Other scientists resolved the mysteries that had plagued Marconi through his early work. Oliver Heaviside, physicist and mathematician, proposed that a stratum existed in the atmosphere that caused wireless signals to bounce back to earth, and that this would account for why signals could travel very long distances over the horizon. Others confirmed its existence and dubbed it the Heaviside Layer. Scientists also confirmed that sunlight excited a region of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere, which accounted for the daytime distortion that had so plagued Marconi.
In 1933 the city of Chicago invited Marconi to attend its new world’s fair, the Century of Progress Exhibition, and declared October 2 to be Marconi Day. The climax of the day occurred when Marconi tapped three dots, the letter S, into the exhibition’s powerful transmitter, and stations in New York, London, Rome, Bombay, Manila, and Honolulu relayed it around the world, back to Chicago, in three minutes, twenty-five seconds.
As he aged, Marconi became aloof. At his London headquarters, Marconi House, he would only ride the elevator alone or with someone he knew, never with a stranger. He established a station to listen for signals from Mars and instructed its operators, “Listen for a regularly repeated signal.” In 1923 he joined the Fascist Party and became a friend of Mussolini, though as time passed he became disenchanted with the increasing bellicosity of the Fascists and Nazis. He loathed Hitler.
On the afternoon of July 19, 1937, Marconi experienced a severe heart attack. At three the next morning he rang for his valet. “I am very sorry, but I am going to put you and my friends to considerable trouble. I fear my end is near. Will you please inform my wife?” Forty-five minutes later he was dead. The first outsider to arrive was Mussolini, who prayed at his bedside. Radio listeners around the world heard the news, which darkened an already bleak day in which the U.S. Navy announced that it had ended its search for Amelia Earhart.
That night the gloom lifted a bit, at least for those listeners who gathered around their radios and tuned in to NBC for the regularly scheduled antics of Amos n’ Andy.
THROUGHOUT THE DAY of July 21, 1937, Marconi’s body lay in state in the Farnesina Palace in Rome. The day was hot, the air heavy with the old-water scent of the nearby Tiber. A crowd numbering in the thousands blackened the square in front of the palace and filled the surrounding streets like spilled ink.
Beatrice came alone and uninvited. Even her children—
Once she and this man had been lovers. So much history lay between them, and now she was not even recognized, a ghost. Ten years had passed since the final humiliation of the annulment, and in that time he had seemed to abandon even the memory of her and the children.
She moved closer to the bier, and suddenly the distance that had accumulated between them shrank to nothing. She was overwhelmed and fell to her knees. Mourners passed behind her, the vanguard of a line that stretched seemingly across Rome.
At length she stood, confident that she had remained anonymous. “I was unobserved,” she wrote to Degna. “No one could have recognized me.”
She exited the palace into the extraordinary heat of the afternoon and disappeared among the thousands still waiting to enter.
At six o’clock that evening, when his funeral began, wireless operators around the globe halted telegraphy for two minutes. For possibly the last time in human history, the “great hush” again prevailed.
FLEMING AND LODGE
IN THE SUMMER OF 1911 Oliver Lodge, sixty years old, began building what he called “a fighting fund” to bring a lawsuit against Marconi for infringing on his tuning patent. As of June 15, he and his allies had contributed ?10,000 to the fund, more than $1 million today. Lodge wrote to William Preece, “They are clearly infringing, and we have a moral right to royalty. Accordingly I am actively bestirring myself to that end.” Marconi had already approached Lodge with an offer to acquire his patents, apparently concerned that Lodge might indeed prevail in a court test, but Lodge had turned him down.
Preece, now seventy-seven, counseled caution, even though, as he put it, “I agree with every word you say and I am sure you are taking the proper attitude.”
That summer Preece put aside his own antipathy toward Marconi and brokered a settlement, under which the Marconi company acquired Lodge’s tuning patent for an undisclosed sum and agreed to pay him a stipend of ?1,000 a year for the patent’s duration. On October 24, 1911, Preece wrote to Lodge, “I am delighted to hear that matters are settled between you and the Marconi Company. I am quite sure you have done the right thing for yourself and that you will now get your deserts. But you will have to bring Marconi down a peg or two. He is soaring too much in the higher regions.”
Lodge lost his youngest son, Raymond, to World War I and sought to reach the boy in the ether. He claimed success. He believed that during sittings with certain mediums he had conversed with Raymond. On one occasion, shortly before Christmas 1915, he heard his son say, “I love you. I love you intensely. Father, please speak to me.” The conversation continued, and a few moments later Lodge heard, “Father, tell mother she has her son with her all day on Christmas Day. There will be thousands and thousands of us back in the homes on that day, but the horrid part is that so many of the fellows don’t get welcomed. Please keep a place for me. I must go now.”
Lodge published a book about his experience in 1916, called
The book became hugely popular owing to the many parents seeking contact with sons killed in the first of the real wars.
OVER TIME THE RELATIONSHIP between Ambrose Fleming and Marconi grew more distant, but Fleming maintained his allegiance to the idea that Marconi deserved all credit for the invention of wireless. The company kept him as an adviser until 1931, when it endured one of its many periods of fiscal duress and told him his contract would not be renewed. He saw this as a new betrayal and now changed his opinion. He decided that the man who invented wireless was actually Oliver Lodge and that Lodge had first demonstrated the technology in his June 1894 lecture on Hertz at the Royal Institution.
On August 29, 1937, Fleming wrote to Lodge, “It is quite clear that in 1894 you could send and receive
By this point Fleming was eighty-eight years old but could not resist giving vent to a long-festered bitterness. “Marconi was always determined to claim everything for himself,” he told Lodge, who was now eighty-six. “His conduct to me about the first transatlantic transmission was very ungenerous. I had planned the power plant for him and the first sending was carried out with the arrangement of circuits described in my British patent no 3481 of 1901. But he took care never to mention my name in connection with it.
“However,” Fleming added, “these things get known in time and justice is done.”
