Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [28]
At two they returned and rejoined Preece. Marconi was young, thin, and of modest height, but his manner was compelling. He spoke perfect English and dressed well, in a good suit with razor creases. His explanations of the various components of his apparatus were lucid. He did not smile. Anyone happening to glance at him would have gotten the impression that he was much older, though on closer inspection would have noted the smooth skin and clear blue eyes.
Marconi adjusted his circuits. He pressed the telegraph key. A bell rang on the opposite table. He tapped the coherer with his finger and pressed the key again. Again the bell rang.
Mullis looked at his boss. “I knew by the Chief’s quiet manner and smile that something unusual had been effected.”
PREECE LIKED MARCONI. He recognized that Marconi’s coherer was a modification of devices already demonstrated by others, including Lodge, but he saw too that Marconi had put them together in an elegant way, and if the man—this boy—were to be believed, he had succeeded at something that Lodge and the Maxwellians considered impossible, the sending of legible signals not just over long distances but to a point out of optical range.
Preece and Marconi were kindred spirits. Both understood the power of work and everyday practice to reveal truths—useful, practical truths—about the forces that drove the world. In the battle of practice versus theory, Marconi held the promise of becoming Preece’s secret weapon. Marconi was an inventor, an amateur, hardly even an adult, yet he had bested some of the great scientific minds of the age. Lodge had said that half a mile was probably the farthest that electromagnetic waves could travel, yet Marconi claimed to have sent signals more than twice as far and now, in Preece’s office, forecast transmissions to much greater distances with a confidence that Preece found convincing.
Preece recognized that his own efforts to use induction to produce a crude form of wireless communication had reached their practical limits. Most recently he had attempted to establish communication with a lightship guarding the notoriously deadly Goodwin Sands off the English coast. He had strung wire around the hull of the ship and laid a spiral of wire on the sea floor large enough that no matter where the wind, tide, and waves moved the ship, it always was positioned over part of the spiral. By interrupting the current in the spiral, he hoped to induce matching interruptions in the coil on the ship, and in so doing send Morse messages back and forth. The experiment failed. Later Preece would state that Marconi “came to me at a very fortunate time for myself, for I was just then smarting under the disappointment of having made a failure in communicating with the East Goodwin lightship.”
Two years from retirement, Preece understood that his discovery of Marconi might be the last shining thing that history would remember about his long tenure at the British Post Office. Far better to exit as the man who helped introduce the world to a revolution in communication than as an engineer whose own attempts at telegraphy without wires had failed.
The day came to an end when Preece’s coachman appeared and Preece set out in his brougham for his home in Wimbledon, the beat of hooves keeping time in the cool spring air.
IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER Marconi wrote about the meeting and disclosed a bit of news that must have amazed the elder Marconi, who only a year earlier had been so skeptical of his son’s electrical adventures. “He promised me that, if I wanted to perform experiments, then he would allow me the use of any necessary building belonging to the telegraphic administration in any city or town in the whole of the United Kingdom, as well as ensuring the help (at no cost, of course) of any personnel employed by the administration mentioned above that I might