An Ocean of Air (28 page)

Ten miles away, the
Californian
had hove to. Beset by ice, her captain had decided to wait until morning to continue. The lights of the
Titanic
were just visible in the distance, but nobody on board the
Californian
suspected any trouble. The ship's lone wireless operator had gone off duty at 11:30. He was already in bed.

Fifty-eight miles away, the
Carpathia
's wireless operator, Harold Cottam, had also decided to go to bed. He was partly undressed when he remembered something that the boys on the
Titanic
might like to know. There was a tight network among the Marconi operators. Many of them knew each other personally, and they would often chat among themselves, ship to ship, when work was slow. For such conversations, you'd scarcely even need the ship's call sign. After a while, recognizing someone's Morse touch was as easy as picking out a familiar voice in a crowd. You could tell from how quickly he pressed and released the key, from whether his touch was light or strong or hesitant, and sometimes just from little quirks that nobody else would spot. The boys had unofficial shorthands amongst themselves. You could tell someone who was being annoying GTH, "go to hell." And to sign off, you'd say GNOM, for "good night old man" (this in spite of the fact that they were all in their late teens or early twenties).

Cottam was a friend of both Phillips and Bride—in fact, he had recommended Bride for the job. Now he remembered that Cape Cod had some messages waiting for the
Titanic.
Perhaps he should let them know.

"I say, old man," he tapped out, "do you know there is a batch of messages waiting for you at Cape Cod?"

Cottam had been in his bunk room for the
Titanic
's first CQD, so he
had no idea there was any problem. He was stunned by Phillips's immediate reply to his query:

"Come at once. We have struck a berg."

"Shall I tell my captain?"

"It's a CQD old man. Position 41.46 N. 50.14 W. Come quick."

On the
Californians
bridge, apprentice James Gibson idly studied the distant lights of the
Titanic
through his field glasses. At one point, he thought she was signaling with her Morse lamp. He tried to reply, but then decided the lamp was only flickering. At 12:45, second officer Herbert Stone of the
Californian
saw a warning rocket explode over the
Titanic
in a sudden flash of white light. How odd, he thought, that a ship should be firing rockets at night. Nobody on the
Californian
thought any more of the
Titanic
's strange behavior. The traditional methods of ship-to-ship communication had proved useless. Sight, after all, was blind.

But Heaviside's electrical mirror in the sky had already done its job. Even though the
Carpathia
was far over the horizon from the
Titanic,
the waves carrying Phillips's message had leapt over the intervening mountain of sea, before bouncing back down to where the
Carpathia
's aerial crackled in response. Minutes after the
Carpathia
's captain was wakened with the news, he ordered her to be turned and all power diverted to the engines. Cottam wired his friends on board the
Titanic
to say they were speeding to the rescue. They were four hours away, he wrote, and "coming hard."

Bride ran to tell the captain the news. When he returned, Phillips was sending more detailed directions to the
Carpathia.
"Put your clothes on," Phillips commanded. Until then Bride had forgotten he was still in his pajamas. While Bride scrambled into his warmest clothes, an extra jacket, and boots, Phillips never left the telegraph. He was firing out CQDs every few minutes, responding to any ship that replied, though most were hopelessly far away. He even tried a few SOS's, since, as Bride pointed out, it might be their last chance to use the new code. Meanwhile, Bride draped an overcoat over Phillips and strapped one of the
Titanic
's distinctive white life belts to his back. They could both now feel the ship list forward. The water was up to the boat deck, and word came that the power would soon be gone.

At 1:45, the
Titanic
sent another message to the
Carpathia:
"Come as quickly as you can old man; engine room filling up to the boilers." That was the last message she received. A few minutes later, the captain appeared and formally released the two boys from their duties. From now on, he said, it's "every man for himself." The time was 2:00
A.M.,
and the lifeboats were all gone. Bride rushed to the bunk room to get his and Phillips's money. As he returned, he saw a stoker who had sneaked into the wireless room and was silently slipping the life belt off Phillips's back. Bride was filled with rage. He recalled, "I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die a decent sailor's death. I wished he might have stretched rope or walked a plank. I did my duty. I hope I finished him. I don't know. We left him on the cabin floor of the wireless room, and he was not moving."

The bandmembers had given up hope of escape and stayed heroically at their posts. They had switched from their insouciant ragtime music. As Bride ran to help some men struggling with a collapsible boat, which was lashed to the deck, he heard strains of the hymn "Autumn," as if for a prayer: "Hold me up in mighty waters, keep my eyes on things above." A wave took hold of the boat and washed it offshore. Bride found himself beneath it, shocked by the cold of the water, then somehow on top of it. The boat had overturned, and its occupants were now clinging to the waterlogged underside.

The night was eerily clear, brilliant with stars that reflected off the surrounding ice. There were no more sounds from the band. Also hanging from the upturned boat, seventeen-year-old passenger Jack Thayer was watching the ship with a horrible fascination:

She was pivoting on a point just aft of amidships. Her stern was gradually rising into the air, seemingly in no hurry, just slowly and deliberately ... Her deck was turned slightly towards us. We could see groups of almost fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it, rose into the sky, until it reached a sixty-five or seventy degree angle. Here it seemed to pause, and just hung, for what felt like minutes.

Then the lights went out. The ship's engineers had done their duty. They had stayed at their posts to feed electricity to the wireless set and power the waves that were spreading throughout the Atlantic, bearing Phillips's calls for help. Now every one of them was about to die.

The collapsible boat was so close to the ship that she was gradually being sucked back toward the great pivoting mass. Those who could crane their necks upward were aghast to see three huge propellers loom up over their heads. But then, the final intact bulkheads burst with a series of muffled thuds, and the
Titanic
slid gracefully and silently into the sea.

Jack Thayer heard nothing then but a single collective sigh. He recalled, "Probably a minute passed with almost dead silence and quiet. Then an individual call for help, from here, from here; gradually swelling into a composite volume of one long continuous wailing chant, from the fifteen hundred in the water all around us. It sounded like locusts on a midsummer night, in the woods of Pennsylvania."

For twenty, perhaps thirty minutes, these terrible cries continued, growing gradually fainter as, one after another, their owners succumbed to the cold. All the while, half-empty lifeboats stood off silently, only a few hundred yards away, their huddled occupants afraid to take anyone on board lest their boats be swamped.

The upturned collapsible boat was now little more than a raft, and yet those already clinging to its keel heaved up whoever else they could until the boat was so low in the water that there was no room for more. Now there were twenty-eight people on board, standing, sitting, lying, kneeling, crammed together any which way with no hope of shifting. Someone was kneeling on Thayer, holding his shoulders, and somebody else was on top of them both. Bride was lying full length, his feet crushed against the cork fender, which was under two feet of frigid water; someone else was sitting on his legs. For the next two hours they clung thus, the only cheer Bride's recurring reassurance: "The
Carpathia
is coming up as fast as she can," he told them again and again. "I gave her our position. There is no mistake. We should see her lights at about four or a little after." Though Bride couldn't see him in the darkness, Phillips, too, was crammed onto the boat. But he stayed strangely silent.

The
Carpathia
did come; her lights appeared as Bride had predicted, a little after four. All aboard the collapsible boat were saved, apart from one stiff figure who, it turned out, had already succumbed to hypothermia. In spite of Bride's best efforts to drape him with clothes, Phillips hadn't taken the time away from his messages to dress himself warmly enough for the Atlantic's frigid waters. He never had a chance.

Bride had to be carried aboard the
Carpathia,
his feet too crushed and frostbitten to bear him. Still, after a few hours in the ship's hospital, he joined Cottam in the wireless room, where he remained, sending passengers' messages of grief, until the ship reached New York.

He was still at his station, clicking away, even after the ship had docked, when the door opened and a voice said, "Hardly worth sending now boy." "But these poor people, they expect their messages to go," Bride replied. Then he turned and realized who was in front of him. A lowly ship's operator would never have met Mr. Marconi personally, but every wireless room bore his portrait. Bride looked up at the picture on the wall, and then across again to where Marconi was standing. Marconi extended his hand, and Bride shook it without a word. Then he tried to smile and failed. "You know Mr. Marconi, Phillips is dead," he said.

In all, more than fifteen hundred souls had perished. Marconi, who had arrived in New York just a few days earlier, was terribly shaken by the disaster. He had originally planned to travel on the
Titanic,
but he had been so far behind on his paperwork that he had changed his passage to the
Lusitania,
which had an extremely competent stenographer on board. Still, his wife, Bea, and two young children should have been on board the
Titanic,
to meet him in New York for a holiday. Instead, his son Giulio had fallen ill and his wife had cabled that she was postponing the trip.

Despite the enormous losses, 712 people had been saved, all through the combined power of wireless waves and their horizon-beating mirror in the sky. There were criticisms of Marconi, of course. Had he ordered his operators on board the
Carpathia
to withhold their news until he could sell their stories more effectively? Bride and Cottam did both sell their stories to the
New York Times
for what must have been colossal sums to them, amounting to three or four times their annual salaries. A later U.S. Senate
investigation reported: "Some things are dearer than life itself. The refusal of Phillips and Bride, the wireless operators, to desert their posts of duty even after water had mounted to the upper deck, is an example of faithfulness worthy of the highest praise." But Bride couldn't shake off the memory of that stoker he had killed, and he kept changing his story. He and Phillips had struggled with the man together. Then it was Phillips alone who had done the killing. Bride returned to England a hero, but shortly before the tenth anniversary of the disaster he disappeared to Scotland, changed his name, and became a traveling salesman. He had his own radio set still, and chatted occasionally over the airwaves to people who had no idea of his story.

But the fact remained that if Marconi's waves had not bounced their way over the curving ocean, nobody would ever have known the fate of the
Titanic,
and everyone on board would have been lost.

Now that the power of wireless had been amply demonstrated, everybody wanted one. Wireless stations sprang up around the world. Marconi made vast amounts of money and acquired all the fame he could ever have wanted. He even won the Nobel prize for his invention. However, in spite of Heaviside's prediction nobody, least of all Marconi, knew what had created that mirror in the sky.

***

The wireless world needed another physicist, someone who, like Oliver Heaviside, could understand the mysterious workings of Heinrich Hertz's rays. The person it got was measured, cool, precise, diligent, and utterly conventional, in fact everything that poor Heaviside was not.

Edward Victor Appleton ("Vic" to his family) was born in Bradford, in the north of England, in 1892. His family was working class. They lived in a typical grim neighborhood of back-to-back houses, dominated by the industrial outpourings of the local mill. But though Appleton's neighborhood was poor, it was also respectable. The curtains that shielded the windows were spotless. Even the stone steps that fronted these small houses were always meticulously scrubbed. Appleton's father, a warehouseman, wore a bowler hat every day instead of the plebeian flat cap of the mill
workers. And his neighbors were policemen, railwaymen, and postmen, who wore their uniforms as badges of their reputability.

Appleton was a golden boy. At the age of eleven he won a scholarship to a first-rate high school, where he excelled at everything he touched. He had a fine singing voice; he was captain of the football and cricket teams; he was handsome and popular, with grave gray eyes and wavy brown hair that the girls loved; he ranked top in just about every academic subject from literature to science; and he was the only pupil ever allowed a key to the physics laboratory, so he could continue his work there in the evenings. At age eighteen, he won another scholarship, this time to Cambridge University. To help set him up there, his parents cashed in an endowment policy, and his uncle gave him a present of five gold guineas.