Signor Marconi's Magic Box (14 page)

 

In October that year the stocky, moustachioed figure of George Kemp could be seen working long hours around Mullion Cove. He was still supervising the building of the towers for the new
transmitter, ordering cement and arranging for rocks and gravel to be brought up from the beach to provide solid foundations. Almost the only break he got was when he attended the Sunday service at Gunwalloe church. Disturbing news had come from Marconi engineers in America, who had gone to New York to cover the latest America’s Cup series, expecting to have the wireless reporting field to themselves as they had the previous year, only to discover that they had a rival. A young American just a few months older than Marconi had put together a working wireless telegraphy system, and managed to find financial backing and a commission from the Publishers’ Press Association to cover the races.

Lee de Forest had written to Marconi a year earlier asking for employment, but had received no reply. In the meantime he and some friends had copied Fessenden’s barreter receiver and set themselves up in business on very little money. De Forest’s ambition was to challenge Marconi, and the America’s Cup was the ideal stage on which to demonstrate that the dapper Italian was not the only inventor who could send wireless messages from ship to shore. To the great embarrassment of Marconi’s engineers the two systems interfered with each other to such an extent that they had to agree with de Forest to transmit alternately at five-minute intervals.

On Monday, 4 November George Kemp went to Truro to look over some timber. When he returned to the Poldhu Hotel there was a telegram waiting for him which read: ‘Please hold yourself in readiness to accompany me to Newfoundland on 16th inst. If you desire holidays you can have them now. Marconi.’ The attempt to exchange signals with Cape Cod had finally been abandoned, and Marconi’s revised plan was now to be put into action. Newfoundland was five hundred miles nearer to Poldhu than Cape Cod, and there was a better chance that it would be in range of the Poldhu station’s new aerial. Kemp took the news that he was to pack his bags for Newfoundland in his stride. The following day he took the train to London, and then to Chelmsford to buy equipment: kites, balloons, hydrogen gas and iron filings, and sulphuric acid for making more Leyden jar batteries if necessary,
receiving instruments and aerial wire. He paid a brief visit to his home in London, and was able to give his four children a treat when he took them to the Marconi office in Finch Lane, where they had a fine view of the procession of the Lord Mayor’s Show. After four days Kemp joined Marconi and another Marconi company engineer, Percy Paget, in Liverpool, from where they would sail on 26 November.

S
t John’s, the chief town of Newfoundland, was wild, isolated and backward. Goats wandered about at will, and children would milk them where they found them. Women collected water in wooden buckets, and men rolled barrels of port down the muddy lanes. There was just one paved street covered in rough cobblestones, the harbour was crammed with schooners, and the whole place reeked of salt cod hung out to dry. Newfoundland had remained a British colony when the Dominion of Canada was created in 1867. Neither Marconi nor Paget had visited this remote outpost of the British Empire before, but George Kemp had seen St John’s ablaze a few years earlier, in 1892, when he was in the navy. His ship had gone to the rescue from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the sailors had helped get the fire under control.

On the evening of 26 November, Marconi, Kemp and Paget boarded the SS
Sardinian
at Liverpool. This was an old ship belonging to the Canadian Allan Line, not one of the floating palaces that had previously taken Marconi across the Atlantic. The Allan Line’s main business was carrying immigrants from Europe to Canada, and the passenger lists for the years up to 1901 show many sad cargoes of orphans, waifs and strays shipped by various charities to a new and often harsh life.

Just before the
Sardinian
sailed, the captain handed Marconi a telegram telling him that the Cape Cod wireless aerial had collapsed.
One of the masts had narrowly missed Richard Vyvyan, and another had crashed into the instrument building. A few weeks earlier this news would have been disastrous, but now it made no difference to Marconi’s plans. When the original Poldhu aerial had blown down he had given up on Cape Cod for the time being. He had got the North American maps out once again, and looked for the nearest piece of shore to Poldhu. This pointed him to exactly the same spot where the first successful submarine cable across the Atlantic had been completed in 1866, laid by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s monster iron ship the
Great Eastern
between the west of Ireland and Newfoundland. It had taken twelve years from the founding of the Anglo-American Cable Company in London in 1854 for the venture to succeed. The
Sardinian
’s course took it at a sedate pace along the same route as the cable-laying ship.

The weather was fine for the first two days, and Marconi and his party could walk on the deck, which was almost deserted as there were few other passengers sailing first class at this time of year. Then, towards the evening on 29 November, the
Sardinian
began to pitch and roll, and the following day they had to shelter, shivering, in the deckhouse as waves broke over the bows and stern of the ship. It was not until 6 December that they saw the harbour of St John’s. A thick frost covered the decks and lifeboats of the
Sardinian
. To the north they could see icebergs, and to the south the spouting of whales.

Icebergs were a constant hazard to shipping in these waters. As early as September 1899 a Canadian electrical engineer had written to the editor of the
Halifax Herald
in Nova Scotia, pointing out that with wireless telegraphy ships could send each other details of the latitude and longitude of ice floes; they would also be able to contact the lighthouses that had been built all along that coast. Wireless was regarded as a potential saviour, and Marconi was treated as a celebrity, dining at the Governor’s house in St John’s. On Sunday, 8 December the devout George Kemp was given a seat in the Governor’s pew in St John’s Cathedral. He recalled helping to save the blazing building a few years earlier.

In bitter weather, Marconi went in search of a site to raise his aerials and set up his equipment. He chose Signal Hill, where an abandoned military hospital provided shelter and a place to store the kites and balloons. The
Halifax Herald
sent a reporter to watch the wireless wizard at work.

Marconi told nobody what he, Kemp and Paget were really up to, in case he failed to receive a signal from Poldhu. All three
maintained an air of cool, workmanlike detachment, though a long time later Marconi admitted to an interviewer: ‘The mere memory of it makes me shudder. It may seem a simple story to the world, but to me it was a question of the life and death of my future.’ On 10 December the
Halifax Herald
reporter looked on as Kemp and Paget wrestled with a gas-filled balloon, to which an aerial wire running out of a window in the old fever hospital was attached. The balloon was tethered to the ground by several ropes, but the wind tore it free, and it sailed out of sight across the sea. ‘The accident is not uncommon,’ the reporter wrote, ‘and caused little annoyance.’ In reality Marconi and his men were desperate.

All the while, 1800 miles away at Poldhu, at 6.30 a.m. and then again three hours later, sparks a foot long and thick as a man’s wrist were being generated in sequences of three short bursts. The ground shook each time the transmitter fired the dots of the letter ‘S’ in Morse code. At Signal Hill, Marconi, unsure of what wavelength the signal would be on, adjusted his receiver. All that he could hear on his headphones was a wild static picked up by the aerial whenever Kemp, Paget and some local helpers managed to hold a balloon or kite aloft at the appointed times.

On the afternoon of 11 December, while Kemp was wrestling with a hydrogen-filled balloon, he very nearly disappeared into the ether himself. A sudden gust of wind carried off one of the mooring lines, which flew out to sea ‘like a shot out of a gun’. Had it been the line Kemp was hanging onto, he would have gone with it. Failure was staring Marconi in the face. His only consolation was that at least he had kept his ambition secret, so the world would not take him for a fool.

Certainly, had Professor Oliver Lodge known what Marconi was up to at Signal Hill, waving man-lifting kites and balloons around in an Arctic gale, he might have dismissed him as a crank. Lodge firmly believed that wireless waves could not cross the Atlantic. However, he was also convinced that it was possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. In 1901 Lodge spent more time investigating the powers of spiritualism than the potential of his
coherer and wireless telegraphy. Scientists believed at the time in the existence of ether, the intangible but magical substance whose remarkable properties were only just being revealed. Whereas the pragmatic Marconi did not care how the ether might spirit a wireless signal across the Atlantic, and ignored scientific theory, Oliver Lodge was content in his certainty that Hertzian waves had very limited scope; he found the possibilities of spiritualism much more exciting.

A
t the time Marconi was speculatively flying his balloons and kites above Signal Hill, hoping to hear three dots transmitted from Cornwall, a number of eminent scientists on both sides of the Atlantic were absorbed by research which they thought might bring conclusive proof that there was life after death. The invisible forces that were being revealed by the development of wireless seemed to provide some evidence that the claims of clairvoyants and mystics might, after all, have some foundation. Perhaps individuals with special powers really could act as ‘receivers’ of invisible and inaudible spiritual signals.

The study of the paranormal was not universally considered at that time to be scientifically disreputable. A ‘Society for Psychical Research’ had been founded in 1882 by two men who had met at Cambridge University, Edmund Gurney and Frederic Myers. Within two years the SPR, as it was known, had seven hundred members, including sixty academics, many of them from Cambridge, fifty clergymen, members of the armed forces, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, eight Fellows of the Royal Society, and scientists with an interest in electro-magnetism.

What was most exciting to the SPR towards the end of 1901 was the belief that one of its founders was attempting to keep in touch with them from beyond the grave. Earlier in the year Frederic Myers had died, and he now seemed to be engaged in a piece of
posthumous research of a kind which he could not have carried out when he was alive. Myers, a Professor of Classics, had invented the word ‘telepathy’ to describe the apparent ability of people to communicate without written or spoken words. In his book
Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
, posthumously published in 1903, he stated that experiments could be made ‘from the other side of the gulf, by the efforts of spirits who discern pathways and possibilities which for us are impenetrably dark’. Now psychic mediums in the United States, England, India and other countries were recording strange, incomprehensible texts. They were often taken down by ‘automatic writing’, where the hand of the medium appeared to be controlled by a spirit force. When the quotations recorded by the international band of spiritual telegraphists were read together they suddenly made sense, and appeared to be the work of the Classical scholar Frederic Myers. Most of the mediums were themselves ignorant of Classical literature, and could not have remembered or made up what they wrote or spoke. The phenomenon became known as ‘cross correspondence’, and intrigued the SPR for a number of years.

Professor Oliver Lodge had been a close friend of Myers, and for a while after his death had taken over as president of the SPR. Lodge’s interest in spiritualism was not purely scientific. It was a woman who had been responsible for encouraging him to pursue his scientific interests, just as it had been for William Preece and Guglielmo Marconi. In his case it was his Aunt Anne, a sister of his mother, a cultured and forceful woman who had persuaded the sixteen-year-old Oliver’s parents to let him stay with her in London. She took him to public lectures on scientific and religious matters, which were very popular in the 1860s. Without his aunt’s help it is unlikely that Lodge would have been able to break away from the family firm, which sold clay to the Staffordshire potteries, for his father did not regard ‘science’ as a profession. Aunt Anne had died of cancer, and had told Lodge that if she could she would ‘come back’.