Thunderstruck

A LOS S IN MAYFAIR

MARCONI DID NOT TAKE BEATRICE back to London. He brought her instead to the Poldhu Hotel, adjacent to his wireless compound. She was pregnant and felt ill nearly every day.

Marconi was oblivious, distracted by his experiments and by his company’s financial troubles. The expenses of his transatlantic venture were mounting rapidly, as was pressure from his board and investors. Even so he began looking for a location to replace Poldhu and found one near Clifden in County Galway, Ireland. He envisioned a station that would produce 300,000 watts of power, four times that of his original Glace Bay station, with a horizontal antenna more than half a mile long stretched across the tops of eight two-hundred-foot masts. To fuel the boilers needed to power the station’s generators, he planned to use peat from a bog about two miles away and to build a small railway to deliver it to the station. Once erected, the condenser building would house eighteen hundred plates of galvanized iron, each five times the height of a man and suspended from the ceiling.

By this point he had invested his personal fortune in his quest. Another failure now would ruin not just his company but himself as well. He kept the situation a secret from Beatrice. She said, years later, “I was almost too young to realize the strain he was under during the first year of our marriage. In view of my condition he kept his increasingly pressing financial difficulties from me. He was dreadfully overworked yet he couldn’t allow himself to neglect his experiments.”

Beatrice grew weary of her new isolation and resolved to move to London. Thinking still that Marconi was rich, her mother, Lady Inchiquin, leased for her an expensive house in Mayfair. After moving in, Beatrice saw little of Marconi. The journey from Poldhu to London took eleven hours; the round trip consumed the better part of two workdays. It was time Marconi did not want to lose.

Some trips were unavoidable. In February Beatrice bore a daughter, Lucia. Marconi immediately headed for London to meet this newest member of his family. After a brief stay he left again for Poldhu.

The family doctor pronounced Lucia “a more than usually healthy baby,” but after several weeks the baby fell ill. Her body grew hot and she seemed to suffer abdominal pain. Her condition worsened rapidly. Beatrice, still weak from the ordeal of childbirth, was terrified. One night Lucia had convulsions, a consequence possibly of meningitis. Shortly after eight o’clock the next morning, a Friday, the baby died. There had not even been time to have her baptized.

Marconi came back to London to find Beatrice bedridden from grief and illness. He wrote to his own mother, “Our darling little baby was taken away from us suddenly on Friday morning.” Beatrice, he wrote, had received “a most awful shock and she is now very weak.”

He sought to arrange Lucia’s burial but found that cemeteries refused to accept her because she had not been baptized. Now he endured what Degna Marconi called “the ghastly experience of driving around London in a taxi, trying to find a cemetery that would bury his baby.” Eventually he found one, in west London.

Beatrice’s sister, Lilah, came to the house to tend to Beatrice, and Marconi again left for Poldhu.

MARCONI’S FINANCIAL TROUBLES worsened, and he at last revealed the true state of his financial affairs to Beatrice. She was startled but vowed henceforth to conserve money whenever she could.

Now Marconi fell ill. His malaria flared again and compelled him to return to London, to the Mayfair house, where he collapsed into bed and remained for three months. On April 3, 1906, an employee wrote to Fleming that Marconi’s “condition is unchanged, and the Doctor has now given strict instructions that Mr. Marconi must not be disturbed.”

During this time Beatrice learned something else about her husband—that he was a morbid, difficult patient.

He insisted on knowing the contents of every medicine and was impatient with the overly tactful manner of English doctors and nurses. At intervals he exploded, “They take me for an idiot!”

He clipped funeral advertisements from newspapers and displayed them on a bedside table. Beatrice, grieving her lost daughter and anxious about her husband’s health, did not think this funny.

At one point she stepped out for a walk and to bring a new prescription to a nearby chemist’s shop. She returned to find Marconi standing on his head in the bedroom. She was convinced he had gone mad.

Once he was upright again, he explained that he had bitten his thermometer and broken it and swallowed some of the mercury. Standing on his head had seemed the most efficient means of getting the mercury out of his body.

HIS ILLNESS LINGERED through much of the summer and cost him time, during which his critics and competitors remained active. Nevil Maskelyne, his magic shows now lodged in a new location farther up Regent Street from Piccadilly, acquired the rights to new wireless technology from America and formed a company, Amalgamated Radio-Telegraph, to develop it into a competing wireless system. He recruited Marconi’s opponents to join him and claimed that his new apparatus allowed him to transmit messages 530 miles.

Meanwhile the secretary of Lloyd’s of London, Henry Hozier, grew disenchanted with Marconi and his company. In a letter to Oliver Lodge, marked, “Private and Confidential,” dated May 11, 1906, Hozier wrote, “We find that the administration of the Marconi Company is so unsatisfactory, and so difficult to deal with, that we must take precautions to have some other system available for Lloyd’s business as soon as our present agreement with the Marconi Company comes to an end, and I should be very glad to have an opportunity of discussing this matter with either yourself, or Dr. Muirhead, or possibly your business manager.”

Muirhead arranged to have a test station constructed on a field owned by his brother.

But Lodge’s focus wavered. Mrs. Piper, the medium, returned to England with her daughters and stayed at his house, where he conducted a series of sittings. Impressed anew, he wrote a 153-page report on the experience for the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Once again Lodge found himself convinced of her gift and deeply distracted.

Germany’s hostility to Marconi continued unabated, as British fears of German invasion deepened. In 1906, in response to Germany’s growing naval power, Britain launched the most powerful battleship ever built, the HMS Dreadnought. That year a widely read novel, The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Quex, fanned British anxiety and planted the fear that Germany might already have secreted spies throughout England. Commissioned by Alfred Harmsworth, the novel appeared first in serial form in his Daily Mail and described a future invasion in which German forces crushed all resistance and occupied London—until a heroic counterattack expelled them. Harmsworth sent men dressed as German soldiers into the streets wearing sandwich boards to promote each new installment. One witness described a line of men “in spiked helmets and Prussian-blue uniforms parading moodily down Oxford Street.”

The book immediately became a bestseller in Britain, but German readers loved it too. The publisher of the German-language edition had chosen to omit the counterattack.

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1908, Marconi was in America when he received word that Beatrice had given birth to another baby girl. Immediately he booked passage for England. During the voyage he happened to read a history of Venice, in which he spotted a name that he found appealing. The child became Degna.

The birth did little to bridge the growing distance between Marconi and his wife. They fought with increasing frequency.