Thunderstruck

THE GIRL ON THE DOCK

FOR MARCONI THE FIRST HALF OF 1904 proved a time of disillusionment and sorrow. His father, Giuseppe, died on March 29, but Marconi was so consumed by the difficulties of his company that he did not travel to Italy for the funeral. In May he set off on a voyage aboard the Cunard Line’s Campania to conduct more long-range tests but found that by day his maximum distance was 1,200 miles, by night 1,700, not much better than the results he had gotten in February 1902 during similar tests on the Philadelphia. Two full years had passed with no significant improvement. His stations, he decided, had to be even bigger and more powerful, though enlarging them would further strain his company’s financial health. On Nova Scotia he faced a choice—invest more money in the Glace Bay station, or abandon it and find a site far larger for a wholly new station. He chose the latter path. He envisioned the installation of an antenna three thousand feet in diameter.

The new station would impose great strain on his company’s increasingly fragile financial health, to say nothing of taxing his board’s willingness to support his transatlantic quest—especially now, in the face of the grave threat posed by Kaiser Wilhelm II and his international conference on wireless. The conference had taken place the previous August in Berlin, and the nations in attendance had agreed in principle that every station or ship should be able to communicate with every other, regardless of whose company manufactured the equipment involved. They agreed also that companies must exchange the technical specifications necessary to make such communication possible. For the moment the agreement had no effect, but eventual ratification seemed certain.

Back in London Marconi confronted skepticism and suspicion that seemed to have deepened. He found it hard to comprehend. Wireless worked. He had demonstrated its power time and again. Lloyd’s had endorsed the system. More and more ships carried his apparatus and operators. News reports testified to the value of wireless. The previous December, for example, the Red Star Line’s Kroonland had lost her steering, but thanks to wireless all her passengers had been able to notify family that they were safe. Even Kaiser Wilhelm’s conference testified, albeit perversely, to the quality and dominance of Marconi’s system.

Yet here it was, 1904, and the author of a newly published book on wireless still felt compelled to write: “Notwithstanding the great mass of positive evidence, there are many conservative people who doubt that wireless telegraphy is or will be an art commercially practicable. Public exhibitions have so often proved disappointing that a great deal of disparaging testimony has circulated.”

Marconi turned thirty on April 25. The context was bittersweet. “At thirty,” his daughter, Degna, wrote, “his nerves were dangerously frayed, he was disheartened, and near the end of his endurance.”

He told his friend Luigi Solari, “A man cannot live on glory alone.”

MARCONI, HOWEVER, WAS NOT exactly leading a life of misery. In London, when he wasn’t immersed in business matters, he dined in elegant restaurants, certainly the Criterion and Trocadero, and was coveted as a guest at dinner parties in Mayfair and at the country homes of the titled rich. Marconi loved the company of beautiful women and was pursued by many, albeit in the sotto voce fashion of the day. The fact that he was Italian put him a rank or two below the kind of suitor that British parents considered ideal, but still, as Degna put it, he “was internationally considered a brilliant second-best.”

While conducting experiments from his base at the Haven Hotel in Poole, he often would sail to nearby Brownsea Island for lunch with his friends Charles and Florence Van Raalte, who owned the island and lived there in a castle. In the summer of 1904 the Van Raaltes had houseguests, a young woman named Beatrice O’Brien and her mother, Lady Inchiquin. Beatrice was nineteen years old and one of fourteen children of the fourteenth Baron Inchiquin, Edward Donagh O’Brien, who had died four years earlier, possibly from parental exhaustion. Beatrice and her siblings were accustomed to castle life, having grown up in a large one on the family estate, Dromoland, in County Clare, Ireland.

On a day when Marconi was expected, Mrs. Van Raalte dispatched Bea to the dock to meet him. She put on her favorite dress, a satin number meant for evening wear that she had sewn herself. To her, it seemed lovely; to everyone else, merely peculiar. While walking on the dock, she broke a heel off one of her shoes. She stood waiting, a bit off kilter, as Marconi’s boat arrived.

Two observations struck him: first, as he said later, that “the dress she had on was awful,” and second, that she was utterly beautiful. He was thirty, eleven years her senior, but in those moments on the dock he fell in love.

Suddenly his wireless troubles did not seem so overwhelming. He came to Brownsea more often, not just for lunch but also for dinner and high tea. When Beatrice left Brownsea for the family’s mansion in London, Marconi dropped his experiments and followed.

In London one evening Marconi went to the Albert Hall to attend a charity banquet organized by Beatrice’s mother. He had little interest in the charity. He found Beatrice at the top of a long flight of iron stairs. He asked her to marry him.

To this point, marriage had not entered her thoughts. She did not love him, at least not in the way that marriage might require. She asked for more time. He bombarded her with letters, using the post office’s express mail service, which dispatched messenger boys to carry important letters directly to their destinations.

At last Beatrice invited Marconi to tea. She told him, gently, that she would not become his wife.

He fled for the Balkans, behaving, Degna said, “like the jilted suitor in a romantic Victorian novel.” He contracted malaria, which would plague him with intervals of fever and delirium for the rest of his life.

BEATRICE WAS SURPRISED at how sad Marconi’s departure from her life had made her. Stricken with the grief of failed romance, she returned to Brownsea Island for another long stay. Mrs. Van Raalte promised her “solemnly,” according to Degna, that Marconi would not learn of her presence. But Mrs. Van Raalte liked Marconi and believed he and Beatrice constituted an ideal match.

Without telling Beatrice, Mrs. Van Raalte wrote to Marconi, still sulking in the Balkans, to tell him of Beatrice’s heartbreak. In the great conspiratorial tradition of Englishwomen of title, she invited Marconi to the island as well, this time as a houseguest.

Marconi accepted at once and returned to England as quickly as possible. Beatrice was stunned to see him but charmed by the fact that his ardor had not diminished. They took walks, and sailed, and fell into what Degna described as an “easy comradeship.” On December 19, 1904, as they walked through the heather on a headland overlooking the sea, Marconi again asked her to marry him. This time she said yes—on condition that her sister Lilah approved.

This meant another delay, for Lilah was in Dresden. Beatrice was unsure how to tell her sister the news and needed two days to compose her letter. “It’s so serious I don’t know how to break it to you,” she wrote. “I’m not crazy; it’s only this, I’ve settled the most serious thing in my life. Can you guess it—I am engaged to be married to Marconi…. I don’t love him. I’ve told him so over and over again, he says he wants me anyhow and will make me love him. I do like him so much and enough to marry him.” She added, “And to think I never meant to marry! I had always arranged to be an old maid.”

She did not yet reveal the engagement to her mother. First, she told one of her brothers, Barney, who approved and urged her to go to London to tell her mother and, more important, her eldest brother Lucius, who after the death of their father had become the ranking male, the fifteenth Baron Inchiquin. Nothing could happen without his consent.

Beatrice and Marconi set out for London. Soon after their arrival Marconi bought her a ring, which Degna described as “tremendous,” then paid a visit to the O’Brien family’s London mansion to ask Beatrice’s mother, Lady Inchiquin, for her daughter’s hand.

Nothing was easy. Lady Inchiquin was a bulwark of propriety. She said no. Lucius, the fifteenth Baron Inchiquin, seconded the refusal. While Marconi was indeed famous and was believed to be rich, he was still foreign. Neither the baron nor Lady Inchiquin knew anything of his heritage.

Predictably, their opposition had a perverse effect on Beatrice. Now, in the grand tradition of the daughters of titled Englishwomen, Beatrice steeled her resolve. She would marry Marconi, no matter what.

MARCONI WAS CRUSHED AND probably furious, fully aware of the underlying reasons for the O’Briens’ refusal. He had lived among the wealthy of England long enough to know that their welcome had boundaries. He fled again, this time for Rome.

Troubling news drifted back. A German governess in the O’Brien family happened to read in a European newspaper that Marconi had been spotted often in the company of a Princess Giacinta Ruspoli. The governess told Lady Inchiquin. Worse news followed the next day. Another item reported that Marconi and the princess were engaged.

In the O’Brien mansion there were tears and rage and underneath it all a certain smug sense that the inevitable had occurred. Marconi was, after all, an Italian. Lady Inchiquin and the fifteenth baron accepted the reports as hard fact and saw them as affirming the righteousness of their decision. Beatrice wept. She insisted the news was false.

The situation called for lofty counsel. Lady Inchiquin took Beatrice to the home of an ancient and imposing aunt, Lady Metcalfe, “whose opinions,” according to Degna, “were often invoked in times of crisis.” Over tea, as Beatrice sat silent, the Ladies Inchiquin and Metcalfe railed and condemned, oblivious to her presence—“as though Beatrice, obviously reduced to the status of a naughty child, were not there.”

Marconi was not the sole object of Lady Metcalfe’s scorn. At one point she turned to Lady Inchiquin and asked, “What can you be thinking of, to let this child become engaged to a foreigner?”

IN ROME, MARCONI too read the reports of his alleged engagement and, realizing their likely impact in the O’Brien household, he immediately left for London. The reports were false, he assured Lady Inchiquin, and then he began a campaign to charm her into permitting his marriage to Beatrice. Surprisingly, he succeeded. He and Lady Inchiquin became friends. She took to calling him “Marky.”

The engagement moved forward. Beatrice and Marconi scheduled their wedding for the following March.

From the first there were warning signs. “She was a born flirt,” Degna wrote, and was “incapable of suppressing her adorable, flashing smile at every male who came near her.”

At such times Marconi flared with jealous rage.

IN HIS LABORATORY at University College, London, Fleming directed the hurt of his rejection into work aimed at winning his way back into Marconi’s favor. He invented a device that in time would revolutionize wireless, the thermionic valve. He wrote to Marconi, “I have not mentioned this to anyone yet as it may become very useful.” Soon afterward he invented another device, the cymometer, that at last provided a means for the accurate measurement of wavelength. He told Marconi about this as well.

Oliver Lodge, meanwhile, became a bona-fide competitor to Marconi. In Birmingham, in moments when he wasn’t busy managing his university or teaching or conducting research or investigating strange occurrences, Lodge helped his friend Alexander Muirhead attempt to find buyers for their wireless system. In 1904, while seeking a contract from the Indian government to provide a wireless link to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, they wound up in direct competition with Marconi.

And won.