hydrogen and, with Kemp holding tight to a mooring line, sent it aloft. This time the wire was six hundred feet long. The balloon’s silk and cotton sleeve, expanded by gas to fourteen feet in diameter, acted now as a giant sail far overhead. In his diary Kemp wrote that he “had great trouble with it.”
Abruptly, the wind intensified. The balloon rose to about one hundred feet when Marconi decided the weather was too turbulent. The men began hauling it back down.
The balloon tore free. Had the balloon moved in a different direction, Kemp noted, “I should have gone with it as its speed was like a shot out of a gun.”
With six hundred feet of wire following in a graceful arc, the balloon, Marconi wrote, “disappeared to parts unknown.”
MARCONI TOLD THE
THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, December 12, the plateau atop Signal Hill was engulfed in what Marconi called a “furious gale.”
“I came to the conclusion that perhaps the kites would answer better,” he wrote, and so despite the storm Kemp and Paget readied one for launch. This time they attached two wires, each 510 feet long. Coats flapping, they launched the kite into the gale. It dipped and heaved but rose quickly to about four hundred feet.
“It was a bluff, raw day,” Marconi wrote: “at the base of the cliff, three hundred feet below us, thundered a cold sea. Oceanward, through the mist I could discern dimly the outlines of Cape Spear, the easternmost reach of the North American continent, while beyond that rolled the unbroken ocean, nearly two thousand miles of which stretched between me and the British coast. Across the harbor the city of St. John’s lay on its hillside, wrapped in fog.”
Once the kite was airborne, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget retreated from the weather into the transmitter room. “In view of the importance of all that was at stake,” Marconi wrote, “I had decided not to trust to the usual arrangement of having the coherer signals recorded automatically through a relay and a Morse instrument on a paper tape.” Instead, he connected his receiver to the handset of a telephone, “the human ear being far more sensitive than the recorder.”
It seemed at the time a prudent decision.
NOT ONLY THE PRESS was kept in the dark. Ambrose Fleming had left Poldhu on September 2 and soon afterward departed for his first vacation in years. Despite his crucial role in designing and adjusting Poldhu’s transmitter and power supply, he knew nothing about the attempt then under way in Newfoundland. On returning from his holiday, he occupied himself with his teaching duties at University College in Bloomsbury and worked on an important upcoming talk, a Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution.
For reasons that remain unclear, Marconi had excluded Fleming from the very thing that he had hired him to achieve. It may simply have been an oversight, owing to the turmoil raised by the destruction of the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet. It may, however, have been another example of Marconi’s periodic lapse into social blindness with its attendant disregard for the needs of others.
THE KITE SHUDDERED through the sky and strained at the line that tethered it to the plateau. At the appointed time Marconi held the telephone receiver to his ear. He heard nothing but static and the noise of wind. Each new gust stabbed the room with the scent of winter.
In Poldhu the operator began slamming down the key to make each dot.
To anyone watching, the whole quest would have seemed utterly hopeless,
WRETCHED LOVE
TOWARD THE END OF JANUARY 1910 Ethel’s friend and landlady, Mrs. Jackson, began to notice a change in her behavior. Ordinarily Ethel left the house at ten o’clock in the morning for work, then returned around six or seven in the evening, when she would greet Mrs. Jackson warmly. In practice if not blood they were mother and daughter. But now Ethel’s demeanor changed. She was, Jackson said, “rather strange in manner, sometimes she would speak to me, sometimes not and was depressed. People noticed it.”
After several nights of this Mrs. Jackson resolved to ask Ethel why she seemed so depressed, though indeed London in deep winter—so dark, cold, and wet, the streets conduits of black water and manure—was enough to depress anyone.
As was her habit, Mrs. Jackson followed Ethel into her bedroom, where in more pleasant times they would spend the evening talking about work or the day’s news. The thing most on people’s minds was the rising power of Germany and the near-certainty of invasion, raised anew by a terrifying but popular play,
At first Ethel said nothing. She undressed and changed into bedclothes, then undid her hair and let it fall to her shoulders. Her cheeks still red from the cold, her hair dark and loose, she really was lovely, though sad. She put curlers in her hair, Jackson recalled—and probably these were examples of the latest in grooming technology, the Hinde’s Patent Brevetee, about three inches long, with a Vulcanite central core and two parallel metal bands.
She had difficulty. Her hands moved in clumsy jolts. Her fingers twitched. She did her hair, then undid it, “pulled and clawed it, looked straight into a recess in the corner of the room and shuddered violently,” Jackson said. Ethel had a “horrible staring look in her eyes.”
Jackson was too worried to leave and stayed with Ethel until nearly two o’clock in the morning. She begged Ethel to tell her what was wrong, but Ethel would only say that the cause had nothing to do with Mrs. Jackson. “Go to bed,” Ethel said, “I shall be alright in the morning.”
Ethel lay back in bed and turned her face to the wall. Mrs. Jackson sat beside her awhile longer, then left.
IN THE MORNING ETHEL was no better. Mrs. Jackson brought her a cup of tea in her room. Later, after Mrs. Jackson’s husband had left—his liking for Ethel had waned after her miscarriage—Ethel came into the kitchen for breakfast. She ate nothing. She rose and put on her coat, preparing to leave for work. Mrs. Jackson stopped her. “I can’t let you go out of the house like this,” she said.
It was clear to Mrs. Jackson that Ethel was too ill to leave. She telephoned Crippen at Albion House, then returned to Ethel. “For the love of God,” she now said, “tell me what is the matter, are you in the family way again?”
Ethel said no.
Mrs. Jackson persisted: “I told her she must have something on her mind, and that it must be something
