Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [65]
Clouds often filled the sky. The Weather Bureau’s Nantucket station, nearest the cape, reported for 1901 only 83 clear days, 101 days identified as partly cloudy, and 181 days where clouds reigned. On such days all color left the world. Sky, sea, and ground became as gray as shale, the color blue a memory. Frequent gales brought winds of fifty or sixty miles an hour and shot snow off the cliff edge in angry spirals. The boom of the sea paced the day like the tick of a gigantic clock.
The plan for the station called for the construction of living quarters for the staff, a boiler room to produce steam to generate electricity, a separate room full of equipment to concentrate power and produce a spark, and another room in which an operator would hammer out messages in Morse code. The most important structure was the aerial, and that was what most worried Vyvyan. In London Marconi had shown Vyvyan plans for a new antenna array to be built at Poldhu, and he ordered Vyvyan to build the same one in South Wellfleet. As soon as Vyvyan saw the plans, he grew concerned. He would have to erect twenty masts similar in design to the masts of sailing ships, complete with top gallants, royals, and yards. The finished masts would rise to 200 feet and stand in a circle about 200 feet in diameter, a Stonehenge of timber. The height of the masts, plus the 130-foot height of the cliff, would give Marconi’s antenna an effective height of well over 300 feet, thus in theory—Marconi’s theory—increasing the station’s ability to send and receive signals over long distances. A complex series of guy wires and connectors was supposed to keep the masts from toppling. The masts in turn would support an aerial of wire. A heavy cable of twisted copper would connect the tops of all the masts, and from it would be strung hundreds of thinner wires, all converging to form a giant cone with its tip over the transmission building. A cable run through the roof would link the cone to the spark generator within.
What troubled Vyvyan most was the rigging. Each mast should have had its own array of guy wires, so that if one mast failed the others would remain standing. Instead, the top of each was connected to the tops of its neighbors with “triatic stays.” Vyvyan realized that if one mast collapsed, these connections would cause the rest to fall as well. He told Marconi of his concerns, but Marconi overruled him and commanded that the station be built as designed. Vyvyan accepted his decision. “It was clear to me, however, that the mast system was distinctly unsafe.”
Construction advanced slowly, hampered by what the Weather Bureau called a “period of exceptionally severe storms.” April brought gales that scoured the coast with winds up to fifty-four miles an hour. May brought rainfall in quantities that broke all records for New England.
The men hired by Ed Cook lived in Wellfleet and adjacent communities, but Vyvyan, Bottomley, and the full-time Marconi employees lived on the grounds in a one-story residence with about two hundred feet of living space, a level of coziness that eventually prompted the station’s chief engineer, W. W. Bradfield, to plead for an additional wing containing more sleeping space and a recreation room. He wrote, “In view of the isolation of the station, I regard it as almost necessary that this should be done in order that the men may be comfortable, contented, and that their best work may be got out of them.”
The men did what they could to improve their living conditions. They dined on a table draped in white and spined with four candles jutting at odd angles from improvised holders. They read books, played the station’s piano, and sang, and from time to time they hiked to the bay side