Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [27]
The delay caused by the destruction of his equipment amplified his ever-present fear that some other inventor with an apparatus as good as his own or better might suddenly appear. With Jameson Davis’s help, Marconi acquired materials for his apparatus and set to work on reconstruction. He demonstrated the finished product to his cousin and to others in the Jameson diaspora. The effect was as startling as if a dead relative’s voice had just emerged from the mouth of a medium. Here was a means of communicating not just across space but through walls.
They talked of what to do next. A patent was necessary, of course. And a sponsor would help—perhaps the British Post Office, which controlled all telegraphy in Britain.
Here the Jameson network proved invaluable. Through an intermediary, Jameson Davis arranged to have Marconi meet with William Preece, chief electrician of the British Post Office. By dint of his position, Preece, two years from the post office’s retirement age of sixty-five, was the most prominent man in British telegraphy and one of the empire’s best-known lecturers. He was well liked by fellow engineers and employees but was loathed by Oliver Lodge and his allies, who together comprised a cadre of theoretical physicists known as “Maxwellians” for their reverence for Clerk Maxwell and his use of mathematics to posit the existence of electromagnetic waves. To the Maxwellians, Preece was the king of “practicians.” He and Lodge had more than once come to metaphoric blows over whether theory or everyday experience had more power to uncover scientific truth.
Marconi knew of Preece and knew that he had attempted with some success to signal across short distances using induction, the phenomenon whereby one circuit can generate a sympathetic current in another. Preece had never heard of Marconi but with characteristic generosity agreed to see him.
Soon afterward Marconi arrived at post office headquarters, three large buildings on St. Martin’s le Grand, just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. One building, named General Post Office East, occupied the east side of the street and managed the processing and delivery of 2,186,800,000 letters a year throughout the United Kingdom, 54.3 letters per resident, with deliveries in London up to a dozen times a day. Across the street stood General Post Office West, which housed the Telegraph Department, Preece’s bailiwick, where anyone with a proper introduction from “a banker or other well-known citizen” could visit the Telegraph Instrument Galleries and see the heart of Britain’s telegraphic empire. Here in a room measuring 27,000 square feet stood five hundred telegraphic instruments and their operators, the largest telegraph station in the world. Four large steam engines powered pneumatic tubes that allowed the immediate dispatch of telegrams from the galleries direct to offices throughout London’s financial center, the City, and its neighboring district, the Strand, named for the boulevard that fronted the Thames.
Marconi carried two large bags of equipment. He set out his induction coil, spark generator, coherer, and other equipment, but apparently he had not brought with him a telegraph key. One of Preece’s assistants, P. R. Mullis, found one and together he and Marconi set up sending and receiving circuits on two tables. At this point Preece pulled out his watch and said quietly, “It has gone twelve now. Take this young man over to the refreshment bar and see that he gets a good dinner on my account, and come back here again by two o’clock.”
Mullis and Marconi had lunch and sipped tea, then strolled along Farringdon Road, where Marconi took particular interest in the wheelbarrows of street traders “with their loads of junk, books, and fruit.” By Mullis’s description, this lunch was one of relaxation and ease. Marconi would