Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [163]
THROUGHOUT THE DAY of July 21, 1937, Marconi’s body lay in state in the Farnesina Palace in Rome. The day was hot, the air heavy with the old-water scent of the nearby Tiber. A crowd numbering in the thousands blackened the square in front of the palace and filled the surrounding streets like spilled ink.
Beatrice came alone and uninvited. Even her children—their children—were not told of the funeral plans. She came incognito. She was now fifty-two and as beautiful as always. When her turn came, she moved to the bier where he lay exposed.
Once she and this man had been lovers. So much history lay between them, and now she was not even recognized, a ghost. Ten years had passed since the final humiliation of the annulment, and in that time he had seemed to abandon even the memory of her and the children.
She moved closer to the bier, and suddenly the distance that had accumulated between them shrank to nothing. She was overwhelmed and fell to her knees. Mourners passed behind her, the vanguard of a line that stretched seemingly across Rome.
At length she stood, confident that she had remained anonymous. “I was unobserved,” she wrote to Degna. “No one could have recognized me.”
She exited the palace into the extraordinary heat of the afternoon and disappeared among the thousands still waiting to enter.
At six o’clock that evening, when his funeral began, wireless operators around the globe halted telegraphy for two minutes. For possibly the last time in human history, the “great hush” again prevailed.
FLEMING AND LODGE
IN THE SUMMER OF 1911 Oliver Lodge, sixty years old, began building what he called “a fighting fund” to bring a lawsuit against Marconi for infringing on his tuning patent. As of June 15, he and his allies had contributed £10,000 to the fund, more than $1 million today. Lodge wrote to William Preece, “They are clearly infringing, and we have a moral right to royalty. Accordingly I am actively bestirring myself to that end.” Marconi had already approached Lodge with an offer to acquire his patents, apparently concerned that Lodge might indeed prevail in a court test, but Lodge had turned him down.
Preece, now seventy-seven, counseled caution, even though, as he put it, “I agree with every word you say and I am sure you are taking the proper attitude.”
That summer Preece put aside his own antipathy toward Marconi and brokered a settlement, under which the Marconi company acquired Lodge’s tuning patent for an undisclosed sum and agreed to pay him a stipend of £1,000 a year for the patent’s duration. On October 24, 1911, Preece wrote to Lodge, “I am delighted to hear that matters are settled between you and the Marconi Company. I am quite sure you have done the right thing for yourself and that you will now get your deserts. But you will have to bring Marconi down a peg or two. He is soaring too much in the higher regions.”
Lodge lost his youngest son, Raymond, to World War I and sought to reach the boy in the ether. He claimed success. He believed that during sittings with certain mediums he had conversed with Raymond. On one occasion, shortly before Christmas 1915, he heard his son say, “I love you. I love you intensely. Father, please speak to me.” The conversation continued, and a few moments later Lodge heard, “Father, tell mother she has her son with her all day on Christmas Day. There will be thousands and thousands of us back in the homes on that day, but the horrid part is that so many of the fellows don’t get welcomed. Please keep a place for me. I must go now.”
Lodge published a book about his experience in 1916, called Raymond, in which he offered comforting advice to the bereaved: “I recommend people in general to learn and realize that their loved ones are still active and useful and interested and happy—more alive than ever in one sense—and to make up their minds to live a useful life till they rejoin them.”
The book became hugely popular owing to the many parents seeking