Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [67]
Only years later would anyone take note of how strange it was that the second officer of the Lake Champlain at this pioneering moment was a young sailor by the name of Henry Kendall.
WITH WARMER WEATHER the work on Cape Cod proceeded quickly, though Vyvyan and Bottomley discovered that unlike Poldhu, where temperatures in summer remained cool, even cold, the cape often registered some of the hottest weather in New England, with temperatures in the nineties accompanied by wet-blanket humidity. At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity.
As each mast rose, Vyvyan’s concerns increased. Winds routinely blew at twenty to thirty miles an hour, sometimes more. By mid-June his workers had erected seventeen lower masts out of twenty. Fourteen of them now had top masts, and ten had a third stage, the top gallants. The plan called for each also to get a fourth stage, the royal masts, hair-raising work for the men who had to scale the masts and secure each portion to the next. A photograph shows these men, called riggers, at work—tiny figures alone at the tops of masts two hundred feet tall that swayed in even the slightest breeze.
By the end of the month the boiler house, generation equipment, and transmitter were in place and the circle of masts was complete. Photographs show a grove of two-hundred-foot masts linked and steadied with guy wires having all the substance of cobwebs draped on a candlestick.
Vyvyan tested the transmitter. At night the spark gap lit the sky with such intensity that it was visible and audible four miles down the beach. Up close it was deafening, like the crack of a starter pistol repeated over and over. An early employee, James Wilson, recalled, “If you opened the door and stepped out you had to hold your ears.”
At times the wires of the antenna shimmered a cold blue. To keep electricity from flowing through the guy wires and distorting the signal, the men installed “deadeyes” of a very hard wood called lignum vitae at intervals along each wire. Shipwrights used dead eyes as connectors in rigging, but Marconi’s men used them as insulators to break up potential paths for current. Still, current traveled to unexpected places. Through induction it charged drainpipes and stove flues. Even something as prosaic as hanging the wash became an electric experience. Mrs. Higgins, the station cook, reported feeling myriad electric shocks as she pinned clothing to the line.
August brought heat and fog, with Provincetown again recording the highest temperatures in New England, ninety-two degrees on August 12 and August 18, but storms were few and the winds reasonable, at no time exceeding thirty miles an hour. And yet, Vyvyan wrote, “In August, under the influence of nothing more than a stiff breeze, the heads of the masts on the windward side bent over to a dangerous degree.”
The triatic stays that linked the tops of the masts ensured that when one mast swayed, they all swayed.
MARCONI MAINTAINED SECRECY. No one outside the company knew yet that he planned to try sending messages across the ocean. When an Admiralty official, G. C. Crowley, came to observe at Poldhu, Marconi enclosed the station’s receiver in a box, just as he had done for his earliest demonstrations. Marconi willingly discussed his results, Crowley wrote, but would not let anyone look inside. “We used to call it ‘the black box of Poldhu.’”
Marconi himself barely understood the nature of the phenomena he had marshaled, which made the process of preparing each station