Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [116]
The new station would impose great strain on his company’s increasingly fragile financial health, to say nothing of taxing his board’s willingness to support his transatlantic quest—especially now, in the face of the grave threat posed by Kaiser Wilhelm II and his international conference on wireless. The conference had taken place the previous August in Berlin, and the nations in attendance had agreed in principle that every station or ship should be able to communicate with every other, regardless of whose company manufactured the equipment involved. They agreed also that companies must exchange the technical specifications necessary to make such communication possible. For the moment the agreement had no effect, but eventual ratification seemed certain.
Back in London Marconi confronted skepticism and suspicion that seemed to have deepened. He found it hard to comprehend. Wireless worked. He had demonstrated its power time and again. Lloyd’s had endorsed the system. More and more ships carried his apparatus and operators. News reports testified to the value of wireless. The previous December, for example, the Red Star Line’s Kroonland had lost her steering, but thanks to wireless all her passengers had been able to notify family that they were safe. Even Kaiser Wilhelm’s conference testified, albeit perversely, to the quality and dominance of Marconi’s system.
Yet here it was, 1904, and the author of a newly published book on wireless still felt compelled to write: “Notwithstanding the great mass of positive evidence, there are many conservative people who doubt that wireless telegraphy is or will be an art commercially practicable. Public exhibitions have so often proved disappointing that a great deal of disparaging testimony has circulated.”
Marconi turned thirty on April 25. The context was bittersweet. “At thirty,” his daughter, Degna, wrote, “his nerves were dangerously frayed, he was disheartened, and near the end of his endurance.”
He told his friend Luigi Solari, “A man cannot live on glory alone.”
MARCONI, HOWEVER, WAS NOT exactly leading a life of misery. In London, when he wasn’t immersed in business matters, he dined in elegant restaurants, certainly the Criterion and Trocadero, and was coveted as a guest at dinner parties in Mayfair and at the country homes of the titled rich. Marconi loved the company of beautiful women and was pursued by many, albeit in the sotto voce fashion of the day. The fact that he was Italian put him a rank or two below the kind of suitor that British parents considered ideal, but still, as Degna put it, he “was internationally considered a brilliant second-best.”
While conducting experiments from his base at the Haven Hotel in Poole, he often would sail to nearby Brownsea Island for lunch with his friends Charles and Florence Van Raalte, who owned the island and lived there in a castle. In the summer of 1904 the Van Raaltes had houseguests, a young woman named Beatrice O’Brien and her mother, Lady Inchiquin. Beatrice was nineteen years old and one of fourteen children of the fourteenth Baron Inchiquin, Edward Donagh O’Brien, who had died four years earlier, possibly from parental exhaustion. Beatrice and her siblings were accustomed to castle life, having grown up in a large one on the family estate, Dromoland, in County Clare, Ireland.
On a day