Thunderstruck (20 page)

This being the age of hired help, the station had a cook and employed two Wellfleet women who came each day to clean. They wore maid’s caps and aprons. One of the women was Mable Tubman, daughter of a prominent Wellfleet resident, who caught the attention of one of Marconi’s men, Carl Taylor. A photograph from the time shows Carl and Mable seated on the beach on a day bright with sun. What makes this photograph unusual is that it captures people actually having fun. Mable is wearing her apron and maid’s cap and is turned away from the camera, watching the sea. Carl is wearing a light-colored suit and looks into the camera, a huge grin running from one earlobe to the other. He also is wearing a maid’s cap.

T
HOUGH DEEPLY DISTRACTED
by the work under way on both sides of the Atlantic and by myriad other developments, Marconi apparently believed that things were sufficiently under control that he and Josephine Holman could at last announce their engagement—though the major pressure to do so likely came not from him but from Josephine, who was growing increasingly concerned about just where she stood relative to his work. He still had not come to visit her family in Indianapolis.

Marconi’s mother, Annie, had concerns about her own status in Marconi’s life, now that he planned to marry. “To lose him to anyone, rich or poor, on his first flight from home was hard,” Degna Marconi wrote years later.

Marconi’s mother did her best to behave “self-effacingly,” but she felt aggrieved when Josephine failed to write to her, and she complained to Marconi. Soon afterwards a letter did arrive, which Annie described as “very kind and sweet.”

Now Annie wrote to Marconi, “I wish I had got this letter [from Josephine] before and I should not have said anything to you about her not writing. Now it is all right and I feel much happier and shall write to her soon.” She added an odd line to this letter: “Our friends here think it is only right I should be at your wedding”—as if there had been serious consideration that she would not be present.

Spring brought successes and trials. On May 21, 1901, Oliver Lodge won a U.S. patent for “electrical telegraphy,” and he and William Preece became de facto allies, more and more outspoken in their criticism of Marconi. Lodge also opened an attack on another front. He formed a new company with his friend Alexander Muirhead, the Lodge-Muirhead Syndicate, to begin selling Lodge’s technology.

And Marconi endured a very public failure. He had agreed again to provide coverage by wireless of the America’s Cup yacht races, now for the Associated Press, but this time he faced competition from two fledging American companies. The transmissions interfered with one another so much that Marconi could not send messages to his shore station for relay to the Associated Press—despite his claims to have perfected the technology for tuning transmissions to avoid interference. Afterward allegations arose that one of the competing companies had sought deliberately to create interference by transmitting exceptionally long dashes and, at one point, placing a weight on their transmission key and leaving it there, creating what one observer called “the longest dash ever sent by wireless.”

In another realm, however, Marconi made progress. On May 21, 1901, the first British ship equipped with wireless, the
Lake Champlain,
departed Liverpool on a transatlantic voyage. At the same time Marconi’s men also were installing his apparatus aboard Cunard’s
Lucania.
During the
Lake Champlain
’s return voyage its Marconi operator got a surprise—a message from the
Lucania
at midocean. To mariners resigned to the isolation of the sea, the feat seemed a miracle.

Only years later would anyone take note of how strange it was that the second officer of the
Lake Champlain
at this pioneering moment was a young sailor by the name of Henry Kendall.

W
ITH WARMER WEATHER
the work on Cape Cod proceeded quickly, though Vyvyan and Bottomley discovered that unlike Poldhu, where temperatures in summer remained cool, even cold, the cape often registered some of the hottest weather in New England, with temperatures in the nineties accompanied by wet-blanket humidity. At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity.

As each mast rose, Vyvyan’s concerns increased. Winds routinely blew at twenty to thirty miles an hour, sometimes more. By mid-June his workers had erected seventeen lower masts out of twenty. Fourteen of them now had top masts, and ten had a third stage, the top gallants. The plan called for each also to get a fourth stage, the royal masts, hair-raising work for the men who had to scale the masts and secure each portion to the next. A photograph shows these men, called riggers, at work—tiny figures alone at the tops of masts two hundred feet tall that swayed in even the slightest breeze.

By the end of the month the boiler house, generation equipment, and transmitter were in place and the circle of masts was complete. Photographs show a grove of two-hundred-foot masts linked and steadied with guy wires having all the substance of cobwebs draped on a candlestick.

Vyvyan tested the transmitter. At night the spark gap lit the sky with such intensity that it was visible and audible four miles down the beach. Up close it was deafening, like the crack of a starter pistol repeated over and over. An early employee, James Wilson, recalled, “If you opened the door and stepped out you had to hold your ears.”

At times the wires of the antenna shimmered a cold blue. To keep electricity from flowing through the guy wires and distorting the signal, the men installed “deadeyes” of a very hard wood called lignum vitae at intervals along each wire. Shipwrights used dead eyes as connectors in rigging, but Marconi’s men used them as insulators to break up potential paths for current. Still, current traveled to unexpected places. Through induction it charged drainpipes and stove flues. Even something as prosaic as hanging the wash became an electric experience. Mrs. Higgins, the station cook, reported feeling myriad electric shocks as she pinned clothing to the line.

August brought heat and fog, with Provincetown again recording the highest temperatures in New England, ninety-two degrees on August 12 and August 18, but storms were few and the winds reasonable, at no time exceeding thirty miles an hour. And yet, Vyvyan wrote, “In August, under the influence of nothing more than a stiff breeze, the heads of the masts on the windward side bent over to a dangerous degree.”

The triatic stays that linked the tops of the masts ensured that when one mast swayed, they all swayed.

M
ARCONI MAINTAINED SECRECY.
No one outside the company knew yet that he planned to try sending messages across the ocean. When an Admiralty official, G. C. Crowley, came to observe at Poldhu, Marconi enclosed the station’s receiver in a box, just as he had done for his earliest demonstrations. Marconi willingly discussed his results, Crowley wrote, but would not let anyone look inside. “We used to call it ‘the black box of Poldhu.’”

Marconi himself barely understood the nature of the phenomena he had marshaled, which made the process of preparing each station a matter of experiment. The huge cone-shaped aerial was the product of Marconi’s instinctive sense of how Hertzian waves behaved. No established theory determined its shape. Its height reflected Marconi’s conviction, partially confirmed by experimentation, that the distance a signal traveled varied in relation to the height of the antenna.

Beyond these assumptions lay an impossible array of other variables that likewise had to be resolved, any of which could affect overall performance. The subtlest of adjustments affected the nature and strength of the signal. Fleming, Marconi’s scientific advisor, found that something as simple as polishing the metal balls of the spark gap greatly improved signal clarity. It was like playing chess with pieces ungoverned by rules, where a pawn might prove to be a queen for one turn, a knight for the next.

To make matters more difficult, the thing Marconi was trying to harness was invisible, and no means yet existed for measuring it. No one could say for sure even how Hertzian waves traveled or through what medium. Like Fleming and Lodge and other established physicists, Marconi believed that electromagnetic waves traveled through the ether, even though no one had been able to prove that this mysterious medium even existed.

Marconi and Fleming tried everything they could to boost the power and efficiency of the transmitters at Poldhu and Wellfleet, at times with surprising effect. As power increased, the ambient current became harder and harder to manage. At Poldhu the gutters on nearby homes sparked, and blue lightning suffused the Cornish mists. On August 9, 1901, George Kemp in Poldhu wrote in his diary, “We had an electric phenomenon—it was like a terrific clap of thunder over the top of the masts when every stay sparked to earth in spite of the insulated breaks. This caused the horses to stampede and the men to leave the ten acre enclosure in great haste.”

The Poldhu station still was not finished when a period of extremely foul weather arrived and slowed things further. The masts were up, but high winds made it impossible for riggers to reach the mastheads. Squalls raked the cliff. On August 14, 1901, Kemp wrote, “The weather is still boisterous. The men could not work outside today.”

The squalls and winds continued without ease for a full month, forcing Kemp to send workers home.

Signs went up beside the condensers that boosted the station’s electrical power: “Caution. Very Dangerous. Stand Clear.” At night the eruption of sparks could be seen for miles along the coast, followed by the crack of artificial thunder. One witness would call the Poldhu station “the thunder factory.”

I
N LONDON THERE WAS
good news: Marconi’s negotiations with Colonel Hozier of Lloyd’s now yielded fruit. Hozier had given up trying to sell patents and technology to Marconi after realizing that the only aspect of the talks that interested him was the possibility of a contract with Lloyd’s itself.