Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [56]
The new strategy seemed sound in principle, but now the question became, Would the change at last dispel the still-widespread reluctance to embrace wireless? Would customers come?
It seemed even more imperative now for Marconi to do something big to assert his dominance of the field and to publicize his technological prowess. If successful, the transatlantic bid would achieve both goals, as well as serve a third, more concrete purpose: It would demonstrate that his wireless could reach not only ships traveling near the coast but also liners far out in the deepest blue.
If successful. Marconi’s certainty aside, the company was taking a grave gamble, betting its future and Marconi’s reputation on a single experiment whose success nearly every established physicist believed to be impossible.
LATE THAT SUMMER Marconi and Flood Page and a recently hired engineer named Richard Vyvyan set out for Cornwall to search for a suitable location for the station that would serve as the English node of Marconi’s transatlantic experiment. After tramping the coast, through fog and along paths that crossed mounds of heather and gorse and wildflowers, they settled on land atop Angrouse Cliff, near the village of Poldhu and adjacent to the large and comfortable Poldhu Hotel. Marconi did not mind remote locations, provided that a source of fine food and wine lay near at hand.
The first construction on the cliff began soon afterward, in October, directed by Vyvyan. Marconi planned the antenna; Fleming worked out details about how to amplify power to provide a spark intense enough to create waves capable of jumping the Atlantic, and how to do so safely, for with so much voltage coursing through the system even the act of keying a message could prove lethal. No ordinary Morse key could handle the power. This key would be a lever requiring muscle to operate, and courage as well, especially when sending Morse dashes—which required longer pulses of energy and increased the threat that uncontrolled sparks, or arcs, would be unleashed.
The extreme power of the station raised anew the board’s concern about how its signals would affect transmissions from other, smaller wireless stations. Marconi by now had devised a means of tuning transmissions, for which he had received British patent no. 7777, often referred to as his “four sevens” patent. But the technology was fallible, as Fleming and Marconi well knew. In fact, they were sufficiently concerned that Marconi ordered George Kemp to build a second, far smaller station six miles away on a stretch of coast known as the Lizard, to gauge whatever interference might occur and to provide a receiver for trial messages once the new station began operation. Here Kemp directed the construction of an antenna consisting of three ships’ masts secured end to end and stayed against the wind, rising to a height of 161 feet.
No reader of The Times would have guessed Fleming’s concern, however, from reading his latest letter to the editor, published October 4, 1900, in which he praised a recent series of experiments that he claimed demonstrated Marconi’s ability to tune transmissions to avoid interference. Interestingly, Fleming at no point identified himself in the letter as Marconi’s scientific adviser. He described how operators had sent messages simultaneously and how they had been captured on two receiving antennas “without delay or mistake.”
“But greater wonders followed,” Fleming wrote—at which point Oliver Lodge, reading The Times as he always did, must have spat his morning coffee onto the floor.
Fleming reported that the operators sent another