Signor Marconi's Magic Box (35 page)

The crumbling old towers of Eaglehurst were generally out of bounds to the children, but on special occasions they were allowed to climb them and enjoy the fine view over Southampton Water, where the great liners were led by tugs into the open sea for the crossing to Cherbourg in northern France, the first leg of the voyage to New York. From the decks high above the water the passengers were close enough to wave to them in their turret. It was from here that Beatrice and Degna waved goodbye one morning in April 1912 to a great liner they would never see again.

O
ver the centuries of transatlantic voyages, thousands of ships had limped into port with their hulls bearing gaping holes inflicted by icebergs. Of those which sank in mid-Atlantic with all hands after hitting icebergs there is no record before the days of wireless telegraphy. How many of the wrecks which lie on the bed of the North Atlantic were sunk by icebergs can never be known.

Every winter, great tongues of ice spread out over the sea off the southern coast of Greenland, covering more than seven hundred thousand square miles with compressed frozen water to an average depth of five thousand feet. When the spring comes the immense icebergs break away with a thunderous crash, and float south and west towards the coast of Labrador. They are scattered by winds and tides and currents, drifting with their peaks above the waves, nine-tenths of their treacherous bulk submerged and melting below the surface. Icebergs present the greatest threat to shipping in April, May and June, and to reduce the risk of running into them it was customary for transatlantic liners to take a more southerly course in those months.

There was no telling what each spring would bring. Some years there were few bergs in April, while in others an early thaw and northerly winds would drive large floes into the path of the liners. A constant lookout was kept when ships sailed into the danger zone, and all experienced navigators knew that some bergs were
much harder to sight than others, especially at night, for they were not brilliant white but were darkened by the action of the sea as they melted. Sometimes they turned over, and the rocks and rubble embedded in them showed above the surface.

By the spring of 1912 all large passenger liners on the North Atlantic run were equipped with a wireless telegraphy cabin, the great majority of them manned by Marconi operators, and were able to warn each other of any danger from icebergs. Though the range of their transmitters was under two hundred miles, there were so many liners at sea at any time that wireless contact was almost always possible. The pursuit of Dr Crippen had demonstrated the way in which messages sent from ship to ship and passed on to shore stations which were linked by cable could keep everyone on the open sea in touch with each other and with the mainland. From 1906 the Marconi Company had been publishing charts which showed the date of departure of liners from European ports and their expected date of arrival in North America, criss-crossed with the departure and arrival times of ships sailing from west to east. The charts gave a rough idea of where any liner was likely to be in mid-ocean on a particular day.

Many of the young men who had taken courses at the Marconi training centres knew each other personally, and they would relieve the loneliness they sometimes experienced by chatting to each other in Morse code. They were at their keys for long hours, tapping out messages for first-class passengers, and when they did crawl into their cabins to snatch a few hours’ sleep their ship would be out of touch. Before turning in they would generally sign off in Morse ‘GNOM’ - Good night old man.

Competition between shipping companies on the North Atlantic route remained fierce in the early 1900s, and the White Star Line, a British company which had been bought up by the American magnate John Pierpont Morgan, decided to make its mark with three huge liners that would dwarf the competition. They were built in the shipyards of Belfast, their massive hulls held together by millions of rivets hammered into place by skilled boilermakers.
The first of these great ships, the
Olympic
, was launched in 1911. One of the most experienced White Star Line captains, Edward Smith, was in command on her maiden voyage, and almost immediately had trouble manoeuvring a ship larger than any he had handled before. In a collision with a British naval cruiser the
Olympic
lost part of one of her giant propellers. Emergency repairs to the
Olympic
delayed the maiden voyage of the second huge White Star liner, the
Titanic
, which had completed its trials in 1911.

The Marconi Company had the job of fitting both ships with wireless equipment, including a trusty ‘Maggie’ detector, housed in a handsome mahogany box, and an exceptionally powerful spark transmitter working off five kilowatts of power, giving it a much greater range than any other liner at sea except for the
Olympic
. This transmitter was run on the
Titanic
’s generator, but in an emergency it could be operated with batteries.

It was decided that the amount of traffic likely to be generated by the wealthy passengers in first class warranted two operators who would work in shifts. Jack Phillips, the senior operator, was twenty-six years old, and had already served on a number of liners as well as at the Clifden station. He had many friends among the Marconi operators, one of whom, Harold Cottam, had recommended the twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride as Phillips’s junior. Cottam had met him the year before when Bride went to a wireless office to enquire about the possibility of taking part in this exciting new line of work on transatlantic liners.

Harold Cottam had already signed on as the lone operator on a Cunard liner, the
Carpathia
. He was a year younger than Bride, but was a precocious operator - the youngest, at seventeen, ever to pass the examinations. Cottam was just one of a number of Marconi operators Phillips and Bride would know personally when they exchanged messages out on the Atlantic.

As an experienced operator, Phillips could tap out thirty-nine words a minute, whereas Bride’s speed was only twenty-six. They agreed to divide up their shifts so that Phillips worked from 8 p.m.
until 2 a.m., and Bride from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m., the quieter time. During the day they would share the work as it came in. Their sleeping quarters were next to the wireless cabin or ‘shack’. They could nip out on deck for a smoke, but there would be little time for relaxation.

At least they could share the workload. Harold Cottam on the
Carpathia
, like most other operators, had to grab some sleep when he could, leaving his cabin unattended. When Phillips and Bride were in range they would chat to Cottam if they had time. If the wireless traffic was heavy, operators could be very abrupt in their responses to idle enquiries. Three ‘D’s - ‘dah-di-dit, dah-di-dit, dah-di-dit’ - meant ‘Shut up!’ More forceful was ‘dah-dah-dit, dah, di-di-di-dit’, which spelled out ‘GTH’ - ‘Go to hell.’ Each ship had its own call-sign, so that operators knew instantly who was sending signals or trying to contact them. The
Titanic
’s was ‘MGY’: ‘dah-dah, dah-dah-dit, dah-di-dah-dah’.

The
Titanic
was the most up-to-date ship afloat, offering electric lighting and heating in the first-class cabins - a luxury for many of even the wealthiest passengers. Everything was worked by electricity: the lifts, the kitchens, the refrigerators (another novelty for European travellers), all kinds of ventilation fans and the loading cranes. There was even an electrically operated ‘camel’ for toning up in the gymnasium. This was just the kind of fabulous floating fantasy world that Marconi enjoyed, and he was naturally invited by the White Star Line to sail as an honoured guest on the five-day maiden voyage across the Atlantic. Beatrice, Degna and Giulio were also booked on the
Titanic
, and looked forward to spending some time in New York while Marconi himself continued his company’s demolition of its American opposition.

When the
Titanic
’s maiden voyage was delayed by the emergency repairs to the
Olympic
, Marconi had to cancel. After his spell with the Italian navy in the Mediterranean he was urgently needed by his American company, and he sailed on the
Lusitania
at the first opportunity. Then young Giulio fell ill early in April, and Bea decided to stay with the children at Eaglehurst. Sad and
disappointed, she held Degna’s hand tightly and waved from the turret of Eaglehurst to the hundreds of lucky passengers who leaned on the rail of the upper decks of the
Titanic
as the great liner eased out of Southampton Water on 10 April 1912.

L
ate on the night of 14 April, Jack Phillips was at the Morse key in the
Titanic
’s wireless cabin. Harold Bride was fast asleep next door. They had had a miserable day: their equipment had broken down late the previous evening, and it had taken them seven hours to find the electrical fault and put it right. All the while, inconsequential messages paid for by the first-class passengers had piled up. There had been one or two reports from other ships as well, several warning of icebergs ahead, and these had been delivered to Captain Edward Smith. As arranged, Harold had been at the key from two o’clock that afternoon. Jack had been due to relieve him at eight, but sending messages continuously was strenuous work, and Jack could see that his young assistant was exhausted, so he took over at 7.30 and told Harold to get some sleep. For nearly four and a half hours Jack had been hammering away at the Morse key as the
Titanic
cruised at twenty-two knots through a sea which was miraculously calm for the North Atlantic. There was not even a swell.

At around midnight Harold woke up and shuffled into the wireless cabin in his pyjamas. His next shift did not begin for two hours, but he wanted to return the favour Jack had done him earlier, and offered to take over. Despite the reports of a large amount of ice in the sea, neither had any concern for the safety of the ship. There was nothing unusual about such warnings, and it
was up to the captain to take whatever action he thought necessary. He might slow down or take a more southerly course, or, as many experienced captains did, keep straight on ahead but order a sharp lookout. At more or less the same time as Harold Bride was trying to persuade Jack Phillips to hand over the Morse key, their mutual friend Harold Cottam was getting ready for bed on the
Carpathia
, which was fifty-eight miles to the south-east of the
Titanic
, cruising at a sedate fourteen knots and heading clear of any iceberg danger.

Cottam had crossed the Atlantic before the
Titanic
left Southampton, and was now on his way back from New York to the Mediterranean. As a lone operator, he worked long hours: the previous night he had not got to bed until 3 a.m. Just before midnight on 14 April he listened in to Jack firing off his thirty-nine words a minute on the
Titanic
. Most of the messages were going to Cape Race, Newfoundland, where two Marconi stations had been built since the Anglo-American Cable Company’s monopoly had expired. Cottam heard Jack sending off instructions for a dinner party in New York at which all kinds of luxuries were to be served.

The range of Cottam’s transmitter was only about 150 miles, but he could still call up Cape Cod, from where he learned that a backlog of messages for the
Titanic
was piling up. In a comradely gesture he took down five or six of these, with the idea of passing them on to Jack when he was less busy. He then took off his headphones, slipped off his shoes and hung up his coat. Before shutting down he thought he would have a last listen-in to Jack, and perhaps send him a ‘GNOM’ - Good night old man. He could hear nothing from the
Titanic
, so he tapped out: ‘I say, old man, do you know there is a batch of messages waiting for you at Cape Cod?’

Jack’s transmissions had been silenced by the arrival in the wireless cabin of Captain Smith. As Harold Bride stood there in his pyjamas and Jack was wondering why the ship’s engines had been stopped, the captain told them to stand by to send a message. They had hit an iceberg, and he was going to assess the damage. Neither Jack nor Harold had felt any impact, and they believed there was
no cause for alarm. So did Captain Smith, until carpenters and others came running from the bowels of the ship to tell him that water was pouring in, and the engine room was flooding.

The
Titanic
’s designer, Thomas Andrews, was in a stateroom, noting in his meticulous way small improvements that could be made to this near-perfect liner. He went with the captain to view the damage, and realised straight away, as only the ship’s designer could, that the punctures inflicted in the hull by a glancing blow from the iceberg were fatal. He said the ship would go down within two hours, and there was no way to save it.

Captain Smith went straight back to the wireless cabin and ordered Jack to send the distress signal. As a loyal Marconi operator he sent out a ‘CQD’, rather than the ‘SOS’ which had long been established as the official international distress call. The message was picked up more or less instantaneously by the station at Cape Race and ships nearby, though not by the nearest liner, the
Californian
, whose lone Marconi operator had already gone to bed. Harold Cottam on the
Carpathia
missed it too. But when he put his headphones back on to try to raise Phillips again with the news about the unanswered Cape Cod messages, he got a reply instantly. ‘Come at once. We are sinking.’ Cottam could not believe his ears. He replied: ‘What’s wrong? Should I tell my captain?’ Jack’s retort stunned him: ‘Yes. It’s a CQD, old man. We have hit a berg and we are sinking.’ Jack gave an estimate of the
Titanic
’s longitude and latitude.

Henry Rostron, the forty-three-year-old captain of the
Carpathia
, whose crew had given him the affectionate nickname ‘the Electric Spark’, lived up to his reputation when he was woken in his cabin at 12.35 a.m. The
Carpathia
was immediately turned about and set on a course for the position given to Cottam by Jack Phillips, who was sending Morse distress signals continuously. Captain Rostron told Cottam to send a message to the
Titanic
that they were coming as quickly as possible, and would probably take four hours to arrive on the scene. He then called in his senior officers and told them to prepare the ship for the rescue. The chief
engineer was ordered to cut the heating and to reserve all power for the engines, which were pushed to their limit, driving the
Carpathia
along at seventeen knots. The iron hull shuddered and the furnaces blazed down below. Three doctors aboard were detailed to take responsibility for the
Titanic
’s first-class, second-class and steerage passengers. Hot drinks were prepared, saloons converted into recovery rooms, and lifeboats got ready as the
Carpathia
ploughed through the night, keeping a constant watch for icebergs. They were soon amongst them, but Captain Rostron kept as near to his maximum speed as he dared, taking a zig-zag course as warnings were shouted to the bridge.