Thunderstruck

THE SECRET OF THE KITES

DESPITE THE NEWS ABOUT SOUTH WELLFLEET, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget sailed for Newfoundland. The crossing took ten days and was marred by what Kemp called a “terrific gale” and a blizzard at sea. On Friday, December 6, 1901, they entered the harbor at St. John’s and docked at Shea’s Wharf. Snow bearded the Sardinian’s hull and lay in drifts on deck.

A throng of reporters and dignitaries met Marconi as he disembarked. To mask the true purpose of his mission, he hinted that he had come to Newfoundland to explore aspects of ship-to-shore communication. He reinforced the ruse by cabling the Cunard Line in Liverpool to inquire about the locations of the wireless-equipped Lucania and the more recently outfitted Campania. “He reasoned,” Vyvyan wrote, “that if he stated his purpose beforehand and failed, it would throw some discredit on his system…whereas if he succeeded the success would be all the greater by reason of its total unexpectedness.”

Soon after landing, Marconi began scouting for a site to launch his kites and balloons and settled on a “lofty eminence” that he had spotted from the ship, which bore the apt name Signal Hill, for the fact that it previously had been used for visual communication. It rose three hundred feet over the harbor and had a two-acre plateau at its top. Marconi and Kemp decided to set up their receiver and other equipment in a building on the plateau that previously had been a fever hospital.

On Monday, December 9, three days after their arrival, they began their work in earnest. They buried twenty sheets of zinc to provide a ground, assembled two kites, and oiled the skin of one balloon so that it would retain hydrogen.

Before leaving England, Marconi had given his operators at Poldhu instructions to wait for a cable from him specifying a day to begin signaling. Here too he was concerned about secrecy, for he knew that information leaked from telegraph offices as readily as water from a colander. By establishing the protocol in advance, all he now had to do was send a cable stating a date, with no further instructions. On that date, at three o’clock Greenwich Mean Time, his Poldhu station was to begin sending the letter S, three dots, over and over. Marconi had chosen S not out of nostalgia for his first great success on the lawn at Villa Griffone, but because the transmitter at Poldhu channeled so much power, he feared that repeatedly holding down the key for a dash might cause an electric arc to span the spark gap and damage his equipment. His operators were to send ten-minute volleys of 250 S’s spaced by five-minute intervals of rest. The pauses were important, for the key required to manage so much power had more in common with the lever on a water pump than the key typically found in conventional telegraph bureaus—it required strength and stamina to operate.

That Monday Marconi sent Poldhu his cable. The message read, simply, “BEGIN WEDNESDAY 11TH.”

So far, he had succeeded in keeping his real goal a secret. Only the New York Herald had bothered to send a correspondent to Signal Hill, and now the newspaper reported that Marconi “hopes to have everything completed by Thursday or Friday, when he will try and communicate with the Cunard steamer Lucania, which left Liverpool on Saturday.”

On Tuesday Kemp and Paget conducted a test flight of one kite, which rose into the sky trailing an antenna of five hundred feet of wire. The weather was fair, and the kite flew nicely. The next day, Wednesday, when the signaling was to begin, the weather changed.

Of course.

A strong wind huffed across the clifftop and raised the hems of the men’s coats. They decided to try a balloon first, thinking it would have more stability in the rough air. They filled a balloon with a thousand cubic feet of hydrogen and, with Kemp holding tight to a mooring line, sent it aloft. This time the wire was six hundred feet long. The balloon’s silk and cotton sleeve, expanded by gas to fourteen feet in diameter, acted now as a giant sail far overhead. In his diary Kemp wrote that he “had great trouble with it.”

Abruptly, the wind intensified. The balloon rose to about one hundred feet when Marconi decided the weather was too turbulent. The men began hauling it back down.

The balloon tore free. Had the balloon moved in a different direction, Kemp noted, “I should have gone with it as its speed was like a shot out of a gun.”

With six hundred feet of wire following in a graceful arc, the balloon, Marconi wrote, “disappeared to parts unknown.”

MARCONI TOLD THE Herald’s man, “Today’s accident will delay us for a few days and it will not be possible to communicate with a Cunarder this week. I hope, however, to do so next week, possibly with the steamer leaving New York on Saturday.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, December 12, the plateau atop Signal Hill was engulfed in what Marconi called a “furious gale.”

“I came to the conclusion that perhaps the kites would answer better,” he wrote, and so despite the storm Kemp and Paget readied one for launch. This time they attached two wires, each 510 feet long. Coats flapping, they launched the kite into the gale. It dipped and heaved but rose quickly to about four hundred feet.

“It was a bluff, raw day,” Marconi wrote: “at the base of the cliff, three hundred feet below us, thundered a cold sea. Oceanward, through the mist I could discern dimly the outlines of Cape Spear, the easternmost reach of the North American continent, while beyond that rolled the unbroken ocean, nearly two thousand miles of which stretched between me and the British coast. Across the harbor the city of St. John’s lay on its hillside, wrapped in fog.”

Once the kite was airborne, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget retreated from the weather into the transmitter room. “In view of the importance of all that was at stake,” Marconi wrote, “I had decided not to trust to the usual arrangement of having the coherer signals recorded automatically through a relay and a Morse instrument on a paper tape.” Instead, he connected his receiver to the handset of a telephone, “the human ear being far more sensitive than the recorder.”

It seemed at the time a prudent decision.

NOT ONLY THE PRESS was kept in the dark. Ambrose Fleming had left Poldhu on September 2 and soon afterward departed for his first vacation in years. Despite his crucial role in designing and adjusting Poldhu’s transmitter and power supply, he knew nothing about the attempt then under way in Newfoundland. On returning from his holiday, he occupied himself with his teaching duties at University College in Bloomsbury and worked on an important upcoming talk, a Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution.

For reasons that remain unclear, Marconi had excluded Fleming from the very thing that he had hired him to achieve. It may simply have been an oversight, owing to the turmoil raised by the destruction of the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet. It may, however, have been another example of Marconi’s periodic lapse into social blindness with its attendant disregard for the needs of others.

THE KITE SHUDDERED through the sky and strained at the line that tethered it to the plateau. At the appointed time Marconi held the telephone receiver to his ear. He heard nothing but static and the noise of wind. Each new gust stabbed the room with the scent of winter.

In Poldhu the operator began slamming down the key to make each dot.

To anyone watching, the whole quest would have seemed utterly hopeless, deserving of ridicule—three men huddled around a crude electrical device as a gigantic kite stumbled through the sky four hundred feet overhead. If not for the atmosphere of sober concentration that suffused the room, the scene would have served well as a Punch parody of Marconi’s quest.