Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [66]
This being the age of hired help, the station had a cook and employed two Wellfleet women who came each day to clean. They wore maid’s caps and aprons. One of the women was Mable Tubman, daughter of a prominent Wellfleet resident, who caught the attention of one of Marconi’s men, Carl Taylor. A photograph from the time shows Carl and Mable seated on the beach on a day bright with sun. What makes this photograph unusual is that it captures people actually having fun. Mable is wearing her apron and maid’s cap and is turned away from the camera, watching the sea. Carl is wearing a light-colored suit and looks into the camera, a huge grin running from one earlobe to the other. He also is wearing a maid’s cap.
THOUGH DEEPLY DISTRACTED by the work under way on both sides of the Atlantic and by myriad other developments, Marconi apparently believed that things were sufficiently under control that he and Josephine Holman could at last announce their engagement—though the major pressure to do so likely came not from him but from Josephine, who was growing increasingly concerned about just where she stood relative to his work. He still had not come to visit her family in Indianapolis.
Marconi’s mother, Annie, had concerns about her own status in Marconi’s life, now that he planned to marry. “To lose him to anyone, rich or poor, on his first flight from home was hard,” Degna Marconi wrote years later.
Marconi’s mother did her best to behave “self-effacingly,” but she felt aggrieved when Josephine failed to write to her, and she complained to Marconi. Soon afterwards a letter did arrive, which Annie described as “very kind and sweet.”
Now Annie wrote to Marconi, “I wish I had got this letter [from Josephine] before and I should not have said anything to you about her not writing. Now it is all right and I feel much happier and shall write to her soon.” She added an odd line to this letter: “Our friends here think it is only right I should be at your wedding”—as if there had been serious consideration that she would not be present.
Spring brought successes and trials. On May 21, 1901, Oliver Lodge won a U.S. patent for “electrical telegraphy,” and he and William Preece became de facto allies, more and more outspoken in their criticism of Marconi. Lodge also opened an attack on another front. He formed a new company with his friend Alexander Muirhead, the Lodge-Muirhead Syndicate, to begin selling Lodge’s technology.
And Marconi endured a very public failure. He had agreed again to provide coverage by wireless of the America’s Cup yacht races, now for the Associated Press, but this time he faced competition from two fledging American companies. The transmissions interfered with one another so much that Marconi could not send messages to his shore station for relay to the Associated Press—despite his claims to have perfected the technology for tuning transmissions to avoid interference. Afterward allegations arose that one of the competing companies had sought deliberately to create interference by transmitting exceptionally long dashes and, at one point, placing a weight on their transmission key and leaving it there, creating what one observer called “the longest dash ever sent by wireless.”
In another realm, however, Marconi made progress. On May 21, 1901, the first British ship equipped with wireless, the Lake Champlain, departed Liverpool