WORD of the disaster via undersea cable to the company’s headquarters in London, which relayed the news to Marconi, now dining aboard the Sardinian. The telegram was concise: “MASTS DOWN CAPE COD.”