Thunderstruck

“I DON’T BELIEVE IT”

MARCONI HAD EXPECTED SOME SKEPTICISM about his Newfoundland success, but he was dismayed to find himself now confronting a barrage of incredulous commentary.

“I doubt this story,” Thomas Edison told the Associated Press. “I don’t believe it.” He said, “That letter ‘S’ with the three dots is a very simple one, but I have been fooled myself. Until the published reports are verified I shall doubt the accuracy of the account.”

In London that same day the Daily Telegraph reported, “Skepticism prevailed in the city…. The view generally held was that electric straysand not rays were responsible for activating the delicate instruments recording the ‘S’s’ supposed to have been transmitted from near the Lizard to Newfoundland on Thursday or Friday.” The paper cited one widely held theory making the rounds that the signals had come from a “Cunarder fitted with the Marconi apparatus, which was, or should have been, within 200 miles of the receiving station at St. John’s on the day of the experiment.” It also quoted William Preece as stating that “the letters S and R are just the letters most frequently signaled as the result of disturbance in the earth or atmosphere.”

Two days later The Electrical Review called Marconi’s claim “so sensational that we are inclined for the present to think that his enthusiasm has got the better of his scientific caution.” The Review proposed that the signals most likely came from a station in America. “A practical joker who had learned when the signals were expected, might easily have fulfilled the expectations of the watchers at the Newfoundland station.”

The Times of London published a letter from Oliver Lodge that was a model of artful damnation. “It is rash to express an opinion either way as to the probability of the correctness of Mr. Marconi’s evidently genuine impression that he has obtained evidence on the other side of the Atlantic of electrical disturbances purposely made on this side, but I sincerely trust he is not deceived.” Acknowledging that he had been critical of Marconi in the past, Lodge wrote, “I should not like to be behindhand in welcoming, even prematurely, the possibility of so immense and barely expected an increase of range as now appears to be foreshadowed. Proof, of course, is still absent, but by making the announcement in an incautious and enthusiastic manner Mr. Marconi has awakened sympathy and a hope that his energy and enterprise may not turn out to have been deceived by the unwonted electrical dryness of the atmosphere on that wintry shore.”

But at least one longtime skeptic took Marconi at his word, and saw in his achievement a glimmer of threat.

ON THE EVENING OF MONDAY, December 16, 1901, as he dined at his hotel in St. John’s, Marconi was approached by a young man bearing a letter addressed to him. Marconi’s dinner companion was a Canadian postal official named William Smith, who was staying at the same hotel and had a room just off the dining room. As the young man crossed the room toward the table, Marconi was telling Smith that he now planned to build a permanent station on Newfoundland, most likely at Cape Spear, a spit of land that jutted into the sea four miles southeast of Signal Hill.

Smith watched as Marconi opened the letter. As Marconi read, he became distraught. When Smith expressed concern, Marconi passed him the letter.

Smith too found it appalling. The letter was from a law firm representing the Anglo-American Telegraph Co., the big undersea cable company that provided telegraph service between Britain and Newfoundland.

The letter was brief, a single long paragraph that charged Marconi with violating Anglo-American’s legal monopoly over telegraphic communication between Britain and Newfoundland. “Unless we receive an intimation from you during the day that you will not proceed any further with the work you are engaged in and remove the appliances erected for the purpose of telegraph communication legal proceedings will be instituted to restrain you from the further prosecution of your work and for any damages which our clients may sustain or have sustained; and we further give you notice that our clients will hold you responsible for any loss or damage sustained by reason of [your] trespass on their rights.”

Marconi was furious, but he took Anglo-American’s threat seriously. He knew his own company could not withstand litigation with so powerful a foe, and he recognized too that harm had indeed been done to Anglo-American, because of the decline in the price of its stock.

Smith asked him into his room, calmed him, and on impulse invited him—“begged him,” Smith recalled—to bring his experiments to Canada. (At this point Newfoundland was a colony of Britain; it did not join Canada until 1949.) Over the next few days Smith arranged a formal invitation from the Canadian government. Marconi relented and set off for Nova Scotia, part of Canada since 1867, to scout a new location.

A party of dignitaries met him at the wharf in North Sydney, at the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, and whisked him into a train for a brief trip south to Glace Bay to show him a spot called Table Head. Aptly named, it was a flat plateau of ice and blown snow atop cliffs striated with bands of blue-gray and rust that fell a hundred feet straight down to the sea. “The site,” Smith said, “delighted Marconi.”

He set off for Ottawa to negotiate a formal agreement with the government.

ON CHRISTMAS DAY two operators with Anglo-American Cable exchanged salvos of doggerel. One in Nova Scotia tapped out,

Best Christmas greetings from North Sydney,

Hope you are sound in heart and kidney.

Next year will find us quite unable

To exchange over the cable.

Marconi will our finish see,

The Cable Co’s have ceased to be.

No further need of automatics

Retards, resistances and statics.

I’ll then across the ether sea

Waft Christmas greetings unto thee.

His counterpart in Liverpool responded,

Don’t be alarmed, the Cable Co’s

Will not be dead as you suppose.

Marconi may have been deceived,

In what he firmly has believed.

But be it so, or be it not,

The cable routes won’t be forgot.

His speed will never equal ours,

Where we take minutes, he’ll want hours.

Besides, his poor weak undulations

Must be confined to their own stations.

This is for him to overcome,

Before we’re sent to our long home.

Don’t be alarmed, my worthy friend.

Full many a year precedes our end.

North Sydney ended the exchange:

Thanks old man, for the soothing balm,

Which makes me resolute and calm.

I do not feel the least alarm,

The signal S can do no harm.

It might mean sell to anxious sellers,

It may mean sold to other fellers.

Whether it is sold or simply sell,

Marconi’s S may go to—well!

IN NEW YORK JOSEPHINE Holman spent Christmas without her fiancé. She was coming to see that being pledged to a man so obsessed with work brought with it certain disadvantages, one of them being loneliness.