Thunderstruck (30 page)

N
EWS FROM
A
MERICA

Letter,

Sunday, March 20, 1910

To Clara and Paul Martinetti

Dear Clara and Paul,

Please forgive me for not running in during the week, but I have really been so upset by very bad news from Belle that I did not feel equal to talking about anything, and now I have had a cable saying she is so dangerously ill with double pleuropneumonia that I am considering if I had better not go over at once. I don’t want to worry you with my troubles, but I felt that I must explain why I had not been to see you. I will try and run in during the week and have a chat. Hope both of you are well, with love and good wishes.

Yours very sincerely,

Peter

Telegram,

Thursday, March 24, 1910

To Paul and Clara Martinetti

Belle died yesterday at 6 o’clock.

“D
AMN THE
S
UN
!”

O
N HIS WAY BACK TO
L
ONDON
, with a formal offer from Canada in hand, Marconi stopped off in New York and attended a January 13, 1902, banquet of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, where he was to be the guest of honor. Unknown to him, the affair nearly proved to be a disaster.

At first a number of prominent scientists declined to attend, expressing doubt as to whether Marconi really had sent signals across the Atlantic, but by the night of January 13 the institute’s leaders had managed to recruit a ballroom full of believers. They held an elaborate banquet. Black signs at three points in the room bore the names Marconi, Poldhu, and St. John’s, with strings of lamps hung between them. At intervals, the lamps flashed three dots. The menus were printed with ink made from Italian olive oil, and the soup for the evening was “Potage Electrolytique.” Bowls of sorbet emerged, decorated with telegraph poles and wireless masts.

Thomas Edison had been invited but could not attend. Instead he sent a telegram, which the master of ceremonies read aloud. Clearly Edison had changed his mind and now accepted Marconi’s claims. His telegram read, “I am sorry that I am prevented from attending your dinner tonight especially as I should like to pay my respects to Marconi, the young man who had the monumental audacity to attempt and succeed in jumping an electric wave clear across the Atlantic Ocean.”

Cheers and applause rose from the audience. For Marconi, it was a rare moment of adulation, but he understood that his achievement in Newfoundland, though striking, was only the beginning of a long struggle. What he did not recognize was the extent to which the applause masked a deep and pervasive skepticism toward him and his claims of success.

I
N
L
ONDON
A
MBROSE
Fleming sulked. After learning of remarks Marconi had made in Canada and at the banquet, he felt doubly hurt. He believed that he deserved a big share of the credit for Marconi’s success, yet when the great moment had arrived, he had been frozen out. In his own account of events, Fleming wrote that during Marconi’s celebratory lunch with the governor of Newfoundland, Marconi had “made no frank acknowledgement…of the names of those who had assisted him but spoke continuously of ‘my system’ and ‘my work.’” At the New York banquet, Fleming wrote, Marconi “pursued the same policy.”

Josephine Holman too grew disenchanted. If she had expected to be the center of Marconi’s attention during his stay in New York, she now found that she was mistaken. Marconi attended luncheons and dinners and kept busy in between by overseeing the installation of wireless aboard the SS
Philadelphia,
the ship that would take him and Kemp back home.

Josephine conceded defeat. On January 21, 1902, her mother, Mrs. H.B. Holman, issued an announcement to the press: Her daughter had asked Marconi to release her from the engagement, and Marconi had done so.

It made the front page of the
Indianapolis News
in an article just three paragraphs long under the headline, “
ENGAGEMENT IS BROKEN
.” The item offered few details.

Later, a
News
reporter managed to catch up with Marconi at the Hoffman House in New York and asked if he had anything more to say.

“No, except that I am sorry.”

The reporter asked, “Have your feelings in any way changed toward Miss Holman?”

“I don’t think I can answer that—just say simply, please, that I am sorry.”

The reporter probed further: “Had your experiments reached the point where you were at liberty to be married?”

“Well, hardly,” Marconi said, “but if other things had not occurred things might have been arranged.” He continued: “I have not one word of criticism to make on Miss Holman’s notion. She concluded, I suppose, that her future happiness did not rest in my keeping, and the letter of request followed. I had reason to believe that our relations were quite happy and mutual until lately, and it is only natural that I should feel a little depressed at the result.”

He added a tincture of mystery when he told another reporter that while delays in his work had indeed been a factor, “there was also a very delicate question involved.” He gave no further explanation.

Miss Holman said little but did tell one newspaper, “There have been disasters on both sides.” She was
not
referring to the collapse of the masts at Poldhu and South Wellfleet.

By the end of the day, Wednesday, January 22, 1902, as gossip about the breakup became the opening course at dinner tables in Indianapolis, New York, and London, both Marconi and Holman were at sea, Marconi aboard the
Philadelphia
bound for Southampton, Holman aboard the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse,
one of the few German liners afloat that was equipped with her ex-lover’s apparatus.

Holman sought escape to the Continent, hoping that travel would prove a salve for her broken heart; Marconi got back to work.

Loath to let a day pass without further experimentation, Marconi installed himself in the
Philadelphia
’s wireless cabin. As the liner approached the English coast, he made contact with Poldhu and set a new record for ship-to-shore communications: 150 miles.

Despite his failed romance, Marconi arrived in London feeling more confident than he had in a long time—a good thing, for he faced a year that would prove especially trying and raise a grave new threat from Germany.

I
N
L
ONDON
M
ARCONI
explained the details of the new Canadian arrangement to his board of directors. Much to the directors’ delight, Canada had agreed to pay for the construction of the Nova Scotia station. Less delightful was Marconi’s promise to provide transatlantic wireless service for 60 percent less than the rate charged by the cable companies, a maximum of ten cents a word. This was a bold commitment, given that all Marconi had sent thus far was a couple of dozen three-dot signals. Nonetheless, the board gave its approval.

Next Marconi addressed the annual meeting of his company’s shareholders and for the first time in public launched into a direct attack against William Preece and Oliver Lodge and their much-publicized harping about flaws in his system. A man more able to sense the subtler bounds of accepted scientific behavior might have omitted this attack or at least phrased it differently, with the kind of oblique but slashing wit at which British parliamentarians seemed so adept, but Marconi was about to cross a dangerous invisible line—especially in touching on that most sensitive of subjects, Lodge’s interest in ghosts.

First Marconi took on Preece. “Sir William Preece is, I believe, a gentleman with various claims to scientific distinction; but, whatever his attainments in other walks of science, I regret to say that the most careful examination reveals absolutely no testimonial to his competency for this most recent of his undertakings. Such knowledge of my work as he may possess is at least three years old—a very long period, I would remind you, in the brief history of my system…. Of the conditions under which the system is now worked Sir William Preece is, in fact, wholly ignorant.”

Now he addressed Lodge’s criticisms. “I regret to say that, distinguished as Dr. Lodge may be as a professor of physics or as a student of psychical phenomena, the same statement applies also in his case, so far as my present system or wireless telegraphy is concerned.”

Marconi declared that his tuning technology allowed him to send messages across the Atlantic “without interfering with, or, under ordinary conditions, being interfered with, by any ship working its own wireless installations.” He then challenged Preece and Lodge to attempt to interfere with his transmissions and even offered them the use of his own stations for the experiment.

His shareholders applauded, but to others outside the company, his remarks, published in the press, smacked of impudence and mockery.

The
Westminster Gazette
suggested that “Signor Marconi would have done better if he had spared his sneers at the capacity of the more important of his critics…. Bitter retorts and jeers at the intelligence of opponents are not the marks of the scientific spirit. There would seem to be no a priori reason why the student of psychic phenomena should not be permitted to express an opinion upon the future of wireless telegraphy.”

The
Electrical Times
condemned Marconi for speaking “with scarcely veiled contempt” of Lodge and Preece. “Had it not been for the scientific work of the former it is doubtful whether Mr. Marconi would have had any wireless telegraphy to boast about, while to the latter he is indebted for help and encouragement when he first came to England…. But, apart from that, the tone Mr. Marconi adopts is hardly decent in so young a man towards one so much his senior and of so high a standing in the engineering and scientific world.”

The journal further charged that if no one knew much about the current state of Marconi’s technology, it was Marconi’s own fault. “If Mr. Marconi would but describe his methods and apparatus openly and fully, as scientific men are accustomed to do, he would find no lack of sympathy and appreciation.”

Far from ending here, the battle was about to get a lot uglier.

T
WO DAYS LATER,
on Saturday, February 22, 1902, Marconi once again boarded the
Philadelphia.
The main purpose of this voyage was to return to Canada to close the agreement with the government, but he also saw an opportunity to counter the skepticism confronting his Newfoundland achievement. He installed a new and taller antenna on the
Philadelphia
to attempt to increase the range at which signals could be received from Poldhu, and invited the ship’s captain, A. R. Mills, to witness the tests. He abandoned the telephone receiver he had used in Newfoundland and attached his usual Morse inker, so that at least there would be a physical record of whatever signals came through.

Everyone by now accepted that Marconi’s system worked well over short distances, so the first messages exchanged with his shore stations caused little stir. It was on the morning of the second day, when the ship was precisely 464.5 miles from Poldhu, that things got interesting.