by Erik Larson
Cook assured Marconi there would be no problem persuading the landowner to let Marconi build here. The landowner was Cook himself. He had acquired the land using the proceeds of his work as a wrecker. Whether either man recognized the paradox therein is unclear, but here was Marconi, whose technology promised to make the sea safer, acquiring land from a man who had made his living harvesting precisely the wrecks Marconi hoped to eliminate. In the future these eight acres of seaside land would be some of the most coveted terrain in the world, but at this time the stretch was considered worthless. Marconi bought it for next to nothing.
Marconi also hired Cook to be his general contractor, with a mandate to find workers, arrange living quarters and food supplies, and acquire necessary building materials. Marconi and his men took their initial meals at the nearby inn, but the food was so awful that he vowed never to eat there again. He arranged to have more elegant fare, and the wines to go with it, shipped from Boston and New York. Among the locals this caused a good deal of frowning and saddled Marconi with a lasting reputation as a culinary aesthete.
Soon Marconi headed back to England, leaving Vyvyan to face the true nature of the location.
IN LONDON COLONEL HOZIER of Lloyd’s and Nevil Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall, acting together as a syndicate, approached Marconi and offered to sell him Maskelyne’s patents and apparatus. Marconi listened. As negotiations proceeded, Hozier somehow cut Maskelyne out of the syndicate and began negotiating on his own behalf, despite the fact that it was Maskelyne’s technology upon which the syndicate was based. Hozier wanted £3,000—over $300,000 today—and a seat on Marconi’s board. To make the arrangement more palatable, even irresistible, Hozier promised that in return he would broker a deal between Marconi and Lloyd’s itself.
Hozier’s maneuver left Maskelyne embittered. But his anger, for the moment, seemed of no consequence.
THE LANDSCAPE THAT NOW confronted Vyvyan was lovely but spare. There were few trees, none tall enough to be worthy of the name, let alone to be useful for building houses or ships. Most of the surrounding flora hugged the ground. Hog cranberry coated the sand, tufted here and there by beach heather, also called “poverty grass,” a name that captured the overall austerity of the terrain. There was crowberry, savory-leaved aster, mouse-ear, and goldenrod, as well as pitch pine planted during the previous century to keep wind-driven sand from overwhelming towns on the bay side of the cape. Everywhere the wind caught stalks of American beach grass and bent them until their tips scraped the sand, engraving precise circles and earning them the nickname “compass grass.” Thoreau wrote, “The barren aspect of the land would hardly be believed if described.”
Clouds often filled the sky. The Weather Bureau’s Nantucket station, nearest the cape, reported for 1901 only 83 clear days, 101 days identified as partly cloudy, and 181 days where clouds reigned. On such days all color left the world. Sky, sea, and ground became as gray as shale, the color blue a memory. Frequent gales brought winds of fifty or sixty miles an hour and shot snow off the cliff edge in angry spirals. The boom of the sea paced the day like the tick of a gigantic clock.
The plan for the station called for the construction of living quarters for the staff, a boiler room to produce steam to generate electricity, a separate room full of equipment to concentrate power and produce a spark, and another room in which an operator would hammer out messages in Morse code. The most important structure was the aerial, and that was what most worried Vyvyan. In London Marconi had shown Vyvyan plans for a new antenna array to be built at Poldhu, and he ordered Vyvyan to build the same one in South Wellfleet. As soon as Vyvyan saw the plans, he grew concerned. He would have to erect twenty masts similar in design to the masts of sailing ships, complete with top gallants, royals, and yards. The finished masts would rise to 200 feet and stand in a circle about 200 feet in diameter, a Stonehenge of timber. The height of the masts, plus the 130-foot height of the cliff, would give Marconi’s antenna an effective height of well over 300 feet, thus in theory—Marconi’s theory—increasing the station’s ability to send and receive signals over long distances. A complex series of guy wires and connectors was supposed to keep the masts from toppling. The masts in turn would support an aerial of wire. A heavy cable of twisted copper would connect the tops of all the masts, and from it would be strung hundreds of thinner wires, all converging to form a giant cone with its tip over the transmission building. A cable run through the roof would link the cone to the spark generator within.
What troubled Vyvyan most was the rigging. Each mast should have had its own array of guy wires, so that if one mast failed the others would remain standing. Instead, the top of each was connected to the tops of its neighbors with “triatic stays.” Vyvyan realized that if one mast collapsed, these connections would cause the rest to fall as well. He told Marconi of his concerns, but Marconi overruled him and commanded that the station be built as designed. Vyvyan accepted his decision. “It was clear to me, however, that the mast system was distinctly unsafe.”
Construction advanced slowly, hampered by what the Weather Bureau called a “period of exceptionally severe storms.” April brought gales that scoured the coast with winds up to fifty-four miles an hour. May brought rainfall in quantities that broke all records for New England.
The men hired by Ed Cook lived in Wellfleet and adjacent communities, but Vyvyan, Bottomley, and the full-time Marconi employees lived on the grounds in a one-story residence with about two hundred feet of living space, a level of coziness that eventually prompted the station’s chief engineer, W. W. Bradfield, to plead for an additional wing containing more sleeping space and a recreation room. He wrote, “In view of the isolation of the station, I regard it as almost necessary that this should be done in order that the men may be comfortable, contented, and that their best work may be got out of them.”
The men did what they could to improve their living conditions. They dined on a table draped in white and spined with four candles jutting at odd angles from improvised holders. They read books, played the station’s piano, and sang, and from time to time they hiked to the bay side to pick oysters at the mouth of Blackfish Creek, named for the herds of small whales called social whales that locals once drove onto the beach and butchered for oil. They went beachcombing, the sands below the Truro highlands being a lot more interesting in those days given the frequency of shipwrecks. One never knew what treasure might turn up, including crockery, luggage, fine soaps from a ship’s cabin, and the occasional corpse, its cavities filled with sand. Thoreau called the beach “a vast morgue” for all the dead men and creatures the sea discharged. “There is naked Nature—inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.”
This being the age of hired help, the station had a cook and employed two Wellfleet women who came each day to clean. They wore maid’s caps and aprons. One of the women was Mable Tubman, daughter of a prominent Wellfleet resident, who caught the attention of one of Marconi’s men, Carl Taylor. A photograph from the time shows Carl and Mable seated on the beach on a day bright with sun. What makes this photograph unusual is that it captures people actually having fun. Mable is wearing her apron and maid’s cap and is turned away from the camera, watching the sea. Carl is wearing a light-colored suit and looks into the camera, a huge grin running from one earlobe to the other. He also is wearing a maid’s cap.
THOUGH DEEPLY DISTRACTED by the work under way on both sides of the Atlantic and by myriad other developments, Marconi apparently believed that things were sufficiently under control that he and Josephine Holman could at last announce their engagement—though the major pressure to do so likely came not from him but from Josephine, who was growing increasingly concerned about just where she stood relative to his work. He still had not come to visit her family in Indianapolis.
Marconi’s mother, Annie, had concerns about her own status in Marconi’s life, now that he planned to marry. “To lose him to anyone, rich or p
oor, on his first flight from home was hard,” Degna Marconi wrote years later.
Marconi’s mother did her best to behave “self-effacingly,” but she felt aggrieved when Josephine failed to write to her, and she complained to Marconi. Soon afterwards a letter did arrive, which Annie described as “very kind and sweet.”
Now Annie wrote to Marconi, “I wish I had got this letter [from Josephine] before and I should not have said anything to you about her not writing. Now it is all right and I feel much happier and shall write to her soon.” She added an odd line to this letter: “Our friends here think it is only right I should be at your wedding”—as if there had been serious consideration that she would not be present.
Spring brought successes and trials. On May 21, 1901, Oliver Lodge won a U.S. patent for “electrical telegraphy,” and he and William Preece became de facto allies, more and more outspoken in their criticism of Marconi. Lodge also opened an attack on another front. He formed a new company with his friend Alexander Muirhead, the Lodge-Muirhead Syndicate, to begin selling Lodge’s technology.
And Marconi endured a very public failure. He had agreed again to provide coverage by wireless of the America’s Cup yacht races, now for the Associated Press, but this time he faced competition from two fledging American companies. The transmissions interfered with one another so much that Marconi could not send messages to his shore station for relay to the Associated Press—despite his claims to have perfected the technology for tuning transmissions to avoid interference. Afterward allegations arose that one of the competing companies had sought deliberately to create interference by transmitting exceptionally long dashes and, at one point, placing a weight on their transmission key and leaving it there, creating what one observer called “the longest dash ever sent by wireless.”
In another realm, however, Marconi made progress. On May 21, 1901, the first British ship equipped with wireless, the Lake Champlain, departed Liverpool on a transatlantic voyage. At the same time Marconi’s men also were installing his apparatus aboard Cunard’s Lucania. During the Lake Champlain’s return voyage its Marconi operator got a surprise—a message from the Lucania at midocean. To mariners resigned to the isolation of the sea, the feat seemed a miracle.
Only years later would anyone take note of how strange it was that the second officer of the Lake Champlain at this pioneering moment was a young sailor by the name of Henry Kendall.
WITH WARMER WEATHER the work on Cape Cod proceeded quickly, though Vyvyan and Bottomley discovered that unlike Poldhu, where temperatures in summer remained cool, even cold, the cape often registered some of the hottest weather in New England, with temperatures in the nineties accompanied by wet-blanket humidity. At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity.
As each mast rose, Vyvyan’s concerns increased. Winds routinely blew at twenty to thirty miles an hour, sometimes more. By mid-June his workers had erected seventeen lower masts out of twenty. Fourteen of them now had top masts, and ten had a third stage, the top gallants. The plan called for each also to get a fourth stage, the royal masts, hair-raising work for the men who had to scale the masts and secure each portion to the next. A photograph shows these men, called riggers, at work—tiny figures alone at the tops of masts two hundred feet tall that swayed in even the slightest breeze.
By the end of the month the boiler house, generation equipment, and transmitter were in place and the circle of masts was complete. Photographs show a grove of two-hundred-foot masts linked and steadied with guy wires having all the substance of cobwebs draped on a candlestick.
Vyvyan tested the transmitter. At night the spark gap lit the sky with such intensity that it was visible and audible four miles down the beach. Up close it was deafening, like the crack of a starter pistol repeated over and over. An early employee, James Wilson, recalled, “If you opened the door and stepped out you had to hold your ears.”
At times the wires of the antenna shimmered a cold blue. To keep electricity from flowing through the guy wires and distorting the signal, the men installed “deadeyes” of a very hard wood called lignum vitae at intervals along each wire. Shipwrights used dead eyes as connectors in rigging, but Marconi’s men used them as insulators to break up potential paths for current. Still, current traveled to unexpected places. Through induction it charged drainpipes and stove flues. Even something as prosaic as hanging the wash became an electric experience. Mrs. Higgins, the station cook, reported feeling myriad electric shocks as she pinned clothing to the line.
August brought heat and fog, with Provincetown again recording the highest temperatures in New England, ninety-two degrees on August 12 and August 18, but storms were few and the winds reasonable, at no time exceeding thirty miles an hour. And yet, Vyvyan wrote, “In August, under the influence of nothing more than a stiff breeze, the heads of the masts on the windward side bent over to a dangerous degree.”
The triatic stays that linked the tops of the masts ensured that when one mast swayed, they all swayed.
MARCONI MAINTAINED SECRECY. No one outside the company knew yet that he planned to try sending messages across the ocean. When an Admiralty official, G. C. Crowley, came to observe at Poldhu, Marconi enclosed the station’s receiver in a box, just as he had done for his earliest demonstrations. Marconi willingly discussed his results, Crowley wrote, but would not let anyone look inside. “We used to call it ‘the black box of Poldhu.’”
Marconi himself barely understood the nature of the phenomena he had marshaled, which made the process of preparing each station a matter of experiment. The huge cone-shaped aerial was the product of Marconi’s instinctive sense of how Hertzian waves behaved. No established theory determined its shape. Its height reflected Marconi’s conviction, partially confirmed by experimentation, that the distance a signal traveled varied in relation to the height of the antenna.
Beyond these assumptions lay an impossible array of other variables that likewise had to be resolved, any of which could affect overall performance. The subtlest of adjustments affected the nature and strength of the signal. Fleming, Marconi’s scientific advisor, found that something as simple as polishing the metal balls of the spark gap greatly improved signal clarity. It was like playing chess with pieces ungoverned by rules, where a pawn might prove to be a queen for one turn, a knight for the next.
To make matters more difficult, the thing Marconi was trying to harness was invisible, and no means yet existed for measuring it. No one could say for sure even how Hertzian waves traveled or through what medium. Like Fleming and Lodge and other established physicists, Marconi believed that electromagnetic waves traveled through the ether, even though no one had been able to prove that this mysterious medium even existed.
Marconi and Fleming tried everything they could to boost the power and efficiency of the transmitters at Poldhu and Wellfleet, at times with surprising effect. As power increased, the ambient current became harder and harder to manage. At Poldhu the gutters on nearby homes sparked, and blue lightning suffused the Cornish mists. On August 9, 1901, George Kemp in Poldhu wrote in his diary, “We had an electric phenomenon—it was like a terrific clap of thunder over the top of the masts when every stay sparked to earth in spite of the insulated breaks. This caused the horses to stampede and the men to leave the ten acre enclosure in great haste.”
The Poldhu station still was not finished when a period of extremely foul weather arrived and slowed things further. The masts were up, but high winds made it impossible for riggers to reach the mastheads. Squalls raked the cliff. On August 14, 1901, Kemp wrote, “The weather is still boisterous. The men could not work outside today.”
The squalls and winds continued without ease for a full month, forcing Kemp to send workers home.
Signs went
up beside the condensers that boosted the station’s electrical power: “Caution. Very Dangerous. Stand Clear.” At night the eruption of sparks could be seen for miles along the coast, followed by the crack of artificial thunder. One witness would call the Poldhu station “the thunder factory.”
IN LONDON THERE WAS good news: Marconi’s negotiations with Colonel Hozier of Lloyd’s now yielded fruit. Hozier had given up trying to sell patents and technology to Marconi after realizing that the only aspect of the talks that interested him was the possibility of a contract with Lloyd’s itself.
Hozier negotiated on behalf of Lloyd’s but also on his own behalf, as a private individual, and on September 26, 1901, he struck a deal with Marconi. Hozier got his seat on the board and personally received £4,500 in cash and stock, half a million dollars today. Marconi got the right to build ten stations for Lloyd’s, and Lloyd’s agreed to use no other brand of wireless equipment for fourteen years.
The most important clause stipulated that the ten stations would be allowed to communicate only with ships carrying Marconi equipment, virtually ensuring that as shipping lines adopted wireless, they would choose Marconi’s service. Shippers understood that wireless would make the process of reporting the arrivals and departures of ships to Lloyd’s much safer and more efficient by eliminating the danger incurred when ships left course to venture close to shore for visual identification by Lloyd’s agents. The agreement moved Marconi closer to achieving a monopoly over ship-to-shore communication, but it also fed resentment among governments, shipowners, and emerging competitors already unhappy with Marconi’s policy barring his customers from communicating with any other wireless system.