by Erik Larson
To the dismay of peers, one of his greatest distractions was the world of the supernatural. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, established in 1882 by a group of level-headed souls, mostly scientists and philosophers, to bring scientific scrutiny to ghosts, séances, telepathy, and other paranormal events, or as the society stated in each issue of its Journal, “to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.” The society’s constitution stated that membership did not imply belief in “physical forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.” That the SPR had a Committee on Haunted Houses deterred no one. Its membership expanded quickly to include sixty university dons and some of the brightest lights of the era, among them John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, William E. Gladstone, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), and the Rev. C. L. Dodgson (with the equally prominent pen name Lewis Carroll). The roster also listed Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister of England, and William James, a pioneer in psychology, who by the summer of 1894 had been named the society’s president.
It was Lodge’s inquisitiveness, not a belief in ghosts, that first drove him to become a member of the SPR. The occult was for him just one more invisible realm worthy of exploration, the outermost province of the emerging science of psychology. The unveiling during Lodge’s life of so many hitherto unimagined physical phenomena, among them Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, suggested to him that the world of the mind must harbor secrets of its own. The fact that waves could travel through the ether seemed to confirm the existence of another plane of reality. If one could send electromagnetic waves through the ether, was it such an outrageous next step to suppose that the spiritual essence of human beings, an electromagnetic soul, might also exist within the ether and thus explain the hauntings and spirit rappings that had become such a fixture of common legend? Reports of ghosts inhabiting country houses, poltergeists rattling abbeys, spirits knocking on tables during séances—all these in the eyes of Lodge and fellow members of the society seemed as worthy of dispassionate analysis as the invisible travels of an electromagnetic wave.
Within a few years of his joining the SPR, however, events challenged Lodge’s ability to maintain his scientific remove. In Boston William James began hearing from his own family about a certain “Mrs. Piper”—Lenore Piper—a medium who was gaining notoriety for possessing strange powers. Intending to expose her as a fraud, James arranged a sitting and found himself enthralled. He suggested that the society invite Mrs. Piper to England for a series of experiments. She and her two daughters sailed to Liverpool in November 1889 and then traveled to Cambridge, where a sequence of sittings took place under the close observation of SPR members. Lodge arranged a sitting of his own and suddenly found himself listening to his dead aunt Anne, a beloved woman of lively intellect who had abetted his drive to become a scientist against the wishes of his father. She once had told Lodge that after her death she would come back to visit if she could, and now, in a voice he remembered, she reminded him of that promise. “This,” he wrote, “was an unusual thing to happen.”
To Lodge, the encounter seemed proof that some part of the human mind persisted even after death. It left him, he wrote, “thoroughly convinced not only of human survival, but of the power to communicate, under certain conditions, with those left behind on the earth.”
Partly because of his diverse interests and his delight in new discoveries, by June 1894 he had become one of the Royal Institution’s most popular speakers.
THE EVENING’S LECTURE WAS ENTITLED “The Work of Hertz.” Heinrich Hertz had died earlier in the year, and the institution invited Lodge to talk about his experiments, a task to which Lodge readily assented. Lodge had a deep respect for Hertz; he also believed that if not for his own fatal propensity for distraction, he might have beaten Hertz to the history books. In his memoir, Lodge stopped just short of claiming that he himself, not Hertz, was first to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. And indeed Lodge had come close, but instead of pursuing certain tantalizing findings, he had dropped the work and buried his results in a quotidian paper on lightning conductors.
Every seat in the lecture hall was filled. Lodge spoke for a few moments, then began his demonstration. He set off a spark. The gunshot crack jolted the audience to full attention. Still more startling was the fact that this spark caused a reaction—a flash of light—in a distant, unattached electrical apparatus. The central component of this apparatus was a device Lodge had designed, which he called a “coherer,” a tube filled with minute metal filings, and which he had inserted into a conventional electric circuit. Initially the filings had no power to conduct electricity, but when Lodge generated the spark and thus launched electromagnetic waves into the hall, the filings suddenly became conductors—they “cohered”—and allowed current to flow. By tapping the tube with his finger, Lodge returned the filings to their nonconductive state, and the circuit went dead.
Though seemingly a simple thing, in fact the audience had never seen anything like it: Lodge had harnessed invisible energy, Hertz’s waves, to cause a reaction in a remote device, without intervening wires. The applause came like thunder.
Afterward Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished mathematician and physicist and secretary of the Royal Society, came up to Lodge to congratulate him. He knew of Lodge’s tendency toward distraction. What Lodge had just demonstrated seemed a path that even he might find worthy of focus. “Well, now you can go ahead,” Rayleigh told Lodge. “There is your life work!”
But Lodge did not take Lord Rayleigh’s advice. Instead, once again exhibiting his inability to pursue one theme of research to conclusion, he left for a vacation in Europe that included a scientific foray into a very different realm. He traveled to the Ile Roubaud, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France, where soon very strange things began to happen and he found himself distracted anew, at what would prove to be a critical moment in his career and in the history of science.
For even as Lodge conducted his new explorations on the Ile Roubaud, far to the south someone else was hard at work—ingeniously, energetically, compulsively—exploring the powers of the invisible world, with the same tools Lodge had used for his demonstration at the Royal Institution, much to Lodge’s eventual consternation and regret.
THE GREAT HUSH
IT WAS NOT PRECISELY A VISION, like some sighting of the Madonna in a tree trunk, but rather a certainty, a declarative sentence that entered his brain. Unlike other lightning-strike ideas, this one did not fade and blur but retained its surety and concrete quality. Later Marconi would say there was a divine aspect to it, as though he had been chosen over all others to receive the idea. At first it perplexed him—the question, why him, why not Oliver Lodge, or for that matter Thomas Edison?
The idea arrived in the most prosaic of ways. In that summer of 1894, when he was twenty years old, his parents resolved to escape the extraordinary heat that had settled over Europe by moving to higher and cooler ground. They fled Bologna for the town of Biella in the Italian Alps, just below the Santuario di Oropa, a complex of sacred buildings devoted to the legend of the Black Madonna. During the family’s stay, he happened to acquire a copy of a journal called Il Nuovo Cimento, in which he read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz written by Augusto Righi, a neighbor and a physics professor at the University of Bologna. Something in the article produced the intellectual equivalent of a spark and in that moment caused his thoughts to realign, like the filings in a Lodge coherer.
“My chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it into practice,” he said later. “In fact Oliver Lodge had, but he had missed the correct answer by a fraction. The idea was so real to me that I did not realize that to others the theory might appear quite fantastic.”
What he hoped to do�
�expected to do—was to send messages over long distances through the air using Hertz’s invisible waves. Nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible. Quite the opposite. To the rest of the scientific world what he now proposed was the stuff of magic shows and séances, a kind of electric telepathy.
His great advantage, as it happens, was his ignorance—and his mother’s aversion to priests.
WHAT MOST STRUCK PEOPLE on first meeting Guglielmo Marconi was that no matter what his true age happened to be at a given moment, he looked much older. He was of average height and had dark hair, but unlike many of his compatriots, his complexion was pale and his eyes were blue, an inheritance from his Irish mother. His expression was sober and serious, the sobriety amplified by his dark, level eyebrows and by the architecture of his lips and mouth, which at rest conveyed a mixture of distaste and impatience. When he smiled, all this changed, according to those who knew him. One has to accept this on faith, however. A search of a hundred photographs of him is likely to yield at best a single half-smile, his least appealing expression, imparting what appeared to be disdain.
His father, Giuseppe Marconi, was a prosperous farmer and businessman, somewhat dour, who had wanted his son to continue along his path. His mother, Anne Jameson, a daughter of the famous Irish whiskey empire, had a more impulsive and exploratory nature. Guglielmo was their second child, born on April 25, 1874. Family lore held that soon after his birth an elderly gardener exclaimed at the size of his ears—“Che orecchi grandi ha!”—essentially, “What big ears he has!”—and indeed his ears were larger than one might have expected, and remained one of his salient physical features. Annie took offense. She countered, “He will be able to hear the still, small voice of the air.” Family lore also held that along with her complexion and blue eyes, her willful nature was transferred to the boy and established within him a turbulence of warring traits. Years later his own daughter, Degna, would describe him as “an aggregate of opposites: patience and uncontrollable anger, courtesy and harshness, shyness and pleasure in adulation, devotion to purpose and”—this last for her a point of acute pain—“thoughtlessness toward many who loved him.”
Marconi grew up on the family’s estate, Villa Griffone, in Pontecchio, on the Reno River a dozen or so miles south of Bologna, where the land begins to rise to form the Apennines. Like many villas in Italy, this one was a large stone box of three stories fronted with stucco painted the color of autumn wheat. Twenty windows in three rows punctuated its front wall, each framed by heavy green shutters. Tubs planted with lemon trees stood on the terrace before the main door. A loggia was laced with paulownia that bloomed with clusters of mauve blossoms. To the south, at midday, the Apennines blued the horizon. As dusk arrived, they turned pink from the falling sun.
Electricity became a fascination for Marconi early in his childhood. In that time anyone of a scientific bent found the subject compelling, and nowhere was this more the case than in Bologna, long associated with advances in electrical research. Here a century earlier Luigi Galvani had done awful things to dead frogs, such as inserting brass hooks into their spinal cords and hanging them from an iron railing to observe how they twitched, in order to test his belief that their muscles contained an electrical fluid, “animal electricity.” It was in Bologna also that Galvani’s peer and adversary, Count Alessandro Volta, constructed his famous “pile” in which he stacked layers of silver, brine-soaked cloth, and zinc and thereby produced the first battery capable of producing a steady flow of current.
As a child, Marconi was possessive about electricity. He called it “my electricity.” His experiments became more and more involved and consumed increasing amounts of time. The talent he exhibited toward tinkering did not extend to academics, however, though one reason may have been his mother’s attitude toward education. “One of the enduring mysteries surrounding Marconi is his almost complete lack of any kind of formal schooling,” wrote his grandson, Francesco Paresce, a physicist in twenty-first-century Munich. “In my mind this had certainly something to do with Annie’s profound distaste for the Catholic Church ingrained in her by her Protestant Irish upbringing and probably confirmed by her association with the late nineteenth-century society of Bologna.” At the time the city was closely bonded to the Vatican. In a letter to her husband Annie sought assurances that Marconi would be allowed to learn “the good principles of my religion and that he not come into contact with the great superstition that is commonly taught to small children in Italy.” The city’s best schools were operated by Jesuits, and this from Annie’s point of view made them inappropriate for Marconi. She made her husband swear that he would not let his son “be educated by the Priests.”
She tutored Marconi or hired tutors for him and allowed him to concentrate on physics and electricity, at the expense of grammar, literature, history, and mathematics. She also taught him piano. He came to love Chopin, Beethoven, and Schubert and discovered he had a gift not just for reading music on sight but also for mentally transposing from one key to another. She taught him English and made sure he spoke it without flaw.
What schooling Marconi did have was episodic, occurring wherever the family happened to choose to spend its time, perhaps Florence or Livorno, an important Italian seaport known to the British as Leghorn. His first formal schooling began when he was twelve years old, when his parents sent him to Florence to the Istituto Cavallero, where his solitary upbringing now proved a liability. He was shy and had never learned the kind of tactics necessary for making and engaging friends that other children acquired in their first years in school. His daughter, Degna, wrote, “The expression on Guglielmo’s face, construed by his classmates as arising from a sense of superiority, was actually a cover for shyness and worry.”
At the istituto he discovered that while he had been busy learning English, his ability to speak Italian had degraded. One day the principal told him, “Your Italian is atrocious.” To underscore the point, or merely to humiliate the boy, he then ordered Marconi to recite a poem studied in class earlier that day. “And speak up!” the principal said.
Marconi made it through one line, when the class erupted in laughter. As Degna put it, “His classmates began baying like hounds on a fresh scent. They howled, slapped their thighs, and embarked on elaborate pantomimes.”
Years later one teacher would tell a reporter, “He always was a model of good behavior, but as to his brain—well, the least said, the soonest mended. I am afraid he got many severe smackings, but he took them like an angel. At that time he never could learn anything by heart. It was impossible, I used to think. I had never seen a child with so defective a memory.” His teachers referred to Marconi as “the little Englishman.”
Other schools and tutors followed, as did private lessons on electricity by one of Livorno’s leading professors. Here Marconi was introduced to a retired telegrapher, Nello Marchetti, who was losing his eyesight. The two got along well, and soon Marconi began reading to the older man. In turn, Marchetti taught him Morse code and techniques for sending messages by telegraph.
Many years later scientists would share Marconi’s wonder at why it was that he of all people should come to see something that the most august minds of his day had missed. Over the next century, of course, his idea would seem elementary and routine, but at the time it was startling, so much so that the sheer surprise of it would cause some to brand him a fraud and charlatan—worse, a foreign charlatan—and make his future path immeasurably more difficult.
To fully appreciate the novelty, one has to step back into that great swath of history that Degna later would call “The Great Hush.”
IN THE BEGINNING, IN THE INVISIBLE realm where electromagnetic energy traveled, there was emptiness. Such energy did exist, of course, and traveled in the form of waves launched from the sun or by lightning or any random spark, but these emanations rocketed past without meaning or purpose, at the speed of light. When men first encountered sparks, as whe
n a lightning bolt incinerated their neighbors, they had no idea of their nature or cause, only that they arrived with a violence unlike anything else in the world. Historians often place humankind’s initial awareness of the distinct character of electrical phenomena in ancient Greece, with a gentleman named Thales, who discovered that by rubbing amber he could attract to it small bits of things, like beard hair and lint. The Greek word for amber was elektron.
As men developed a scientific outlook, they created devices that allowed them to generate their own sparks. These were electrostatic machines that involved the rubbing of one substance against another, either manually or through the use of a turning mechanism, until enough electrostatic charge—static electricity—built up within the machine to produce a healthy spark or, in the jargon of electrical engineers, a disruptive discharge. Initially scientists were pleased just to be able to launch a spark, as when Isaac Newton did it in 1643, but the technology quickly improved and, in 1730, enabled one Stephen Gray to devise an experiment that for sheer inventive panache outstripped anything that had come before. He clothed a boy in heavy garments until his body was thoroughly insulated but left the boy’s hands, head, and feet naked. Using nonconducting silk strings, he hung the boy in the air, then touched an electrified glass tube to his naked foot, thus causing a spark to rocket from his nose.