Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [170]
“She wasn’t a top-rank artist”: Rose, Red Plush, 29.
“To fail at even an East End”: Machray, Night Side, 118.
A photographer captured: Goodman, Crippen File, 15.
“Oh Belle does it hurt”: Clara Martinetti Statement. Brief for the Prosecution. NA-DPP, 1/13.
“A GIGANTIC EXPERIMENT”
Why bother at all: For an excellent discussion of this, see Aitken, Syntony, 240–41. Aitken argues that the cable companies could have confronted any competitor with deep cuts in price. The business was lucrative, the companies profitable. They also had the capacity to handle far more business. In a price war, he argues, the cable trust would have proven a dangerous competitor.
He recognized: Interview, Francesco Paresce, Marconi’s grandson, Munich, April 11, 2005. “He had no limits,” Paresce told me. “I think he felt from day one that radio waves would be able to link any two points on the earth.” That Marconi would propose so grand an experiment was due largely to his personality and to his appraisal of his company’s prospects. “In order to win the race he could not continue as he had done before, with little steps,” Paresce said. “Commercially he was realizing it wasn’t working, the system really wasn’t working.”
Paths that might have seemed more prudent did exist, Paresce said. “You would have thought he would have pushed much harder simply to communicate with a ship farther and farther away.” But to settle for this and not test his vision would have run against the grain of Marconi’s character. “I think it was something that was really him,” Paresce said. “He was a very stubborn man, he was a very driven man, and he was self-educated.” But Marconi also understood on some deep level that what science held to be immutable law might easily with time prove to be false. “He learned very early on not to take too seriously the science of the moment,” Paresce said. Marconi perhaps believed “there were enough unknowns about the problem that there was something that would come to his rescue.”
However outlandish Marconi’s idea might have seemed, it did have a practical dimension. “He was an extremely able media manipulator,” Paresce said. “I’m almost certain that the basic reason he did it is he had to give a big impetus to his commercial operation. By making a big splash he could attract more attention to his effort, and attract the best people to help solve its problems.”
“I have not the slightest doubt”: Hong, Wireless, 60.
“When you meet Marconi”: Quoted in Marconi, My Father, 76.
A frightened guest: Ibid., 76.
“peculiar semi-abstract air”: Ibid., 76.
“a bit absent-minded”: Quoted in Weightman, Signor Marconi’s, 59.
He found it: Marconi, My Father, 76–77. For more details on the America’s Cup episode, see pp. 77–80. See also, Weightman, Signor Marconi’s, 60–61 and Baker, History, 48–49.
“The shock from the sending coil”: Quoted in Marconi, My Father, 80; Faulkner, Watchers, 7.
“I noticed”: Marconi, My Father, 168.
“Well try using the other foot”: Isted, I, 55.
The St. Paul suited him: The St. Paul had a twin, the St. Louis, which in 1907 carried a four-year-old boy named Leslie Townes Hope, later Bob Hope, from England to a new life in America. Of his emigration he later said, “I left England at the age of four when I found out I couldn’t be king.” Fox, Transatlantic, 391; Hope’s quip comes from BobHope.com/bob.htm.
“The Needles resembled”: Quoted in Marconi, My Father, 82–83.
“As all know”: Hancock, Wireless, 20.
Josephine Bowen Holman: To gather details about Holman and her roots, I conducted research in the Indiana State Library, and there consulted the following sources: Indianapolis News, December 20, December 21, 1901; January 21, January 22, 1902; June 5, 1972; Indianapolis Star, December 20, 1909, May 24, 1948; August 4, 1979; Indianapolis Star Magazine, March 8, 1970; Indianapolis Times, July 23, 1937. Also, Lewis, “Woodruff Place,” pp. 3–8; McDonald, Indianapolis, 29–31; McKenzie, Blue Book; and Woodruff Place Centennial, 2, 4.
“absolute certitude”: For material on Tesla and his Century article, see: Cheney and Uth,