Thunderstruck

Then at 4:45 P.M. the bell rang.

The Needles operator signaled, “Is that you St. Paul?”

A moment later, an answer: “Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Sixty-six nautical miles away.”

It was a new record. At Needles and aboard ship there was celebration, but soon the men at both nodes began running out of things to say. Pressed for fresh material, the Needles men began sending the latest news of the Boer War in South Africa, which had begun in mid-October and was now gaining ferocity. They sent other news as well.

Someone—it’s not clear who—suggested publishing these dispatches in the form of a shipboard newspaper, the world’s first. The captain granted Marconi use of the ship’s print shop, which ordinarily had the more prosaic assignment of printing menus. The result was the Transatlantic Times, volume one, number one, a keepsake that passengers could purchase for a one-dollar contribution to the Seamen’s Fund. “As all know,” the newspaper’s opening section stated, “this is the first time that such a venture as this has been undertaken. A Newspaper published at Sea with Wireless Telegraph messages received and printed on a ship going twenty knots an hour!”

Anyone reading closely would have found several passengers identified in the masthead of editors, including Marconi’s assistant, Bradfield, as editor in chief and H. H. McClure as managing editor. But there was a third name as well, this one unfamiliar: J. B. Holman, treasurer.

As it happens, another momentous event had occurred during this crossing, albeit one of a rather more personal nature.

JOSEPHINE BOWEN HOLMAN was a young woman from Indianapolis—and from money. Though she lived now in New York with her mother, her roots lay in Woodruff Place, an enclave of some five hundred wealthy people incorporated as a distinct village within Indianapolis, occupying forested land once known locally as the Dark Woods.

Her hair was thick and dark, piled atop her head like a rich black turban. She had full lips and large eyes, and eyebrows that arced like gulls’ wings over a gaze that was frank and direct. Marconi, now twenty-five years old, had always been drawn to feminine beauty, and he was drawn now to her.

They dined and danced and, despite the cold of a mid-November crossing, took long walks around the first- class deck. He taught her Morse code. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. They kept their engagement a secret. When he disappeared into the wireless cabin for the last two days of the voyage, she was not troubled, though perhaps she should have been.

Once onshore, to evade discovery of the engagement by her mother, Holman inserted passages in her letters in Morse code.

BUOYED BY LOVE and by his success in signaling the Needles, Marconi prepared to reveal his idea to the company’s directors and ask approval to build the two gigantic stations. By summer he was ready.

The directors balked. They considered it too risky and too expensive, and they doubted that apparatus capable of generating and managing the required power could even be built—and if so, whether the resulting station would smother every other Marconi station with interference.

Marconi countered that success in the venture would assert the company’s dominance for once and for all. His confidence impressed the board, but so too did news from America that Nikola Tesla might be on the verge of attempting the same feat. In a much-read article in the June 1900 issue of The Century Magazine, Tesla alluded to things he had learned from experiments at his laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which he claimed could generate millions of volts of electricity, the equal of lightning. He wrote that in the course of his experiments he had found proof—“absolute certitude,” as he put it—that “communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable.”

The article prompted J. P. Morgan to invite Tesla to his home, where Tesla revealed his idea for a “world system” of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,” Tesla wrote in the Century article. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.”

That word: television. In 1900.

In July Marconi’s directors voted their approval.

The month provided another milestone as well. On July 4 Britain’s Admiralty agreed to have Marconi’s company supply and install wireless sets for twenty-six ships and six shore stations, at a cost of ?3,200 pounds per installation—$350,000 today—with an additional annual royalty. The company would train the navy’s men in how to use the apparatus. It was Marconi’s first major order, but more important, it helped convince him and his directors of the need for a fundamental change in how the company operated.

As welcome as the contract was, providing first revenue just as Marconi’s greatest quest was about to begin, it embodied the threat that the Royal Navy might now use Marconi’s equipment to develop its own system, something it had the right to do under a British law that allowed the government to adopt any technology it wished, patented or not, in the interests of the empire’s defense.

The contract caused Marconi to rethink the company’s strategy for generating revenue through the manufacture and sale of apparatus to customers. As things stood, the post office monopoly barred the company from collecting fees for private telegrams sent by wireless and further blocked the automatic relay of telegrams from conventional land lines to Marconi’s wireless stations. Thus the only likely customers were government agencies, of which only a few could be expected to see a need for wireless.

A loophole in Britain’s telegraph laws suggested a possible new course. Instead of selling equipment, Marconi could provide customers with a wireless service that, if structured carefully, would skirt the postal monopoly. A shipping line, for example, would pay not for individual messages but for the rental of Marconi’s apparatus and operators, who would receive their salaries from Marconi and communicate only with Marconi stations. Marconi argued successfully that the law allowed such an arrangement because all messages would be intracompany communications from one node of the Marconi company to another.

This change in strategy suited Marconi’s personality. Ever since his days in the attic at the Villa Griffone, he had been worried about competitors. He saw this new approach as a means of erecting a bulwark against the competition. His new strategy included the requirement that any ship using his wireless service would communicate only with other ships likewise equipped, except in case of emergency. This meant that if a shipping line leased Marconi wireless for one vessel, it would have to do so for the rest of its fleet as well, if it wanted its ships to be able to communicate with one another. In theory the approach would also simplify things for shipowners, who would not have to pay for the construction and maintenance of their own networks of shore stations. Once fully equipped, a shipping line would be unlikely to switch to a competitor.

The new strategy seemed sound in principle, but now the question became, Would the change at last dispel the still-widespread reluctance to embrace wireless? Would customers come?

It seemed even more imperative now for Marconi to do something big to assert his dominance of the field and to publicize his technological prowess. If successful, the transatlantic bid would achieve both goals, as well as serve a third, more concrete purpose: It would demonstrate that his wireless could reach not only ships traveling near the coast but also liners far out in the deepest blue.

If successful. Marconi’s certainty aside, the company was taking a grave gamble, betting its future and Marconi’s reputation on a single experiment whose success nearly every established physicist believed to be impossible.