Thunderstruck (16 page)

Anyone reading closely would have found several passengers identified in the masthead of editors, including Marconi’s assistant, Bradfield, as editor in chief and H. H. McClure as managing editor. But there was a third name as well, this one unfamiliar: J. B. Holman, treasurer.

As it happens, another momentous event had occurred during this crossing, albeit one of a rather more personal nature.

J
OSEPHINE
B
OWEN
H
OLMAN
was a young woman from Indianapolis—and from money. Though she lived now in New York with her mother, her roots lay in Woodruff Place, an enclave of some five hundred wealthy people incorporated as a distinct village within Indianapolis, occupying forested land once known locally as the Dark Woods.

Her hair was thick and dark, piled atop her head like a rich black turban. She had full lips and large eyes, and eyebrows that arced like gulls’ wings over a gaze that was frank and direct. Marconi, now twenty-five years old, had always been drawn to feminine beauty, and he was drawn now to her.

They dined and danced and, despite the cold of a mid-November crossing, took long walks around the first-class deck. He taught her Morse code. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. They kept their engagement a secret. When he disappeared into the wireless cabin for the last two days of the voyage, she was not troubled, though perhaps she should have been.

Once onshore, to evade discovery of the engagement by her mother, Holman inserted passages in her letters in Morse code.

B
UOYED BY LOVE
and by his success in signaling the Needles, Marconi prepared to reveal his idea to the company’s directors and ask approval to build the two gigantic stations. By summer he was ready.

The directors balked. They considered it too risky and too expensive, and they doubted that apparatus capable of generating and managing the required power could even be built—and if so, whether the resulting station would smother every other Marconi station with interference.

Marconi countered that success in the venture would assert the company’s dominance for once and for all. His confidence impressed the board, but so too did news from America that Nikola Tesla might be on the verge of attempting the same feat. In a much-read article in the June 1900 issue of
The Century Magazine,
Tesla alluded to things he had learned from experiments at his laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which he claimed could generate millions of volts of electricity, the equal of lightning. He wrote that in the course of his experiments he had found proof—“absolute certitude,” as he put it—that “communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable.”

The article prompted J. P. Morgan to invite Tesla to his home, where Tesla revealed his idea for a “world system” of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,” Tesla wrote in the
Century
article. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.”

That word:
television.
In 1900.

In July Marconi’s directors voted their approval.

The month provided another milestone as well. On July 4 Britain’s Admiralty agreed to have Marconi’s company supply and install wireless sets for twenty-six ships and six shore stations, at a cost of £3,200 pounds per installation—$350,000 today—with an additional annual royalty. The company would train the navy’s men in how to use the apparatus. It was Marconi’s first major order, but more important, it helped convince him and his directors of the need for a fundamental change in how the company operated.

As welcome as the contract was, providing first revenue just as Marconi’s greatest quest was about to begin, it embodied the threat that the Royal Navy might now use Marconi’s equipment to develop its own system, something it had the right to do under a British law that allowed the government to adopt any technology it wished, patented or not, in the interests of the empire’s defense.

The contract caused Marconi to rethink the company’s strategy for generating revenue through the manufacture and sale of apparatus to customers. As things stood, the post office monopoly barred the company from collecting fees for private telegrams sent by wireless and further blocked the automatic relay of telegrams from conventional land lines to Marconi’s wireless stations. Thus the only likely customers were government agencies, of which only a few could be expected to see a need for wireless.

A loophole in Britain’s telegraph laws suggested a possible new course. Instead of selling equipment, Marconi could provide customers with a wireless
service
that, if structured carefully, would skirt the postal monopoly. A shipping line, for example, would pay not for individual messages but for the rental of Marconi’s apparatus and operators, who would receive their salaries from Marconi and communicate only with Marconi stations. Marconi argued successfully that the law allowed such an arrangement because all messages would be intracompany communications from one node of the Marconi company to another.

This change in strategy suited Marconi’s personality. Ever since his days in the attic at the Villa Griffone, he had been worried about competitors. He saw this new approach as a means of erecting a bulwark against the competition. His new strategy included the requirement that any ship using his wireless service would communicate only with other ships likewise equipped, except in case of emergency. This meant that if a shipping line leased Marconi wireless for one vessel, it would have to do so for the rest of its fleet as well, if it wanted its ships to be able to communicate with one another. In theory the approach would also simplify things for shipowners, who would not have to pay for the construction and maintenance of their own networks of shore stations. Once fully equipped, a shipping line would be unlikely to switch to a competitor.

The new strategy seemed sound in principle, but now the question became, Would the change at last dispel the still-widespread reluctance to embrace wireless? Would customers come?

It seemed even more imperative now for Marconi to do something big to assert his dominance of the field and to publicize his technological prowess. If successful, the transatlantic bid would achieve both goals, as well as serve a third, more concrete purpose: It would demonstrate that his wireless could reach not only ships traveling near the coast but also liners far out in the deepest blue.

If
successful. Marconi’s certainty aside, the company was taking a grave gamble, betting its future and Marconi’s reputation on a single experiment whose success nearly every established physicist believed to be impossible.

L
ATE THAT SUMMER
Marconi and Flood Page and a recently hired engineer named Richard Vyvyan set out for Cornwall to search for a suitable location for the station that would serve as the English node of Marconi’s transatlantic experiment. After tramping the coast, through fog and along paths that crossed mounds of heather and gorse and wildflowers, they settled on land atop Angrouse Cliff, near the village of Poldhu and adjacent to the large and comfortable Poldhu Hotel. Marconi did not mind remote locations, provided that a source of fine food and wine lay near at hand.

The first construction on the cliff began soon afterward, in October, directed by Vyvyan. Marconi planned the antenna; Fleming worked out details about how to amplify power to provide a spark intense enough to create waves capable of jumping the Atlantic, and how to do so safely, for with so much voltage coursing through the system even the act of keying a message could prove lethal. No ordinary Morse key could handle the power. This key would be a lever requiring muscle to operate, and courage as well, especially when sending Morse dashes—which required longer pulses of energy and increased the threat that uncontrolled sparks, or arcs, would be unleashed.

The extreme power of the station raised anew the board’s concern about how its signals would affect transmissions from other, smaller wireless stations. Marconi by now had devised a means of tuning transmissions, for which he had received British patent no. 7777, often referred to as his “four sevens” patent. But the technology was fallible, as Fleming and Marconi well knew. In fact, they were sufficiently concerned that Marconi ordered George Kemp to build a second, far smaller station six miles away on a stretch of coast known as the Lizard, to gauge whatever interference might occur and to provide a receiver for trial messages once the new station began operation. Here Kemp directed the construction of an antenna consisting of three ships’ masts secured end to end and stayed against the wind, rising to a height of 161 feet.

No reader of
The Times
would have guessed Fleming’s concern, however, from reading his latest letter to the editor, published October 4, 1900, in which he praised a recent series of experiments that he claimed demonstrated Marconi’s ability to tune transmissions to avoid interference. Interestingly, Fleming at no point identified himself in the letter as Marconi’s scientific adviser. He described how operators had sent messages simultaneously and how they had been captured on two receiving antennas “without delay or mistake.”

“But greater wonders followed,” Fleming wrote—at which point Oliver Lodge, reading
The Times
as he always did, must have spat his morning coffee onto the floor.

Fleming reported that the operators sent another round of simultaneous messages, one in English, one in French. This time both messages were received on a single antenna. Fleming gushed, “When it is realized that these visible dots and dashes are the results of trains of intermingled electric waves rushing with the speed of light across the intervening 30 miles, caught on one and the same short aerial wire and disentangled and sorted out automatically by the two machines into intelligible messages in different languages, the wonder of it all cannot but strike the mind.”

Anyone reading the letter closely, however, would have seen that it presented anything but an objective, verifiable account of the experiments and instead derived its credibility entirely from the fact that its author was the great Ambrose Fleming. In effect, Fleming once again was asking the audience to trust him.

This letter—its glowful praise, its failure to note that Fleming was a paid employee—would prove costly. Not immediately, however. For now it merely kindled the curiosity, and professional skepticism, of Nevil Maskelyne, the magician.