Thunderstruck

The attention given her once again caused Marconi to react with jealous anger. Degna wrote, “When her husband did emerge from the wireless cabin and found her talking to the other passengers, he led her stonily to their stateroom and lectured her about flirting.” Marconi taught her Morse code, though she had little interest in learning. Degna suspected he did so in part to prevent Beatrice from wandering the decks and returning the smiles of the Campania’s other male passengers.

One day Beatrice entered their stateroom to find Marconi consigning his dirty socks to the sea through a porthole. Stunned, she asked him why.

His explanation: It was more efficient to get new ones than wait for them to be laundered.

THEY STOPPED BRIEFLY in New York and traveled to Oyster Bay on Long Island to have lunch with Theodore Roosevelt. They met his daughter Alice, who later reported that they were a handsome couple and seemed very happy with each other. They sailed to Nova Scotia, where snow still lay on the ground and the four towers of the newly completed station stood over the landscape like sentries. They moved into the nearby house, which they were to share with Richard and Jane Vyvyan and their daughter. The child was nearly one and a half years old, not the easiest age to manage, especially in close quarters. And these quarters were close. Beatrice had grown up in a castle with rooms seemingly beyond number. This house had a living room, a dining room, two bedrooms, and a single small bathroom. Marconi left Beatrice with Jane and her daughter and immediately joined Vyvyan at Marconi Towers, where they began adjusting and tuning the apparatus.

The new station encompassed two square miles. The four towers stood at its center. Next came a ring of twenty-four masts, each 180 feet tall, and beyond them another ring, consisting of forty-eight poles, each fifty feet tall. Over it all was draped an umbrella of wire with a diameter of 2,900 feet, comprising fifty-four miles of wire. Another fifty-four lay in ditches below.

Every day Marconi walked down the “corduroy” road of felled trees to the station compound and remained there for most of each day, while back at the house Beatrice confronted a situation wholly new to her experience. She possessed only limited domestic skills but nonetheless tried to help around the house, only to have Mrs. Vyvyan refuse her offers of assistance in a manner as cold as the weather outside. At first Beatrice kept her unhappiness from Marconi, but after days of enduring such behavior, she broke down and, weeping, told Marconi about all that had happened.

The news made Marconi furious. He was ready to charge out to the living room to confront the Vyvyans, but Beatrice stopped him. She knew how much Marconi depended on Vyvyan. She resolved to confront Mrs. Vyvyan herself.

Now it was Jane Vyvyan who burst into tears. She confessed that she had feared that Beatrice, as the daughter of a lord, would act superior and dominate the house or, worse, treat her as if she were a servant. Jane had hoped to assert her own superiority from the start.

Their talk cleansed the atmosphere. Almost immediately they became friends—and just in time.

WHILE WORKING AT THE NEW station under its great umbrella of wire, Marconi became convinced once more that transatlantic communication could succeed. He made arrangements to return to London, again aboard the Campania, for a summit with his board and to use the Campania’s wireless to test the reach of the new station.

Inexplicably, given how prone he was to jealousy, Marconi left Beatrice behind. She found little to occupy herself. Nova Scotia was a male realm, full of male pursuits, like ice hockey, hunting, and fishing. She found it dull.

In contrast, Richard Vyvyan gauged life in Nova Scotia as “on the whole quite pleasant.” Especially the fishing, which he described as “superlatively good.” Winter, he conceded, could be “trying at times,” but even then the landscape took on a frigid beauty. “The stillness of winter in the country in Canada is extraordinary, when there is no wind. All the birds have left, except a few crows, and although the tracks of countless rabbits are to be seen they themselves are invisible. Not a sound can be heard but one’s own breathing, beyond the occasional sharp crack of frost in a tree. The winter air is intensely exhilarating and the climate is wonderfully healthy.”

Beatrice did not agree. There was no place to walk, save for the barbed-wire grounds of the station, and there she felt imprisoned. She would have loved to bicycle, but there were no roads in the vicinity of sufficient quality to make bicycling possible. She was sad and lonely and became ill with jaundice, possibly the result of contracting a form of hepatitis. And, her daughter wrote, always there was that silence, “so intense it made Bea’s ears ring.”

Marconi did not return for three months.

DURING THE VOYAGE Marconi was the toast of the vessel. Though he spent most of his time in the Campania’s wireless cabin, he always emerged for meals, especially dinner, where he sat among the richest and loveliest passengers, in a milieu of unsurpassed elegance.

During the first half of the voyage transmissions from the new Glace Bay station reached the ship strong and clear. Daylight reception reached a maximum of eighteen hundred miles—a good result, though he had hoped the range would be far greater, given the station’s size and power.

In England he persuaded his directors to continue investing in his transatlantic quest. He volunteered his own fortune to the effort and sought new capital from investors in England and Italy.

At Poldhu he inaugurated a new series of experiments.

First he concentrated merely on trying to achieve communication between Poldhu and Nova Scotia. He tuned and adjusted the Poldhu receiver and via cable directed Richard Vyvyan to make other changes at Marconi Towers. At last, at nine o’clock one morning in June, the Poldhu station received readable messages—a major breakthrough for the simple fact that this transmission occurred when both stations were in daylight.

Resorting as always to trial and error, Marconi next tested different antenna configurations. He shut down segments of each to gauge the effect on reception. Again, endless variables came into play. He adjusted power and tried different wavelengths. He believed, as always, that the longer the wavelength, the farther waves would travel, though why this should be the case remained a mystery to him.

He began to see a pattern. An antenna consisting of a single wire stretched horizontally and close to the ground seemed to provide better reception and transmission than its vertical equivalent. He found too that direction mattered. A wire stretched along an east-west axis could send signals most effectively to a receiving wire erected along the same axis. These discoveries freed Marconi from the need to build taller and taller aerials and more complex umbrella arrays. In theory, a single wire or series of parallel wires stretched over a long distance would produce wavelengths longer than anything he had so far achieved.

He instructed Vyvyan at Nova Scotia to simulate that kind of directional antenna by disconnecting portions of the umbrella array, then learned that his hunch was correct. Transmission and reception improved.

He realized now that Poldhu was not merely obsolete—the site would have to be abandoned entirely and another location found that had enough land to allow him to stretch a horizontal antenna up to one mile long. The new Nova Scotia station too would have to be replaced and its power-generation equipment enlarged to produce ten times more power.

The expense would be staggering, but Marconi saw no other path.

HE RETURNED TO NOVA SCOTIA, and to Beatrice. He was appalled at her condition. Her jaundice was jarringly apparent. He promised to take her back to England.

Beatrice assumed this would mean a return to London, and friends and family, and city life. It had been nearly