Thunderstruck

THE FATAL OBSTACLE

ON SIGNAL HILL THE WEATHER WORSENED. Marconi listened hard for the sound of three snaps in the static mist that filled his telephone receiver, but he detected nothing. Outside, his men struggled to keep the kite aloft and stable. Each time it bobbed and dipped, its two trailing wires grew longer or shorter. Marconi still had only a vague understanding of how electromagnetic waves traveled and how the length of his antennas affected transmission and reception, but he did recognize that this constant rising and falling could not be helpful.

Trying to send signals to a wildly shifting kite was a bit like trying to catch a fish in a whirlpool.

IN POLDHU MARCONI’S OPERATORS fired chains of S’s into the sky over Cornwall. Thousands of watts of power pulsed through the spark gap. Lightning cracked, and pipes tingled. Electromagnetic waves coursed in all directions at the speed of light. Receivers at the Lizard, at Niton, and at Crookhaven instantly detected their presence. The signals were likely received aboard at least one of the increasing number of ocean liners equipped with wireless, perhaps the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse or the Lake Champlain or one of Cunard’s grand ships, depending on their locations. But the receiver on Signal Hill remained inert.

At about twelve-thirty the receiver issued a sharp click, the sound of the tapper striking the coherer. It meant the receiver had detected waves.

The tension in the room increased. Marconi’s face bore its usual sober expression. As was so often the case, his lips conveyed distaste, as if he had scented an unpleasant odor.

“Unmistakably,” he wrote, “the three sharp little clicks corresponding to three dots, sounded several times in my ear.”

He was excited but skeptical. He wanted to hear the clicks so badly that he felt he could not trust his own judgment. He passed the telephone receiver to Kemp.

“Can you hear anything Mr. Kemp?” he asked.

Kemp listened, and he too heard, or claimed to hear, sequences of three dots. They passed the telephone receiver to Paget as well, who listened but heard nothing. He, however, had grown increasingly hard of hearing.

“Kemp heard the same thing as I,” Marconi wrote, “and I knew then that I had been absolutely right in my calculation. The electric waves which were being sent out from Poldhu had traversed the Atlantic, serenely ignoring the curvature of the earth which so many doubters considered would be a fatal obstacle, and they were now affecting my receiver in Newfoundland.”

There was no serenity on Signal Hill. A burst of wind tore the kite free. The men lofted a second one, now with a single wire of five hundred feet. This configuration, Kemp wrote in his diary, “appeared more in harmony with the earth’s electric medium and the signals from Poldhu station. We were able to keep this kite up for three hours and it appeared to give good signals.” In all, they picked up twenty-five of the three-dot sequences.

Marconi wrote a draft of a telegram to Managing-Director Flood Page in London to announce his success but held it back. He wanted to hear more signals before notifying his board and especially before the news became public.

He tried again the next day, Friday, December 13, 1901. The weather grew more ferocious. There was snow, rain, hail, and wind—great gasps of it. Three times they launched kites, and three times the weather drove the kites to ground. During the brief periods the kites were in the air, however, Marconi claimed that he again heard three-dot sequences from Poldhu, though these signals were even less distinct than what he had heard the day before.

Frustrated by the lack of clarity, Marconi still did not send his cable to headquarters. He resolved to wait one more day, until Saturday, to allow time for more trials.

The wind accelerated. On Saturday it reached a point where an attempt to fly anything, balloon or kite, was out of the question. In desperation, Kemp and his helpers began constructing a very different kind of antenna. They began stringing a wire from the top of Signal Hill to an iceberg marooned in St. John’s harbor.

To Kemp’s regret, he never got the chance to test it.

MARCONI DEBATED WHAT to do next. He could wait and hope that the weather would improve or that Kemp’s iceberg antenna would work, or he could simply trust that he had indeed heard signals from Poldhu and go ahead and notify Flood Page in London.

He sent the cable. “SIGNALS ARE BEING RECEIVED,” it read. “WEATHER MAKES CONTINUOUS TESTS VERY DIFFICULT.” That night, he released a statement to The Times of London.

For one so aware of the “doubters” arrayed against him and of the hostility in particular of Lodge, Preece, and the electrical press, Marconi in orchestrating this transatlantic experiment and in now revealing it to the world had made errors of fundamental importance.

Once again he had failed to provide an independent witness to observe and confirm his tests. Moreover, in choosing to listen for the signals with a telephone receiver instead of recording their receipt automatically with his usual Morse inker, he had eliminated the one bit of physical evidence—the tapes from the inker—that could have corroborated his account. He had to have recognized that his claims of so wondrous an accomplishment, deemed impossible by the world’s greatest scientists, would pique skepticism and draw scrutiny, but apparently he believed that his own credibility would be sufficient to put all doubts to rest. This belief was a miscalculation that would prove costly.

THAT SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, the governor of Newfoundland, Sir Cavendish Boyle, held a celebratory lunch for Marconi at which, as Kemp recalled, the governor served champagne that had been retrieved from a shipwreck after years underwater. The New York Times called Marconi’s feat “the most wonderful scientific development in modern times.”

Over the next few days the stock prices of the transatlantic cable companies began to fall. Within a week the Anglo-American Telegraph Co. saw its preferred stock drop seven points and its common stock four. Shares of Eastern Telegraph Co. lost five and a half.

AMBROSE FLEMING LEARNED of Marconi’s feat only by reading a newspaper. He wrote later that he had been “left in ignorance of this success” until he opened the December 16 edition of the Daily Mail, where he saw the headline, “MR. MARCONI’S TRIUMPH.”

He had been left out of the whole affair, yet it was he who had designed and configured the power system at Poldhu and who during his many grueling trips to the station had made it all work.

He was hurt and angry.

JOSEPHINE HOLMAN PROFESSED to be delighted. In an interview she revealed that she had known all along about Marconi’s plan to span the Atlantic. “It has been a terrible state secret with me for more than a year,” she said. She omitted the fact that during that year she had seen him only rarely. She hoped that she would see more of him, now that his great goal had been achieved, and that he might even pay a visit at last to Indianapolis to meet her family.

“I would rather marry that kind of man than a king,” she said, and pronounced herself “the happiest woman in the world.”

Several days later her grandmother hosted an engagement party at her home in Woodruff Place in Indianapolis—without Marconi. Josephine now lived in New York with her mother but had come down for a six-week visit. The party occurred at its end, during a spell of deep cold that raised fears of what the newspapers called a “coal famine.” After the party, she set out to return to New York to rejoin her mother and, most important, to be reunited with her fiancé, who was headed there now, booked to stay at his favorite hotel, the Hoffman House.

It seemed a delightful prospect: Christmas in New York, with her husband-to-be, now more famous than ever.