Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [118]
Predictably, their opposition had a perverse effect on Beatrice. Now, in the grand tradition of the daughters of titled Englishwomen, Beatrice steeled her resolve. She would marry Marconi, no matter what.
MARCONI WAS CRUSHED AND probably furious, fully aware of the underlying reasons for the O’Briens’ refusal. He had lived among the wealthy of England long enough to know that their welcome had boundaries. He fled again, this time for Rome.
Troubling news drifted back. A German governess in the O’Brien family happened to read in a European newspaper that Marconi had been spotted often in the company of a Princess Giacinta Ruspoli. The governess told Lady Inchiquin. Worse news followed the next day. Another item reported that Marconi and the princess were engaged.
In the O’Brien mansion there were tears and rage and underneath it all a certain smug sense that the inevitable had occurred. Marconi was, after all, an Italian. Lady Inchiquin and the fifteenth baron accepted the reports as hard fact and saw them as affirming the righteousness of their decision. Beatrice wept. She insisted the news was false.
The situation called for lofty counsel. Lady Inchiquin took Beatrice to the home of an ancient and imposing aunt, Lady Metcalfe, “whose opinions,” according to Degna, “were often invoked in times of crisis.” Over tea, as Beatrice sat silent, the Ladies Inchiquin and Metcalfe railed and condemned, oblivious to her presence—“as though Beatrice, obviously reduced to the status of a naughty child, were not there.”
Marconi was not the sole object of Lady Metcalfe’s scorn. At one point she turned to Lady Inchiquin and asked, “What can you be thinking of, to let this child become engaged to a foreigner?”
IN ROME, MARCONI too read the reports of his alleged engagement and, realizing their likely impact in the O’Brien household, he immediately left for London. The reports were false, he assured Lady Inchiquin, and then he began a campaign to charm her into permitting his marriage to Beatrice. Surprisingly, he succeeded. He and Lady Inchiquin became friends. She took to calling him “Marky.”
The engagement moved forward. Beatrice and Marconi scheduled their wedding for the following March.
From the first there were warning signs. “She was a born flirt,” Degna wrote, and was “incapable of suppressing her adorable, flashing smile at every male who came near her.”
At such times Marconi flared with jealous rage.
IN HIS LABORATORY at University College, London, Fleming directed the hurt of his rejection into work aimed at winning his way back into Marconi’s favor. He invented a device that in time would revolutionize wireless, the thermionic valve. He wrote to Marconi, “I have not mentioned this to anyone yet as it may become very useful.” Soon afterward he invented another device, the cymometer, that at last provided a means for the accurate measurement of wavelength. He told Marconi about this as well.
Oliver Lodge, meanwhile, became a bona-fide competitor to Marconi. In Birmingham, in moments when he wasn’t busy managing his university or teaching or conducting research or investigating strange occurrences, Lodge helped his friend Alexander Muirhead attempt to find buyers for their wireless system. In 1904, while seeking a contract from the Indian government to provide a wireless link to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, they wound up in direct competition with Marconi.
And won.
HOOK
THE NEW CENTURY RACED FORWARD. Motorized taxis and buses clogged Piccadilly. The fastest ocean liners cut the time for an Atlantic crossing down to five and a half days. In Germany the imperial war fleet rapidly expanded, and British anxiety rose in step. The government began talks with the French, and in 1903 Erskine Childers published his one and only novel, The Riddle of the Sands, in which two