Thunderstruck

To Marconi, however, the greater risk lay in not making the attempt. He recognized that from a commercial standpoint his company was inert. He had amazed the world, but the world had not then come rushing to place orders for his apparatus. In the public view, wireless remained a novelty. Marconi saw that he had to do something big to jolt the world into at last recognizing the power and practicality of his technology.

That his plan might be impossible did not occur to him. He saw it in his mind. As far as he was concerned, he already had proven the physicists wrong. With each new experiment he had increased distance and clarity. If he could transmit across the English Channel, why not across the Atlantic? For him it came down to the height of his antenna and the intensity of charge that he was able to jolt into the sky.

He recognized, however, that to achieve his goal he needed help. Winding wire to produce an induction coil capable of signaling thirty feet was one thing, but building a power plant capable of sending a message thousands of miles was something else altogether. For this he needed Fleming.

At first Fleming was skeptical, but by August 1899, after studying the problems involved, he wrote to Marconi, “I have not the slightest doubt I can at once put up two masts 300 feet high and it is only a question of expense getting high enough to signal to America.”

To better evaluate what it might entail, as well as to arrange another publicity event—coverage by wireless of the America’s Cup race off New York at the request of the New York Herald—Marconi booked his first voyage to the United States. On September 11, 1899, accompanied by three assistants, including W. W. Bradfield, Marconi sailed for New York.

ON ARRIVAL MARCONI WAS THRONGED by reporters, who were startled by his youth—“a mere boy,” the Herald observed—though at least one writer was struck by his alien appearance. “When you meet Marconi you’re bound to notice that he’s a ‘for’ner.’ The information is written all over him. His suit of clothes is English. In stature he is French. His boot heels are Spanish military. His hair and moustache are German. His mother is Irish. His father is Italian. And altogether, there’s little doubt that Marconi is a thorough cosmopolitan.” The passage was not meant as praise.

Marconi and his colleagues checked into the Hoffman House at Broadway and 24th Street in Manhattan, opposite a deepening triangular excavation that was soon to become the foundation of the Flatiron Building. They had just begun unpacking when the hotel’s steam boiler, in the basement, exploded. A frightened guest blamed it on Marconi and his mysterious equipment. To quash the guest’s concern, Marconi’s men opened their trunks to reveal the quiescent apparatus within—and only then realized that the most important trunk was missing. Without the coherers it contained, Marconi would be forced to cancel his coverage of the America’s Cup. His confident predictions of success had received a lot of attention from newspapers in America and abroad. His failure, with the weak excuse of lost luggage, would get at least as much publicity, perhaps even cause the price of his company’s stock to slide and thereby eliminate any hope of paying for his transatlantic experiment.

Ordinarily Marconi’s demeanor was cool and quiet. As the Herald noted, Marconi exuded the “peculiar semi-abstract air that characterizes men who devote their days to study and scientific experiment.” The New York Tribune called him “a bit absent-minded.” But now, upon finding the most important trunk missing, Marconi flew into a rage. With the petulance of a child, he proclaimed that he would leave for London aboard the next outbound ship.

His men calmed him. Bradfield and another assistant raced back to the wharf by horse-drawn cab to try to locate the trunk but failed. They returned to the hotel, no doubt fearing another outburst from their employer.

Now Bradfield remembered that on the day their ship left Liverpool, another liner also was scheduled to depart for America, but for Boston. He wondered if just possibly the trunk had gotten on the wrong ship. A reporter for the Herald headed north by train to check.

He found it, and Marconi’s coverage of the yacht race, between the famed Shamrock owned by Sir Thomas Lipton and its American opponent, Columbia II, seized the world’s attention. The Columbia won, and the Herald got the news first, by wireless.

DESPITE HIS SUCCESS, on November 8, 1899, when Marconi was scheduled to return to England, he had no new contracts to show for his effort. He had hoped to win the U.S. Navy as a customer, and while in America he had conducted a series of coastal trials, but the navy balked. Its report on the tests listed a host of speculative reasons to be wary of wireless, including this one: “The shock from the sending coil of wire may be quite severe and even dangerous to a person with a weak heart.” Also, the navy’s observers were peeved by Marconi’s refusal to reveal his secrets. He allowed them to examine only certain components. Others, the navy complained, “were never dismantled, and these mechanics were explained in a general way. The exact dimensions of the parts were not divulged.”

Far from being discouraged, Marconi arranged for yet another experiment, this one to take place during his voyage home aboard the St. Paul, a ship of great luxury and speed.

The ship’s owner, the American Line, agreed to allow Marconi to equip the vessel with wireless and to rig an antenna high above deck. Marconi planned to begin transmitting from the ship to his stations at the Needles and Haven hotels as the liner approached England, to see how far from shore messages could be received.

As Marconi’s assistants adjusted their shipboard equipment, Marconi demonstrated a paradox in his personality. Though he could be blind to the social needs of others, he also was able to command the allegiance of men older and younger and, as quickly became evident aboard ship, exuded a charm that women found compelling. One young woman, recalling the first time she met Marconi, said, “I noticed his peculiar, capable hands, and his rather sullen expression which would light up all at once in a wreath of smiles.” He was said also to possess a dry humor, though occasionally it emerged heavily barbed. During one experiment, frustrated with the keying skills of an operator, Marconi asked via wireless if that was the best he could do. When the man replied that it was, Marconi fired back, “Well try using the other foot.”

The St. Paul suited him. He had grown up amid luxury, conducted his first experiments amid luxury, and now, wealthy and famous, he did his traveling surrounded by something beyond luxury, for the designers of the great ships racing the Atlantic had sought to replicate in their first-class cabins and saloons the rich interiors of English country houses and Italian palazzi. Marconi associated with the wealthiest and most prominent of the ship’s passengers, including Henry Herbert McClure, a well-known journalist. Marconi was the focus of attention and the subject of admiring, though discreet, observation by the women of the first-class deck. Always a connoisseur of beauty, Marconi returned the scrutiny.

As the St. Paul approached England, Marconi and his assistants stationed themselves at their wireless system, located in a first-class cabin, and began hailing the shore stations over and over. Taking turns, they kept at it through the night. They heard nothing in response, and indeed no one expected much this early in the voyage. The system had a maximum range under ideal conditions of perhaps fifty miles.

On Tuesday, November 14, 1899, the new managing director of Marconi’s company, Maj. Samuel Flood Page, arrived at the Needles station on the Isle of Wight to observe the experiment. Jameson Davis, who several months earlier had retired from the post as planned, also came.

They calculated that the St. Paul would pass offshore at ten or eleven o’clock the next morning, Wednesday. Just in case, they assigned an operator to spend Tuesday night in the instrument room, where a bell rigged to the apparatus would announce the receipt of any incoming signals. No bells rang.

Flood Page returned to the instrument room at dawn as the sun began to bathe the Needles, a spine of chalk and flint sea-stacks from which the Needles Hotel took its name. “The Needles resembled pillars of salt as one after the other they were lighted up by the brilliant sunrise,” Flood Page wrote. Marconi’s men watched for ships to appear in the haze off the coast. “Breakfast over, the sun was delicious as we paced the lawn, but at sea the haze increased to fog; no ordinary signals”—meaning optical signals—“could have been read from any ship passing the place at which we were.”

They saw no sign of the St. Paul. The hours dragged past. Flood Page claimed “the idea of failure never entered our minds,” though this seems unlikely. Another hour passed, then another.