impossible — but in 1906 he set up a large transmitting station at Clifden in Connemara and a regular wireless telegraphy service began. By 1908 the messages sent from his apparatus were known as Marconigrams; in 1909 he received the Nobel Prize; in 1911 he launched the journal The Marconigraph, and in March 1912 the official offices of the Marconi International Marine Communication Company opened in London. Marconi was regarded as a hero, someone who had made the sea as solid and stable as a suburban street. Should anything go wrong on a voyage, the wireless system would come to the rescue. The year Marconi became a Nobel laureate, White Star’s Republic collided with another ship, was ripped to the water line and plunged into total darkness. Her Marconi operator succeeded in alerting a number of rescue vessels before directing the Baltic — the same ship whose ice warning the Titanic later received — to the wreck through thick fog. This was the first instance of wireless saving lives: Ismay had no reason to doubt that this could happen again.
But there was something unnerving as well as reassuring about Marconi’s invention. He had turned the solidity of the word into a fluttering, flying, melting thing which entered the material world as if through a rent in the mist. Marconigrams were born in transition, they belonged nowhere, they moved between realms. They were really no more stable than a butterfly being buffeted about on the current of a breeze. ‘When it has anything to say to you,’ wrote Filson Young, it ‘whispers in your ear in whining, insinuating confidence. And you must listen attentively and with a mind concentrated on your own business if you are to receive from it what concerns you, and reject what does not; for it is not always the loudest whisper that is the most important.’ The Burma, one of the ships to be contacted by the Titanic, did not hear her whisper until one hour and twenty-eight minutes after she had sunk. The Titanic’s last words, it seemed, had simply hung about the atmosphere before finally, posthumously, making themselves heard.
Incidents such as this led Marconi to become increasingly convinced that sounds never die but remain suspended on their threads, growing weaker by the minute until we can no longer hear them. With the right apparatus, he believed, it would be possible to catch in his net the sound of Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, written four centuries earlier, the giant Pantagruel realises that the air above their ship is filled with frozen words and ‘some of us… cupped our palms behind our ears’ to hear them, before plucking them in fistfuls and throwing them onto the deck where, ‘like sweets of many colours’, they melted away into sounds which no longer had a meaning: Hing, hing, hing, hing, hisse’, said the words as they dissolved; ’hickory, dickory, dock; brededing, bededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou bou. Ong, ong, ong, ong, ououououong; Gog, magog.’ The sailors were hearing the clashing, clanging, neighing and wailing of a battle long since fought; there must be an ‘inquiry’, Pantagruel suggests, ‘into whether this may be the very place where Words unfreeze’. Rabelais’s characters try to preserve these sounds in oil, to wrap them in straw and pickle them in jars, but when Marconi’s telegraph operators snatched their sounds from space and stamped them onto paper they were no more able than Pantagruel to ensure their readability.6
Ismay’s story buzzes with new technology: he receives telephone calls from Mrs Thayer, he communicates by telegraph with the White Star Line in New York, and Marconigrams flit across the sea, continually going astray. ‘Every message so far’, reported the Northern Echo thirty-six hours after the Titanic disaster, ‘has been by wireless, and has come from some steamship officer or land station officer who has picked up others emitted from the keyboard of the Carpathia, the Olympic, the Parisian, the Virginian, the Baltic, or the Californian, and intercepted in their mysterious passage through the air.’ Marconigrams were harbingers of information — ‘bald statements offact’, as Lightoller put it–but also carriers ofmisinformation; they seldom arrived on time, no one knew who sent them or to whom they were addressed, they could be intercepted by anyone or not read at all, and they seemed never to be in the right place. The origin of the Marconigrams which claimed that the Titanic was being towed to Halifax with all her passengers on board was never found, but they were probably the result of Chinese whispers, words in the ether gone awry. It was pure chance that the Carpathia had picked up the Titanic’s distress signal at all; the first message Ismay sent following the rescue, in which Franklin was told that the Titanic had sunk and that more information was on its way, did not arrive for two days and the further information promised would never be sent. Ismay’s later ‘Yamsi’ messages failed to answer Franklin’s urgent questions, and it was unclear anyway whether they had come from Ismay or from Lightoller, who told the US inquiry that while he should be held ‘responsible’ for their contents he had neither written nor delivered them. Four days after the sinking, New York’s White Star Line office reported, ‘Many messages have been sent to the Carpathia, but we could get no response to our inquiries. I have received absolutely no details of the actual loss of the vessel, and we know nothing about what has happened, except such scrappy information as has been contained in the few authentic wireless messages received and already made in public. I have had a code message from Mr Bruce Ismay, but it relates to business and throws no light whatever on the tragedy.’
The Titanic had either received, or intercepted, eighteen ice warnings during her final weekend, several of which never made their way out of the Operators’ Room. The Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, were employed by the Marconi Company and not the White Star Line; neither members of the crew nor under the command of Captain Smith, they were unknown figures on the ship, housed as they were in their own quarters where they divided their time between dispatching lucrative private messages (such as ‘Hello Boy. Dining with you tonight in spirit, heart with you always. Best love, Girl’, sent three hours before the Titanic foundered) and receiving navigational reports whose levels of importance they decided upon themselves. Ismay had said that the practice was to put them up in the chart room for the officers, but Marconigrams were lawless missives which carried the risk of never being read even if they did reach their destination. Asked by Senator Smith whether he had seen the ice reports on the board of the chart room, Lightoller said that he had not, ‘because I did not look’. As far as Captain Smith was concerned, he had been commanding ships for decades without the use of wireless technology; it was experience that counted, not Marconigrams. The trouble with Marconigrams, as Ismay learned to his cost, is that it was impossible to tell whether they were important or unimportant.
The message from the Baltic whispered to Ismay from a fork in the air, it had been hammered into solid form like the voice of a dead man being rapped out on a table-top. Marconi operators were spirit mediums and the words they transcribed were always already dissolving. The Marconigram was evidence of communication without presence; it proved the possibility of connecting with other worlds. It was a pure example of the kind of ‘contact’ that fascinated Mrs Thayer, and when Ismay saw her on the deck it was not the message but the medium he was showing her. He was flashing around his toy, as a man one hundred years later might demonstrate his new phone. What struck Ismay now, as that final afternoon was frozen for examination by the British inquiry, is that he had held the future in the palm of his hand; the Marconigram had been a psychic forewarning of the ship’s fate.
Sir Rufus Isaacs put the issue of the Marconigram aside for the moment to question Ismay on the speed of the ship. How fast was the Titanic going on her final day? I really have no absolute knowledge myself, replied Ismay, as to the number of revolutions. I believe she was going seventy-five on the Sunday. But really Mr Ismay, responded Isaacs with evident exasperation, if you will just search your recollection a little. Remember that this question of speed interested you very materially. You, as Managing Director of the Company, were interested in the speed of the vessel? Naturally, Ismay conceded. Our intention, he then said, had been if the weather was suitable on the Monday or Tuesday, to run the ship at her full speed of seventy-eight revolutions. With whom, wondered Isaacs, would you discuss this question of driving her at full speed on the Monday or Tuesday? Presumably, the court assumed, this decision would have been made in conversation with the Captain, but Ismay had insisted that he had not talked to the Captain at all during the voyage. The only man I spoke to in regard to it, he said, was the Chief Engineer in my room when the ship was in (Queenstown. Will you explain that? asked Isaacs. It is not quite clear why you should discuss the question in Queenstown? The Titanic had stopped
