Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [55]
BUOYED BY LOVE and by his success in signaling the Needles, Marconi prepared to reveal his idea to the company’s directors and ask approval to build the two gigantic stations. By summer he was ready.
The directors balked. They considered it too risky and too expensive, and they doubted that apparatus capable of generating and managing the required power could even be built—and if so, whether the resulting station would smother every other Marconi station with interference.
Marconi countered that success in the venture would assert the company’s dominance for once and for all. His confidence impressed the board, but so too did news from America that Nikola Tesla might be on the verge of attempting the same feat. In a much-read article in the June 1900 issue of The Century Magazine, Tesla alluded to things he had learned from experiments at his laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which he claimed could generate millions of volts of electricity, the equal of lightning. He wrote that in the course of his experiments he had found proof—“absolute certitude,” as he put it—that “communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable.”
The article prompted J. P. Morgan to invite Tesla to his home, where Tesla revealed his idea for a “world system” of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,” Tesla wrote in the Century article. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.”
That word: television. In 1900.
In July Marconi’s directors voted their approval.
The month provided another milestone as well. On July 4 Britain’s Admiralty agreed to have Marconi’s company supply and install wireless sets for twenty-six ships and six shore stations, at a cost of £3,200 pounds per installation—$350,000 today—with an additional annual royalty. The company would train the navy’s men in how to use the apparatus. It was Marconi’s first major order, but more important, it helped convince him and his directors of the need for a fundamental change in how the company operated.
As welcome as the contract was, providing first revenue just as Marconi’s greatest quest was about to begin, it embodied the threat that the Royal Navy might now use Marconi’s equipment to develop its own system, something it had the right to do under a British law that allowed the government to adopt any technology it wished, patented or not, in the interests of the empire’s defense.
The contract caused Marconi to rethink the company’s strategy for generating revenue through the manufacture and sale of apparatus to customers. As things stood, the post office monopoly barred the company from collecting fees for private telegrams sent by wireless and further blocked the automatic relay of telegrams from conventional land lines to Marconi’s wireless stations. Thus the only likely customers were government agencies, of which only a few could be expected to see a need for wireless.
A loophole in Britain’s telegraph laws suggested a possible new course. Instead of selling equipment, Marconi could provide customers with a wireless service that, if structured carefully, would skirt the postal monopoly. A shipping line, for example, would pay not for individual messages but for the rental of Marconi’s apparatus and operators, who would receive their salaries from Marconi and communicate only with Marconi stations. Marconi argued successfully that the law allowed such an arrangement because all messages would be intracompany communications from one node of the Marconi company to another.
This change in strategy suited Marconi’s personality. Ever since his days in the attic at the Villa Griffone, he had been worried about competitors. He saw this new approach as a means of erecting a bulwark against the competition. His new strategy included the requirement that any ship using his wireless service would communicate only with other ships likewise equipped, except in case