Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [54]
On Tuesday, November 14, 1899, the new managing director of Marconi’s company, Maj. Samuel Flood Page, arrived at the Needles station on the Isle of Wight to observe the experiment. Jameson Davis, who several months earlier had retired from the post as planned, also came.
They calculated that the St. Paul would pass offshore at ten or eleven o’clock the next morning, Wednesday. Just in case, they assigned an operator to spend Tuesday night in the instrument room, where a bell rigged to the apparatus would announce the receipt of any incoming signals. No bells rang.
Flood Page returned to the instrument room at dawn as the sun began to bathe the Needles, a spine of chalk and flint sea-stacks from which the Needles Hotel took its name. “The Needles resembled pillars of salt as one after the other they were lighted up by the brilliant sunrise,” Flood Page wrote. Marconi’s men watched for ships to appear in the haze off the coast. “Breakfast over, the sun was delicious as we paced the lawn, but at sea the haze increased to fog; no ordinary signals”—meaning optical signals—“could have been read from any ship passing the place at which we were.”
They saw no sign of the St. Paul. The hours dragged past. Flood Page claimed “the idea of failure never entered our minds,” though this seems unlikely. Another hour passed, then another.
Then at 4:45 P.M. the bell rang.
The Needles operator signaled, “Is that you St. Paul?”
A moment later, an answer: “Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Sixty-six nautical miles away.”
It was a new record. At Needles and aboard ship there was celebration, but soon the men at both nodes began running out of things to say. Pressed for fresh material, the Needles men began sending the latest news of the Boer War in South Africa, which had begun in mid-October and was now gaining ferocity. They sent other news as well.
Someone—it’s not clear who—suggested publishing these dispatches in the form of a shipboard newspaper, the world’s first. The captain granted Marconi use of the ship’s print shop, which ordinarily had the more prosaic assignment of printing menus. The result was the Transatlantic Times, volume one, number one, a keepsake that passengers could purchase for a one-dollar contribution to the Seamen’s Fund. “As all know,” the newspaper’s opening section stated, “this is the first time that such a venture as this has been undertaken. A Newspaper published at Sea with Wireless Telegraph messages received and printed on a ship going twenty knots an hour!”
Anyone reading closely would have found several passengers identified in the masthead of editors, including Marconi’s assistant, Bradfield, as editor in chief and H. H. McClure as managing editor. But there was a third name as well, this one unfamiliar: J. B. Holman, treasurer.
As it happens, another momentous event had occurred during this crossing, albeit one of a rather more personal nature.
JOSEPHINE BOWEN HOLMAN was a young woman from Indianapolis—and from money. Though she lived now in New York with her mother, her roots lay in Woodruff Place, an enclave of some five hundred wealthy people incorporated as a distinct village within Indianapolis, occupying forested land once known locally as the Dark Woods.
Her hair was thick and dark, piled atop her head like a rich black turban. She had full lips and large eyes, and eyebrows that arced like gulls’ wings over a gaze that was frank and direct. Marconi, now twenty-five years old, had always been drawn to feminine beauty, and he was drawn now to her.
They dined and danced and, despite the cold of a mid-November crossing, took long walks around the first-class deck. He taught her Morse code. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. They kept their engagement a secret. When he disappeared into the wireless cabin for the last two days of the voyage, she was not troubled, though perhaps she should have been.
Once onshore, to evade discovery of the engagement by her mother, Holman inserted passages in her letters in Morse code.