Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [10]
Meanwhile other scientists had discovered an odd phenomenon in which a spark appeared to alter the conducting properties of metal filings. One of them, Edouard Branly of France, inserted filings into glass tubes to better demonstrate the effect and discovered that simply by tapping the tubes he could return the filings to their nonconducting state. He published his findings in 1891 but made no mention of using his invention to detect electromagnetic waves, though his choice of name for his device was prophetic. He called it a radio-conductor. At first his work was ignored, until Oliver Lodge and his peers began to speculate that maybe Hertz’s waves were what caused the filings to become conductive. Lodge devised an improved version of the Branly tube, his “coherer,” the instrument he unveiled at the Royal Institution.
Lodge’s own statements about his lecture reveal that he did not think of Hertzian waves as being useful; certainly the idea of harnessing them for communication never occurred to him. He believed them incapable of traveling far—he declared half a mile as the likely limit. It remained the case that as of the summer of 1894 no means existed for communicating without wires over distances beyond the reach of sight. This made for lonely times in the many places where wires did not reach, but nowhere was this absence felt more acutely than on the open sea, a fact of life that is hard to appreciate for later generations accustomed to pthe immediate world-grasp afforded by shortwave radio and cellular telephone.
The completeness of this estrangement from the affairs of land came home keenly to Winston Churchill in 1899 on the eve of the Boer War, when as a young war correspondent he sailed for Cape Town with the commander of Britain’s forces aboard the warship Dunottar Castle. He wrote, “Whilst the issues of peace and war seemed to hang in their last flickering balance, and before a single irrevocable shot had been fired, we steamed off into July storms. There was, of course, no wireless at sea in those days, and, therefore, at this most exciting moment the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces dropped completely out of the world. After four days at sea, the ship called at Madeira where there was no news. Twelve days passed in silence and only when the ship was two days from Cape Town was another ship sighted coming from the ‘land of knowledge’ and bearing vital news. Signals”—visual signals—“were made to the steamer, a tramp, asking for news, upon which she altered course to pass within a hundred yards of the Dunottar Castle, and held up a blackboard bearing the words, ‘Three battles. Penn Symonds killed.’ Then she steamed on her way, and the Commander-in-Chief, whose troops had been in action without his knowledge, was left to meditate upon this very cryptic message.”
BACK FROM THE ALPS, Marconi immediately set to work devising equipment to transform his idea into reality, with nothing to guide him but an inner conviction that his vision could be achieved. His mother recognized that something had changed. Marconi’s tinkering had attained focus. She saw too that now he needed a formal space dedicated to his experiments, though she had only a vague sense of what it was that he hoped to achieve. She persuaded her husband to allow Marconi to turn a portion of the villa’s third-floor attic into a laboratory. Where once Marconi’s ancestors had raised silkworms, now he wound coils of wire and fashioned Leyden jars that snapped blue with electrical energy.
On hot days the attic turned into a Sahara of stillness. Marconi grew thin, his complexion paler than usual. His mother became concerned. She left trays of food on the landing outside the attic door. Marconi’s father, Giuseppe, grew increasingly unhappy about Marconi’s obsession and its jarring effect on family routine.