Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [76]
Seven days after the disaster the new antenna was finished, and soon afterward, Marconi used it to make his first test transmissions to his station at the Lizard.
With this temporary antenna in place, he gave orders to build a new permanent station to consist of four towers each two hundred feet tall, constructed of cross-braced struts of pine. The four towers would anchor the corners of a piece of ground two hundred feet square. A thick cable of twisted wire would link the tops, and from it Marconi planned to string at least two hundred more wires to form a gigantic inverted pyramid reaching down to the roof of the condenser house. This time Marconi made sure the towers were designed to withstand the worst weather Cornwall was likely to deliver.
But construction of such an immense station would take months. He could not bear so long a delay in his transatlantic experiment. Partly his impatience was fueled by practical considerations. He worried that his board of directors would lose faith. So far the board, with reluctance, had allowed him to spend £50,000 on the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet—$5.4 million today. He needed to prove it was money well spent, though now with one station in ruins that proof would be harder to generate. He worried as always about the growing competition, especially from companies in America, and he still smarted from his failure at the last America’s Cup. He knew also that the secrecy of his transatlantic plan could not be maintained much longer.
But the overriding motivation came from within. On an instinctive level he knew that his signals could cross the Atlantic, even though nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible.
The fact that his temporary antenna at Poldhu still allowed communication with a station he had built at Crookhaven, Ireland, 225 miles away bolstered his confidence. So too did a bit of new technology that had fallen into his hands. In August a friend and fellow countryman, Luigi Solari, an officer in the Italian Navy, had paid a visit to Poldhu and brought with him a new coherer developed by a navy signalman. Marconi tested it and found it to be far more sensitive to transmissions than even his own best receivers.
He devised a new plan. On November 4, 1901, he sent Kemp a conventional telegram: “PLEASE HOLD YOURSELF IN READINESS TO ACCOMPANY ME TO NEWFOUNDLAND ON THE 16TH INST. IF YOU DESIRE HOLIDAYS YOU CAN HAVE THEM NOW. MARCONI.”
He said nothing of the new plan to Fleming.
MARCONI WAS ENOUGH of a realist to recognize that his temporary station was unlikely to be able to generate the power and the wavelengths that he believed would be necessary to produce waves capable of traveling all the way to Cape Cod. But Newfoundland was a different matter. It was far closer to Britain, yet still at the opposite side of the Atlantic. It was also well served by undersea cable, through the Anglo-American Telegraph Co., which held a monopoly on telegraphy between Britain and Newfoundland. This fact was vital to Marconi. He needed to be able to send and receive conventional telegrams in order to direct his operators in Poldhu and to gauge the progress of his experiments.
But now he faced the most important hurdle. Somehow, quickly, he had to erect a receiving station in Newfoundland with an antenna tall enough to receive signals from the temporary station at Poldhu. The antenna would have to be hundreds of feet high.
He came up with a novel solution. It was a good thing that he kept the whole effort secret, because if the shareholders had known of his plan, their confidence in him and his company likely would have plummeted.
KEMP PACKED HIS BAGS, as did another engineer, Percy Paget, and on Tuesday, November 26, 1901, at the wharves