Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [36]
Marconi referred to Jameson Davis and his syndicate as “those gentlemen” and couched the letter in such a way that anyone reading it would conclude that all of this was happening without his involvement, certainly without his encouragement—that this poor young man had suddenly found himself pressed to respond to an offer from the blue, one so generous that he found himself forced to consider it, though it gave him no joy to do so.
After setting out the details, Marconi added, “I beg to state, however, that I have never sought these offers, or given encouragement to the promoters.”
Afterward he wrote to his father that he believed, based on what he had heard from Preece’s associates, “that he will remain friends with me.” In so doing, he revealed a trait of his character that throughout his life would color and often hamper his business and personal relationships: a social obtuseness that made him oblivious to how his actions affected others.
For in fact Preece felt deep personal hurt. Years later in a brief memoir, in which for some reason he described himself in the third person, Preece wrote, “Marconi at the end of 1897 naturally came under the influence of the business men who were financing his new Company, and it was no longer possible for Preece as a Government officer to maintain those cordial, and frequently almost parental, relations with the young inventor. No one regretted this more than Preece.”
The depth of his hurt and its consequences would not become apparent for several months. For the moment Marconi’s news did nothing to shake Preece’s intention to make Marconi the centerpiece of his talk at the Royal Institution in June; nor did Preece immediately withdraw his support for Marconi’s experiments. The new company had not yet formed, and Preece believed there was still a chance the government could acquire Marconi’s patents. A decade later a select committee of Parliament would conclude that Preece should have tried harder. Had he done so, the committee reported, “an enterprise of national importance could have been prevented from passing into the hands of a private company and subsequent difficulties might have been avoided.”
IN APRIL 1897, with Marconi’s over-water tests still a month off, Britain was again wracked by a spasm of fear about the mounting danger of anarchists and immigrants. A bomb exploded on a train in the city’s subterranean railway, killing one person and injuring others. The bomber was never caught, but most people blamed anarchists. Foreigners. Italians.
The world was growing more chaotic and speeding up. Rudyard Kipling could be spotted in his six-horsepower motorcar thundering around at fifteen miles an hour. The race among the great shipping companies to see whose liners could cross the Atlantic in the shortest time intensified and grew more and more costly as the size and speed of each ship increased and as the rivalry between British and German lines became freighted with an ever-heavier cargo of national pride. In April 1897 at the Vulcan shipyard in Stettin, Germany, thousands of workers raced to prepare the largest, grandest, fastest oceanliner yet for its launch on May 4, when it would join the stable of ships owned by North German Lloyd Line. Everything about this new liner breathed Germany’s aspiration to become a world power, especially its name, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, and its decor, which featured life-size portraits of its namesake and of Bismarck and Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, whose nephew all too soon would lead Germany into global war. The launch was to be overseen by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself.
In early May, Adolf Slaby sailed from Germany for Britain and made his way to the Bristol Channel, between England and Wales, where Marconi, with the help of a postal engineer named George Kemp, prepared for his next big demonstration.
MARCONI