Thunderstruck

Philadelphia’s wireless cabin. As the liner approached the English coast, he made contact with Poldhu and set a new record for ship-to-shore communications: 150 miles.

Despite his failed romance, Marconi arrived in London feeling more confident than he had in a long time—a good thing, for he faced a year that would prove especially trying and raise a grave new threat from Germany.

IN LONDON MARCONI explained the details of the new Canadian arrangement to his board of directors. Much to the directors’ delight, Canada had agreed to pay for the construction of the Nova Scotia station. Less delightful was Marconi’s promise to provide transatlantic wireless service for 60 percent less than the rate charged by the cable companies, a maximum of ten cents a word. This was a bold commitment, given that all Marconi had sent thus far was a couple of dozen three-dot signals. Nonetheless, the board gave its approval.

Next Marconi addressed the annual meeting of his company’s shareholders and for the first time in public launched into a direct attack against William Preece and Oliver Lodge and their much-publicized harping about flaws in his system. A man more able to sense the subtler bounds of accepted scientific behavior might have omitted this attack or at least phrased it differently, with the kind of oblique but slashing wit at which British parliamentarians seemed so adept, but Marconi was about to cross a dangerous invisible line—especially in touching on that most sensitive of subjects, Lodge’s interest in ghosts.

First Marconi took on Preece. “Sir William Preece is, I believe, a gentleman with various claims to scientific distinction; but, whatever his attainments in other walks of science, I regret to say that the most careful examination reveals absolutely no testimonial to his competency for this most recent of his undertakings. Such knowledge of my work as he may possess is at least three years old—a very long period, I would remind you, in the brief history of my system…. Of the conditions under which the system is now worked Sir William Preece is, in fact, wholly ignorant.”

Now he addressed Lodge’s criticisms. “I regret to say that, distinguished as Dr. Lodge may be as a professor of physics or as a student of psychical phenomena, the same statement applies also in his case, so far as my present system or wireless telegraphy is concerned.”

Marconi declared that his tuning technology allowed him to send messages across the Atlantic “without interfering with, or, under ordinary conditions, being interfered with, by any ship working its own wireless installations.” He then challenged Preece and Lodge to attempt to interfere with his transmissions and even offered them the use of his own stations for the experiment.

His shareholders applauded, but to others outside the company, his remarks, published in the press, smacked of impudence and mockery.

The Westminster Gazette suggested that “Signor Marconi would have done better if he had spared his sneers at the capacity of the more important of his critics…. Bitter retorts and jeers at the intelligence of opponents are not the marks of the scientific spirit. There would seem to be no a priori reason why the student of psychic phenomena should not be permitted to express an opinion upon the future of wireless telegraphy.”

The Electrical Times condemned Marconi for speaking “with scarcely veiled contempt” of Lodge and Preece. “Had it not been for the scientific work of the former it is doubtful whether Mr. Marconi would have had any wireless telegraphy to boast about, while to the latter he is indebted for help and encouragement when he first came to England…. But, apart from that, the tone Mr. Marconi adopts is hardly decent in so young a man towards one so much his senior and of so high a standing in the engineering and scientific world.”

The journal further charged that if no one knew much about the current state of Marconi’s technology, it was Marconi’s own fault. “If Mr. Marconi would but describe his methods and apparatus openly and fully, as scientific men are accustomed to do, he would find no lack of sympathy and appreciation.”

Far from ending here, the battle was about to get a lot uglier.

TWO DAYS LATER, on Saturday, February 22, 1902, Marconi once again boarded the Philadelphia. The main purpose of this voyage was to return to Canada to close the agreement with the government, but he also saw an opportunity to counter the skepticism confronting his Newfoundland achievement. He installed a new and taller antenna on the Philadelphia to attempt to increase the range at which signals could be received from Poldhu, and invited the ship’s captain, A. R. Mills, to witness the tests. He abandoned the telephone receiver he had used in Newfoundland and attached his usual Morse inker, so that at least there would be a physical record of whatever signals came through.

Everyone by now accepted that Marconi’s system worked well over short distances, so the first messages exchanged with his shore stations caused little stir. It was on the morning of the second day, when the ship was precisely 464.5 miles from Poldhu, that things got interesting.

The equipment snapped to life. The receiver captured the message, “All in order. V.E.,” with V.E. being code for “Do you understand?”

Messages and S’s continued to arrive as per Marconi’s schedule.

At 1,032.3 miles the ship received this message: “Thanks for telegram. Hope all are still well. Good luck.”

Five hundred miles later the last message containing complete words arrived. “All in order. Do you understand?” But even at 2,099 miles from Poldhu the ship’s receiver continued to pick up distinct three-dot patterns.

Captain Mills saw the blue dots as they emerged from the inker. Marconi turned to him. “Is that proof enough, Captain?”

It was. The captain agreed to stand witness and signed the tape and a brief affidavit reading, “Received on S. S. ‘Philadelphia,’ Lat. 42.1 N., Long. 47.23 W., distance 2,099 (two thousand and ninety-nine) statute miles from Poldhu.”

On landing in New York, Marconi told a gathering of reporters, “This merely confirms what I have previously done in Newfoundland. There is no longer any question about the ability of wireless telegraphy to transmit messages across the Atlantic.” In an interview with H. H. McClure, Marconi said, “Why, I can sit down now and figure out just how much power, and what equipment would be required to send messages from Cornwall to the Cape of Good Hope or to Australia. I cannot understand why the scientists do not see this thing as I do.”

But the voyage had brought forth a troubling revelation, which Marconi for now kept secret. He had discovered that during daylight hours, once the ship was more than seven hundred miles out, it received no signals at all, though reception resumed after dark. He called this the “daylight effect.” It seemed, he said, that “clear sunlight and blue skies, though transparent, act as a kind of fog to powerful Hertzian rays.”

A couple of months later, still mystified and frustrated by the effect, Marconi was less judicious in his choice of words. “Damn the sun!” he shouted. “How long will it torment us?”

THAT SAME SPRING Marconi discovered that he had made a personal enemy of Kaiser Wilhelm.

It was a minor incident and very likely did not happen in the way the kaiser believed, but it occurred against a backdrop of degrading relations between Germany and Britain. Wilhelm’s drive to strengthen the German Navy had prompted Britain’s leaders to reconsider the merits of “splendid isolation” and to contemplate alliances with Russia and the once-feared French. That summer the Daily Mail would go so far as to recommend a preemptive strike at the German fleet, expressing in print an idea already in private circulation in the clubs of London and among some military planners.

The growing discord had its private analog in the long-standing animosity between Marconi and Adolf Slaby, and between Marconi’s company and its German opponent, Telefunken, which had begun marketing the Slaby- Arco-Braun apparatus around the world. Even the U.S. Navy was a customer. For Kaiser Wilhelm and Telefunken officials, Marconi’s policy that ships equipped with Marconi apparatus communicate only with other Marconi stations had become a source of rising irritation.

So things stood when, early in 1902, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm’s younger brother, set out for