Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [162]
The church granted the annulment, and soon afterward he married Bezzi Scali.
MARCONI’S INVENTIONS, and advances by engineers elsewhere in the world, led quickly to the wireless transmission of voice and music. In 1920 the Marconi company invited Dame Nellie Melba to its station at Chelmsford to sing over the airwaves. At the station an engineer explained that her voice would be transmitted from the station’s tower. Misunderstanding, Dame Melba said, “Young man, if you think I am going to climb up there you are greatly mistaken.”
As late as 1926 wireless at sea continued to enthrall passengers. A traveler named Sir Henry Morris-Jones kept a record in his diary of a voyage on a second Montrose, launched by Canadian Pacific a few years earlier. “What a world we live in,” he wrote. “A telegraph boy brings me a message handed in two hours before at Hull and I am 2000 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Marconi realized, late, that his approach to wireless during his transatlantic quest had been a mistake. He had been obsessed with increasing the length of antennas and the power of transmitters, until he discovered through experiment that in fact very short waves could travel long distances far more readily and with far less expenditure of power. His giant stations had been unnecessary. “I admit that I am responsible for the adopting of long waves for long-distance communication,” he said in 1927. “Everyone followed me in building stations hundreds of times more powerful than would have been necessary had short waves been used. Now I have realized my mistake.”
Other scientists resolved the mysteries that had plagued Marconi through his early work. Oliver Heaviside, physicist and mathematician, proposed that a stratum existed in the atmosphere that caused wireless signals to bounce back to earth, and that this would account for why signals could travel very long distances over the horizon. Others confirmed its existence and dubbed it the Heaviside Layer. Scientists also confirmed that sunlight excited a region of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere, which accounted for the daytime distortion that had so plagued Marconi.
In 1933 the city of Chicago invited Marconi to attend its new world’s fair, the Century of Progress Exhibition, and declared October 2 to be Marconi Day. The climax of the day occurred when Marconi tapped three dots, the letter S, into the exhibition’s powerful transmitter, and stations in New York, London, Rome, Bombay, Manila, and Honolulu relayed it around the world, back to Chicago, in three minutes, twenty-five seconds.
As he aged, Marconi became aloof. At his London headquarters, Marconi House, he would only ride the elevator alone or with someone he knew, never with a stranger. He established a station to listen for signals from Mars and instructed its operators, “Listen for a regularly repeated signal.” In 1923 he joined the Fascist Party and became a friend of Mussolini, though as time passed he became disenchanted with the increasing bellicosity of the Fascists and Nazis. He loathed Hitler.
On the afternoon of July 19, 1937, Marconi experienced a severe heart attack. At three the next morning he rang for his valet. “I am very sorry, but I am going to put you and my friends to considerable trouble. I fear my end is near. Will you please inform my wife?” Forty-five minutes later he was dead. The first outsider to arrive was Mussolini, who prayed at his bedside. Radio listeners around the world heard the news, which darkened an already bleak day in which the U.S. Navy announced that it had ended its search for Amelia Earhart.
That night the gloom lifted a bit, at least for those listeners