Thunderstruck

THE DYNAMITE PRIZE

SLOWLY, THROUGH GREAT EFFORT and endless experimentation, Marconi forced his transatlantic service into operation, despite foul weather and frequent malfunctions and in the face of competition that seemed to grow more effective and aggressive by the day. Germany’s Telefunken, marketing the Slaby-Arco-Braun equipment, was particularly energetic. It seemed that every time Marconi’s men approached a new customer abroad, they discovered that Telefunken’s salesmen already had been there. They described the German company’s omnipresence as “The Telefunken Wall.” To make matters worse, in 1908 the provisions of Kaiser Wilhelm’s international wireless conference at last took effect. Marconi ordered his men to continue shunning other systems, especially Telefunken, except in case of emergency; Telefunken engineers likewise refused to accept communication from Marconi-equipped ships. Later, Germany banished all foreign wireless systems from its vessels.

Marconi’s new transatlantic service was slow and fraught with problems. A company memorandum dated August 4, 1908, showed that from October 20, 1907, through June 27, 1908, the total traffic between Clifden and Glace Bay was 225,010 words—an average of only 896 words a day. Another company report revealed that in March, the best month, the average time needed to complete transmission of a message was 44 minutes; the maximum was 2 hours and 4 minutes. The next month, however, the average climbed to more than 4 hours; the maximum was 24 hours and 5 minutes, an entire day to send one message.

But the system worked. Marconi had achieved the impossible. These were not merely three-dot messages but full-length dispatches, many of which were sent by correspondents based in America for publication in The Times of London, and Marconi knew, with his usual certainty, that improvements in speed and reliability would come.

In 1909 he received at last the kind of recognition that had eluded him for so many years, amid the sniping of Oliver Lodge, Nevil Maskelyne, and others. In December the overseers of the eight-year-old Nobel prizes awarded the prize for physics to Marconi, for wireless, and to Karl Ferdinand Braun, for inventing the cathode ray tube, which years later would make television possible. This was the same Braun who had joined with Slaby and Arco to produce the wireless system that Telefunken was so aggressively selling throughout the world.

To Marconi, the prize was an immense honor and utterly unexpected, for he had never considered himself a physicist. In the opening moments of his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, Marconi conceded that he was not even a scientist. “I might mention,” he said, “that I never studied Physics or electrotechnics in the regular manner, although as a boy I was deeply interested in those subjects.” And he frankly admitted that he still did not fully understand why he was able to transmit across the Atlantic, only that he could. As he put it, “Many facts connected with the transmission of electric waves over great distances still await a satisfactory explanation.”

He acknowledged that other mysteries remained as well. “It often occurs that a ship fails to communicate with a nearby station, but can correspond with perfect ease with a distant one,” he told the audience. He did not know why this was the case. Nor had he found, yet, a persuasive explanation for why sunlight so distorted communication, though he was “inclined to believe” in a theory recently put forth by physicist J. J. Thomson, that “the portion of the earth’s atmosphere which is facing the sun will contain more ions or electrons than that portion which is in darkness” and therefore absorb energy from the waves being transmitted. He had found too that sunrise and sunset were times of especially acute distortion. “It would almost appear as if electric waves in passing from dark space to illuminated space, and vice versa, were reflected or refracted in such a manner as to be deviated from their normal path.”

But a few moments later, with particular satisfaction, Marconi said, “Whatever may be its present shortcomings and defects there can be no doubt that Wireless Telegraphy even over great distances has come to stay, and will not only stay, but continue to advance.”

HE HAD COME FAR. Though his company was struggling financially, he believed its troubles soon would ease. Ships now routinely hailed each other at midocean. Shipboard newspapers were becoming common. The term Marconigram had entered the lexicon of travel. Despite the competition rising everywhere, especially in Germany and America, his company had clearly achieved dominance in the realm of wireless, and in large part this was a consequence of his transatlantic gamble and the knowledge it had yielded. In Stockholm, receiving the prize, it seemed as though success had crept up unawares and had overtaken him only there at the podium, as men in black and women in gowns rose and applauded.

The biggest hurdle that remained was the skepticism that still confronted long-range wireless. For reasons he could not understand, the world continued to see it as an invention of limited use, and nothing he did seemed capable of draining once and for all that vast and persistent reservoir of doubt.