Thunderstruck

THE MARRIAGE THAT NEVER WAS

THE CRIPPEN SAGA DID MORE TO ACCELERATE the acceptance of wireless as a practical tool than anything the Marconi company previously had attempted—more, certainly, than any of Fleming’s letters or Marconi’s flashiest demonstrations. Almost every day, for months, newspapers talked about wireless, the miracle of it, the nuts and bolts of it, how ships relaying messages from one to another could conceivably send a Marconigram around the world. Anyone who had been skeptical of wireless before the great chase now ceased to be skeptical. The number of shipping companies seeking to install wireless increased sharply, as did public demand that wireless be made mandatory on all oceangoing vessels.

This effect of the Crippen case tended to be overlooked, however, because of an event a year and a half later that further sealed Marconi’s success. In April 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, but not before the ship’s wireless operator, a Marconi employee, managed to summon help.

Marconi and Beatrice were supposed to be passengers on the Titanic, as guests of the White Star Line. Marconi canceled, however, and sailed a few days earlier on the Lusitania. Compulsive as always, he wanted to take advantage of the Lusitania’s public stenographer, whom he knew to be very efficient. Beatrice retained her booking. On the eve of the voyage, however, she too canceled. Their son Giulio had fallen ill with a high fever. The family was living then in a rented house called Eaglehurst, whose grounds had an eighteenth-century tower that overlooked Southampton Water. Beatrice and her daughter Degna, then three and a half, climbed to the top and watched the great ship as it left on its maiden voyage. They waved, and “dozens of handkerchiefs and scarves were waved back at us,” Degna wrote. The departure saddened Beatrice. She had wanted very much to be aboard.

In remarks before the House of Commons, Lord Herbert Samuel, England’s postmaster general, said, “Those who have been saved have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi and…his wonderful invention.” On March 8, 1913, a ship equipped with wireless set out to hunt and report the presence of icebergs—and sparked the formal inauguration in 1914 of the International Ice Patrol. Since then no ship within protected waters has been lost to a collision with an iceberg.

Marconi and Telefunken reached a truce. The companies agreed to stop challenging each other’s patents; they formed a European consortium to share technology and ensure that their systems could communicate with each other. The truce did not last long. On July 29, 1914, a group of Marconi engineers paid a visit to the giant Telefunken transmitter at Nauen, said to be the most powerful in the world. Telefunken officials gave the men a tour and treated them well. As soon as the Marconi men left, the German military took control of the station and began transmitting a message commanding all German ships to proceed immediately to a friendly harbor.

As of eleven P.M., August 4, Britain and Germany were at war. Marconi’s station at Poldhu sent a message to all Admiralty ships, “Commence hostilities against Germany.” A team of Marconi operators began eavesdropping on all German transmissions and by the end of the war collected more than eighty million messages.

Almost at once German torpedoes began sliding through the seas off England. Marconi’s annual report for 1914 stated, “Calls for assistance have been received almost daily.” The wireless cabins of ships became prime targets. In 1917 a German submarine attacked the SS Benledi and focused its fire on the ship’s wireless room, as its Marconi operator tried to reach an American warship for help. The warship arrived, the submarine fled. Afterward the Benledi’s captain went to the wireless cabin and found the operator still in his chair, everything in place, save for one macabre detail. His head was missing. In all, the war would kill 348 Marconi operators, most at sea.

AS MARCONI’S FAME increased and his empire expanded, his relationship with his mother, Annie, his most stalwart supporter, became more distant. She died in 1920 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. Marconi did not attend her funeral. Degna wrote, “The past had been dead for him a long time.”

He grew estranged as well from Beatrice. They spent more and more time apart, and soon Marconi entered an affair with another woman. For a time Beatrice and Marconi tried to preserve the illusion that their marriage was intact but eventually abandoned the effort. Marconi sold their house in Rome, and Beatrice and the children moved into the Hotel de Russie.

Marconi’s affair came to an end, but Beatrice had had enough. She asked Marconi for a divorce. With reluctance, he agreed. They took temporary residence in the free city of Fiume, where in 1923 the divorce was granted. Two years later Marconi wrote to Beatrice that he was on the verge of marrying again. He was fifty-one years old; the prospective bride was seventeen. The idea that Marconi would suddenly feel driven to marry and, presumably, start another family struck Beatrice as ironic, given that he had been so consumed with work that he had barely paid attention to her and their children. She suspended her usual warmth and cordiality. “I would like to wish you every happiness but this news distresses me for I wonder after all the years we were together when your own desire expressed continually was for freedom to concentrate on your work as your family impeded and oppressed you, why you should suddenly feel this great loneliness and need of a home—this craving for fresh ties!! These ties were eventually what broke up your home and ended in our divorce. I fail to understand.”

Marconi did not marry the girl. He immersed himself in work and spent more and more time aboard his yacht, Elettra. He again fell in love, this time with a daughter of one of Rome’s most aristocratic Catholic families, Maria Cristina Bezzi Scali. The family had ties to the so-called “black nobility,” men who swore allegiance to the pope. Marconi asked her to marry him, but an obstacle immediately arose. Vatican law forbade marriage between a divorced man and a confirmed Catholic; only an annulment would allow them to proceed. Marconi investigated and found that one basis for annulment was if a man and woman married with the intention of not adhering to Catholic marital law. He might succeed, he discovered, if he could convince a church tribunal that he and Beatrice had agreed before their wedding that if the marriage proved unhappy they would seek a divorce. To make this argument, however, he would need Beatrice’s help.

For the sake of the past, she agreed. As her time to testify neared, Marconi coached her on exactly what to say. His letters reprised his tendency to be oblivious to ordinary human sensitivities. In one letter he wrote, “They only want your testimony to decide, but please remember to read over my letters on the subject before you go, as it depends so much on your saying that we were agreed to divorce in the event of the marriage not being a happy one. Just simply a legal quibble on a matter of words or thoughts! Forgive very great haste, but I am still rather busy.”

The church granted the annulment, and soon afterward he married Bezzi Scali.

MARCONI’S INVENTIONS, and advances by engineers elsewhere in the world, led quickly to the wireless transmission of voice and music. In 1920 the Marconi company invited Dame Nellie Melba to its station at Chelmsford to sing over the airwaves. At the station an engineer explained that her voice would be transmitted from the station’s tower. Misunderstanding, Dame Melba said, “Young man, if you think I am going to climb up there you are greatly mistaken.”

As late as 1926 wireless at sea continued to enthrall passengers. A traveler named Sir Henry Morris-Jones kept a record in his diary of a voyage on a second Montrose, launched by Canadian Pacific a few years earlier. “What a world we live in,” he wrote. “A telegraph boy brings me a message handed in two hours before at Hull and I am 2000 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean.”

Marconi realized, late, that his approach to wireless during his transatlantic quest had been a mistake. He had been obsessed with increasing the length of antennas and the power of transmitters, until he discovered through experiment that in fact very short waves could travel long distances far more readily and with far less expenditure of power. His giant stations had been unnecessary. “I admit that I am responsible for the adopting of long waves for long-distance communication,” he said in 1927. “Everyone followed me in building stations hundreds of times more powerful than would have been necessary had short waves been used. Now I have realized my mistake.”

Other scientists resolved the mysteries that had plagued Marconi through his early work. Oliver Heaviside, physicist and mathematician, proposed that a stratum existed in the atmosphere that caused wireless signals to bounce back to earth, and that this would account for why signals could travel very long distances over the horizon. Others confirmed its existence and dubbed it the Heaviside Layer. Scientists also confirmed that sunlight excited a region of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere, which accounted for the daytime distortion that had so plagued Marconi.

In 1933 the city of Chicago invited Marconi to attend its new world’s fair, the Century of Progress Exhibition, and declared October 2 to be Marconi Day. The climax of the day occurred when Marconi tapped three dots, the letter S, into the exhibition’s powerful transmitter, and stations in New York, London, Rome, Bombay, Manila, and Honolulu relayed it around the world, back to Chicago, in three minutes, twenty-five seconds.

As he aged, Marconi became aloof. At his London headquarters, Marconi House, he would only ride the elevator alone or with someone he knew, never with a stranger. He established a station to listen for signals from Mars and instructed its operators, “Listen for a regularly repeated signal.” In 1923 he joined the Fascist Party and became a friend of Mussolini, though as time passed he became disenchanted with the increasing bellicosity of the Fascists and Nazis. He loathed Hitler.

On the afternoon of July 19, 1937, Marconi experienced a severe heart attack. At three the next morning he rang for his valet. “I am very sorry, but I am going to put you and my friends to considerable trouble. I fear my end is near. Will you please inform my wife?” Forty-five minutes later he was dead. The first outsider to arrive was Mussolini, who prayed at his bedside. Radio listeners around the world heard the news, which darkened an already bleak day in which the U.S. Navy announced that it had ended its search for Amelia Earhart.

That night the gloom lifted a bit, at least for those listeners who gathered around their radios and tuned in to NBC for the regularly scheduled antics of Amos n’ Andy.

THROUGHOUT THE DAY of July 21, 1937, Marconi’s body lay in state in the Farnesina Palace in Rome. The day was hot, the air heavy with the old-water scent of the nearby Tiber. A crowd numbering in the thousands blackened the square in front of the palace and filled the surrounding streets like spilled ink.

Beatrice came alone and uninvited. Even her children—their children—were not told of the funeral plans. She came incognito. She was now fifty-two and as beautiful as always. When her turn came, she moved to the bier where he lay exposed.

Once she and this man had been lovers. So much history lay between them, and now she was not even recognized, a ghost. Ten years had passed since the final humiliation of the annulment, and in that time he had seemed to abandon even the memory of her and the children.

She moved closer to the bier, and suddenly the distance that had accumulated between them shrank to nothing. She was overwhelmed and fell to her knees. Mourners passed behind her, the vanguard of a line that stretched seemingly across Rome.

At length she stood, confident that she had remained anonymous. “I was unobserved,” she wrote to Degna. “No one could have recognized me.”

She exited the palace into the extraordinary heat of the afternoon and disappeared among the thousands still waiting to enter.

At six o’clock that evening, when his funeral began, wireless operators around the globe halted telegraphy for two minutes. For possibly the last time in human history, the “great hush” again prevailed.