Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [43]
For Marconi, this was an untenable condition, and Kelvin never did become consulting engineer.
Now Marconi concentrated on Lodge.
LODGE REVELED IN HIS NEW POWER to command Marconi’s attention. For help in dealing with Marconi, Lodge recruited a friend, Alexander Muirhead, who ran a company that manufactured telegraphic instruments of high quality. Muirhead met Jameson Davis at the Reform Club in London and immediately afterward wrote to Lodge, “Today was only the beginning of the game. I feel sure now that they want to combine with us. Have patience it will come about.”
In July Muirhead offered to sell Lodge’s tuning technology to Marconi—for £30,000, the same steep price Marconi had quoted to the post office for his own patent rights. In a letter to Lodge dated July 29, 1898, Jameson Davis wrote, “This struck me and my directors as being exceedingly high, more especially, as we are without any information as to what the inventions may be.” He wanted specifics, but so far none had been forthcoming. “As we are very anxious to have you with us, I should be very glad if we could have this matter cleared up, and come to some good business arrangement.”
Now Marconi himself wrote to Lodge and, in an apparent attempt to advance the courtship by demonstrating his own rising prominence, included an intriguing return address:
ROYAL YACHT OSBORNE COWES ISLE OF WIGHT
ANYONE WHO COULD READ a newspaper knew that at that moment Edward, the Prince of Wales, was aboard the royal yacht recuperating from injuries to his leg caused when he fell down a staircase during a ball in Paris. His mother, Queen Victoria, would have preferred that he spend this time at the royal estate, Osborne House, where she herself was staying, but Edward preferred the yacht, and a little distance. The vessel was moored about two miles away in the Solent, the channel between the Isle of Wight and the mainland. In any preceding age this distance would have assured Edward as much privacy as he wished, but his mother had read about Marconi and now asked him to establish a wireless link between the house and the Osborne.
Ever mindful of opportunities to draw the attention of the press, Marconi agreed. At his direction workers extended the Osborne’s mast and ran wire along its length to produce an antenna with a height above deck of eighty-three feet. He installed a transmitter whose spark flushed the sending cabin with light and caused a burst of miniature thunder that required him to fill his ears with cotton. On the grounds of Osborne House at an outbuilding called Ladywood Cottage, Marconi guided construction of another mast, this one reaching one hundred feet.
At one point, while adjusting his equipment, Marconi sought to cut through the Osborne House gardens, at a time when the queen herself was there in her wheeled chair. The queen valued her privacy and commanded her staff to guard against uninvited intrusion. A gardener stopped Marconi and told him to “go back and around.”
Marconi, by now all of twenty-four years old, refused and told the gardener he would walk through the garden or abandon the project. He turned and went back to his hotel.
An attendant reported Marconi’s response to the queen. In her mild but imperious way she said, “Get another electrician.”
“Alas, Your Majesty,” the attendant said, “England has no Marconi.”
The queen considered this, then dispatched a royal carriage to Marconi’s hotel to retrieve him. They met and talked. She was seventy-nine years old, he was barely out of boyhood, but he spoke with the confidence of a Lord Salisbury, and she was charmed. She praised his work and wished him well.
Soon the queen and Edward were in routine communication via wireless. Over the next two weeks Queen Victoria,