and by loggers who over the previous century had stripped it to provide lumber for shipbuilders. Marconi knew he would have to import the tall masts necessary to hold his aerial aloft.
He liked this clifftop parcel. If he stood facing east, all he saw was the great spread of the Atlantic. As Thoreau observed, “There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe.”
When he faced the opposite direction, he saw the harbor at Wellfleet in clear view and very near. A railroad passed less than a mile away, and the nearest telegraph office, at Wellfleet Depot, was only four miles off. This meant lumber and machinery could be delivered to Wellfleet by ship or rail and hauled with relative ease overland to the cliff. A company report on Marconi’s search states, “Plenty of water is available on the site and a very bad inn is situated about 3 miles away; there is, however, a residential house which we can rent on very moderate terms within 200 yards of the site.” One bit of historical resonance was lost on Marconi. During the eighteenth century Wellfleet had been named Poole, after a village in England—the same Poole whose Haven Hotel now served as Marconi’s field headquarters.
Cook assured Marconi there would be no problem persuading the landowner to let Marconi build here. The landowner was Cook himself. He had acquired the land using the proceeds of his work as a wrecker. Whether either man recognized the paradox therein is unclear, but here was Marconi, whose technology promised to make the sea safer, acquiring land from a man who had made his living harvesting precisely the wrecks Marconi hoped to eliminate. In the future these eight acres of seaside land would be some of the most coveted terrain in the world, but at this time the stretch was considered worthless. Marconi bought it for next to nothing.
Marconi also hired Cook to be his general contractor, with a mandate to find workers, arrange living quarters and food supplies, and acquire necessary building materials. Marconi and his men took their initial meals at the nearby inn, but the food was so awful that he vowed never to eat there again. He arranged to have more elegant fare, and the wines to go with it, shipped from Boston and New York. Among the locals this caused a good deal of frowning and saddled Marconi with a lasting reputation as a culinary aesthete.
Soon Marconi headed back to England, leaving Vyvyan to face the true nature of the location.
IN LONDON COLONEL HOZIER of Lloyd’s and Nevil Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall, acting together as a syndicate, approached Marconi and offered to sell him Maskelyne’s patents and apparatus. Marconi listened. As negotiations proceeded, Hozier somehow cut Maskelyne out of the syndicate and began negotiating on his own behalf, despite the fact that it was Maskelyne’s technology upon which the syndicate was based. Hozier wanted ?3,000—over $300,000 today—and a seat on Marconi’s board. To make the arrangement more palatable, even irresistible, Hozier promised that in return he would broker a deal between Marconi and Lloyd’s itself.
Hozier’s maneuver left Maskelyne embittered. But his anger, for the moment, seemed of no consequence.
THE LANDSCAPE THAT NOW confronted Vyvyan was lovely but spare. There were few trees, none tall enough to be worthy of the name, let alone to be useful for building houses or ships. Most of the surrounding flora hugged the ground. Hog cranberry coated the sand, tufted here and there by beach heather, also called “poverty grass,” a name that captured the overall austerity of the terrain. There was crowberry, savory-leaved aster, mouse-ear, and goldenrod, as well as pitch pine planted during the previous century to keep wind-driven sand from overwhelming towns on the bay side of the cape. Everywhere the wind caught stalks of American beach grass and bent them until their tips scraped the sand, engraving precise circles and earning them the nickname “compass grass.” Thoreau wrote, “The barren aspect of the land would hardly be believed if described.”
Clouds often filled the sky. The Weather Bureau’s Nantucket station, nearest the cape, reported for 1901 only 83 clear days, 101 days identified as partly cloudy, and 181 days where clouds reigned. On such days all color left the world. Sky, sea, and ground became as gray as shale, the color blue a memory. Frequent gales brought winds of fifty or sixty miles an hour and shot snow off the cliff edge in angry spirals. The boom of the sea paced the day like the tick of a gigantic clock.
The plan for the station called for the construction of living quarters for the staff, a boiler room to produce steam to generate electricity, a separate room full of equipment to concentrate power and produce a spark, and another room in which an operator would hammer out messages in Morse code. The most important structure was the aerial, and that was what most worried Vyvyan. In London Marconi had shown Vyvyan plans for a new antenna array to be built at Poldhu, and he ordered Vyvyan to build the same one in South Wellfleet. As soon as Vyvyan saw the plans, he grew concerned. He would have to erect twenty masts similar in design to the masts of sailing ships, complete with top gallants, royals, and yards. The finished masts would rise to 200 feet and stand in a circle about 200 feet in diameter, a Stonehenge of timber. The height of the masts, plus the 130-foot height of the cliff, would give Marconi’s antenna an effective height of well over 300 feet, thus in theory—Marconi’s theory—increasing the station’s ability to send and receive signals over long distances. A complex series of guy wires and connectors was supposed to keep the masts from toppling. The masts in turn would support an aerial of wire. A heavy cable of twisted copper would connect the tops of all the masts, and from it would be strung hundreds of thinner wires, all converging to form a giant cone with its tip over the transmission building. A cable run through the roof would link the cone to the spark generator within.
What troubled Vyvyan most was the rigging. Each mast should have had its own array of guy wires, so that if one mast failed the others would remain standing. Instead, the top of each was connected to the tops of its neighbors with “triatic stays.” Vyvyan realized that if one mast collapsed, these connections would cause the rest to fall as well. He told Marconi of his concerns, but Marconi overruled him and commanded that the station be built as designed. Vyvyan accepted his decision. “It was clear to me, however, that the mast system was distinctly unsafe.”
Construction advanced slowly, hampered by what the Weather Bureau called a “period of exceptionally severe storms.” April brought gales that scoured the coast with winds up to fifty-four miles an hour. May brought rainfall in quantities that broke all records for New England.
The men hired by Ed Cook lived in Wellfleet and adjacent communities, but Vyvyan, Bottomley, and the full- time Marconi employees lived on the grounds in a one-story residence with about two hundred feet of living space, a level of coziness that eventually prompted the station’s chief engineer, W. W. Bradfield, to plead for an additional wing containing more sleeping space and a recreation room. He wrote, “In view of the isolation of the station, I regard it as almost necessary that this should be done in order that the men may be comfortable, contented, and that their best work may be got out of them.”
The men did what they could to improve their living conditions. They dined on a table draped in white and spined with four candles jutting at odd angles from improvised holders. They read books, played the station’s piano, and sang, and from time to time they hiked to the bay side to pick oysters at the mouth of Blackfish Creek, named for the herds of small whales called social whales that locals once drove onto the beach and butchered for oil. They went beachcombing, the sands below the Truro highlands being a lot more interesting in those days given the frequency of shipwrecks. One never knew what treasure might turn up, including crockery, luggage, fine soaps from a ship’s cabin, and the occasional corpse, its cavities filled with sand. Thoreau called the beach “a vast
This being the age of hired help, the station had a cook and employed two Wellfleet women who came each day to clean. They wore maid’s caps and aprons. One of the women was Mable Tubman, daughter of a prominent Wellfleet resident, who caught the attention of one of Marconi’s men, Carl Taylor. A photograph from the time shows Carl and Mable seated on the beach on a day bright with sun. What makes this photograph unusual is that it captures people actually having fun. Mable is wearing her apron and maid’s cap and is turned away from the camera, watching the sea. Carl is wearing a light-colored suit and looks into the camera, a huge grin running from one earlobe to the other. He also is wearing a maid’s cap.
