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.
ANOTHER 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.”
On Christmas Day, after Kemp and crew “managed to get over our Christmas dinner,” a gale arose and the ship began to rise and plunge. Moored to the sea floor, it could not maneuver the way an ordinary ship could. “It was very miserable onboard,” Kemp wrote, especially when the wind and tide conspired to hold the lightship broadside to the waves.
Over the next two days the sea continued to overwash the lightship. Water sluiced down hatchways. Kemp continued signaling. “Everything between decks was as wet as those on deck,” he wrote on December 27.
The next day brought more of the same: “The weather was still bad and I told them at the Foreland that I was feeling ill, but I managed to send the 3 c.m. spark.” Despite the increasingly awful conditions, Kemp recorded “splendid results,” though it is hard to imagine how he achieved anything. “The waves were still breaking over the ship and I could not get on deck for fresh air. I was very cold, wet and miserable and had very little sleep.”
By December 30 even stalwart Kemp began to crack. Conditions were so dangerous he could not venture topside for air. He used the ship’s wireless to send a message of his own. “I told Mr. Marconi that I was not well enough to remain on board any longer and he must send for me when the wind dropped…. I told him that we wanted fresh meat, vegetables, bread and bacon but this was taken, it appeared, as a joke. The fact that I had come on board on Dec. 19, with provisions for one week had evidently been forgotten, also that I had been on board for 12 days living, the latter part, on quarter rations, consequently I had to beg, borrow and steal from the Lightshipmen.”
New Year’s Day 1899, his fourteenth day aboard, was cold and wet, with high seas, high winds, heavy rain. The next day he wrote, “I was so stiff and weak that I could scarcely move.”
But at last, on January 4, the weather eased and became “quite calm.” Supplies arrived for Kemp, “some mutton, a fowl, 2 bottles of Claret, 2 loaves, potatoes, a cabbage, sprouts and fruit.” He added, with an underline for emphasis, “Had some good fresh food after 17 days.”
Four months later the lightship’s wireless provided a vivid demonstration of what Marconi long had hoped his technology would accomplish. In April, after heavy fog settled over the Goodwin Sands, a steamship named
DESPITE THIS AND OTHER SUCCESSES, including the first messages sent by wireless across the English Channel, the year 1899 proved a barren one for Marconi and his company, with no revenue from his invention and no prospect of any. Trinity House had been impressed with the Goodwin experiments but did not come forth with a contract. Nor did Lloyd’s of London, though its representatives had been pleased with the Rathlin Island experiment
