Thunderstruck (13 page)

Now Marconi himself wrote to Lodge and, in an apparent attempt to advance the courtship by demonstrating his own rising prominence, included an intriguing return address:

R
OYAL
Y
ACHT
O
SBORNE
C
OWES
I
SLE OF
W
IGHT

A
NYONE WHO COULD READ
a newspaper knew that at that moment Edward, the Prince of Wales, was aboard the royal yacht recuperating from injuries to his leg caused when he fell down a staircase during a ball in Paris. His mother, Queen Victoria, would have preferred that he spend this time at the royal estate, Osborne House, where she herself was staying, but Edward preferred the yacht, and a little distance. The vessel was moored about two miles away in the Solent, the channel between the Isle of Wight and the mainland. In any preceding age this distance would have assured Edward as much privacy as he wished, but his mother had read about Marconi and now asked him to establish a wireless link between the house and the
Osborne.

Ever mindful of opportunities to draw the attention of the press, Marconi agreed. At his direction workers extended the
Osborne
’s mast and ran wire along its length to produce an antenna with a height above deck of eighty-three feet. He installed a transmitter whose spark flushed the sending cabin with light and caused a burst of miniature thunder that required him to fill his ears with cotton. On the grounds of Osborne House at an outbuilding called Ladywood Cottage, Marconi guided construction of another mast, this one reaching one hundred feet.

At one point, while adjusting his equipment, Marconi sought to cut through the Osborne House gardens, at a time when the queen herself was there in her wheeled chair. The queen valued her privacy and commanded her staff to guard against uninvited intrusion. A gardener stopped Marconi and told him to “go back and around.”

Marconi, by now all of twenty-four years old, refused and told the gardener he would walk through the garden or abandon the project. He turned and went back to his hotel.

An attendant reported Marconi’s response to the queen. In her mild but imperious way she said, “Get another electrician.”

“Alas, Your Majesty,” the attendant said, “England has no Marconi.”

The queen considered this, then dispatched a royal carriage to Marconi’s hotel to retrieve him. They met and talked. She was seventy-nine years old, he was barely out of boyhood, but he spoke with the confidence of a Lord Salisbury, and she was charmed. She praised his work and wished him well.

Soon the queen and Edward were in routine communication via wireless. Over the next two weeks Queen Victoria, Edward, and his doctor, Sir James Reid, traded 150 messages, the nature of which demonstrated yet again that no matter how innovative the means of communication, men and women will find a way to make the messages sent as tedious as possible.

August 4, 1898. Sir James to Victoria:

“H.R.H. the Prince of Wales has passed another excellent night, and is in very good spirits and health. The knee is most satisfactory.”

August 5, 1898. Sir James to Victoria:

“H.R.H. the Prince of Wales has passed another excellent night, and the knee is in good condition.”

There was this heated exchange, from a woman aboard the
Osborne
to another at the house, “Could you come to tea with us some day?”

A reply came rocketing back through the ether, “Very sorry cannot come to tea.”

T
HIS NEW TECHNOLOGY
intrigued Edward, and he was delighted to have Marconi aboard. By way of thanks he gave Marconi a royal tie pin.

While on the yacht, Marconi wrote to Lodge about his success in establishing communication between the queen and her son. “I am glad to say that everything has gone off first rate from the very start, having sent thousands of words both ways without having had once to repeat a word.” He noted that although the distance was less than two miles, the two locations were “out of sight of each other, a hill intervening between.”

He closed, “I am in great haste,” and underlined his signature with a bold black slash of his pen, something he would do forever after.

I
N THE MIDST OF COURTING
Lodge, Marconi’s company experienced its first fatality, though the death had nothing to do with wireless itself.

One of Marconi’s men, Edward Glanville, traveled to remote Rathlin Island, seven miles off the coast of Northern Ireland, to help conduct an experiment for Lloyd’s of London, for which he was to help install wireless transmitters and receivers on Rathlin and on the mainland at Ballycastle, for use in reporting the passage of ships to Lloyd’s central office in London. A tempestuous stretch of sea separated Rathlin and Ballycastle and up until now had made communication problematic.

In Ballycastle, where George Kemp managed the mainland portion of the work, the apparatus was placed in a child’s bedroom in “a lady’s house on the cliff,” and the wires to the antenna were run out the child’s window. If all went well, messages from Rathlin would be transmitted to Ballycastle by wireless, regardless of fog and storms, and relayed from there by conventional telegraph to Lloyd’s.

One day Glanville disappeared. Searchers found his body at the base of a three-hundred-foot cliff.

Ever since joining Marconi, George Kemp had found himself called upon to perform diverse duties, but none so sad as now. On August 22, 1898, Kemp wrote in his diary, “I wired to London and arranged for the despatch of a coffin and the arrival of the coroner and steamer and, at 6
P
.
M
. I went to Rathlin and examined the body with a doctor. I washed the body and placed it in the coffin. An inquest was held and the coroner returned ‘death by accident.’ It appeared that the people on the Island had often seen him climbing over the cliffs with a hammer with which he examined the various strata of the earth, and this was no doubt the cause of the accident.”

Glanville’s death briefly derailed the ongoing conversation between the Marconi company and Lodge, but now the courtship renewed. Lodge resisted, and declined even to give Marconi a demonstration of his technology.

Marconi grew impatient. On November 2, 1898, he wrote, “I sincerely hope you will be able to make us this exhibition or in some way arrange that we may work together rather than in opposition, which I am certain would be to the disadvantage of us both.” In the meantime, he added, “It might…facilitate matters if you would kindly let us have an answer to the following questions.” He then asked Lodge how many of his transmitters could operate in a given area without interference, what distance he so far had achieved, and what distance might be possible in the future.

Here again Marconi demonstrated his social obtuseness. He was asking Lodge to reveal his technology, yet just a couple of weeks earlier he himself had refused to do likewise for Lodge, stating: “I much regret that commercial considerations prevent me (at least at present) from mutually communicating the results we are obtaining.”

This was exactly the wrong thing to say to Lodge, for whom the intrusion of commerce into science was so distasteful, but Marconi appeared not to register his antipathy.

In the same letter Marconi blithely asked Lodge if he would serve as one of the two sponsors required for his application to become a member of Britain’s prestigious Institution of Electrical Engineers.

Lodge refused.

A
NOTHER ENEMY NOW RAISED
its standard—weather. Marconi saw that wireless likely would have its greatest value at sea, where it might end at last the isolation of ships, but achieving this goal required conducting experiments on the ocean and along coasts exposed to some of the most hostile weather the world had to offer. The more ambitious the experiment, the more weather became a factor, as proved the case at the end of 1898 when Trinity House, keeper of all lighthouses and lightships in Britain, agreed to let Marconi conduct tests involving the East Goodwin lightship, the same ship where William Preece’s induction experiments had failed—a fact that could not have escaped Preece’s increasingly jaundiced attention.

Marconi dispatched George Kemp to the ship to direct the installation of an antenna, transmitter, and receiver. Kemp chronicled the subsequent ordeal in his diary.

At nine
A
.
M
. on December 17, 1898, Kemp set out by boat from the beach at the village of Deal, notorious in the history of shipwreck both for the number of corpses routinely washed ashore after ships foundered on the Goodwin Sands and for the vocation of certain past residents who, as once chronicled by Daniel Defoe, had seen each new wreck as an opportunity for personal enrichment. Kemp’s boat took three and a half hours to reach the lightship, which was moored at sea at a point roughly twelve miles northeast of the South Foreland Lighthouse, near Dover, where Marconi had erected a shore station for the trials.

Kemp arrived to find the lightship “pitching and rolling” in heavy seas. Nonetheless, Kemp and the lightship crew managed to erect a twenty-five-foot extension to one of the ship’s tall masts, yielding an antenna that rose ninety feet above deck. “Beyond this,” he wrote in his diary, “very little work was done as everyone appeared to be seasick.” He left the lightship at four-thirty in the afternoon in an open boat, which he identified as a Life Boat Galley, and did not arrive at Deal until ten that night. He noted, with a good deal of understatement, “This was[a] rough experience in an open boat.”

He returned to the ship on December 19, this time to stay awhile. He brought provisions for one week and immediately went to work installing equipment and running wire through a hole in a skylight. In his diary he noted that waves were crashing over the lightship’s deck.

After a brief calm on December 21 and 22, the weather grew far worse. Late in the afternoon of December 23 “the wind increased and the Lightship began to toss about,” he wrote. By evening “it was almost unbearable.” He soldiered on and on Christmas Eve signaled greetings to Marconi, who was comfortably ensconced at South Foreland. That night Kemp volunteered to take watch over the ship’s beacon so the crew could celebrate, which they did “until the early hours of the morning.”