Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [80]
Kirby handed him a small container that enclosed tiny crystals that weighed only one-hundredth of an ounce yet were capable of killing twenty men. He put the container in his pocket and returned to Albion House.
THE SECRET OF THE KITES
DESPITE THE NEWS ABOUT SOUTH WELLFLEET, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget sailed for Newfoundland. The crossing took ten days and was marred by what Kemp called a “terrific gale” and a blizzard at sea. On Friday, December 6, 1901, they entered the harbor at St. John’s and docked at Shea’s Wharf. Snow bearded the Sardinian’s hull and lay in drifts on deck.
A throng of reporters and dignitaries met Marconi as he disembarked. To mask the true purpose of his mission, he hinted that he had come to Newfoundland to explore aspects of ship-to-shore communication. He reinforced the ruse by cabling the Cunard Line in Liverpool to inquire about the locations of the wireless-equipped Lucania and the more recently outfitted Campania. “He reasoned,” Vyvyan wrote, “that if he stated his purpose beforehand and failed, it would throw some discredit on his system…whereas if he succeeded the success would be all the greater by reason of its total unexpectedness.”
Soon after landing, Marconi began scouting for a site to launch his kites and balloons and settled on a “lofty eminence” that he had spotted from the ship, which bore the apt name Signal Hill, for the fact that it previously had been used for visual communication. It rose three hundred feet over the harbor and had a two-acre plateau at its top. Marconi and Kemp decided to set up their receiver and other equipment in a building on the plateau that previously had been a fever hospital.
On Monday, December 9, three days after their arrival, they began their work in earnest. They buried twenty sheets of zinc to provide a ground, assembled two kites, and oiled the skin of one balloon so that it would retain hydrogen.
Before leaving England, Marconi had given his operators at Poldhu instructions to wait for a cable from him specifying a day to begin signaling. Here too he was concerned about secrecy, for he knew that information leaked from telegraph offices as readily as water from a colander. By establishing the protocol in advance, all he now had to do was send a cable stating a date, with no further instructions. On that date, at three o’clock Greenwich Mean Time, his Poldhu station was to begin sending the letter S, three dots, over and over. Marconi had chosen S not out of nostalgia for his first great success on the lawn at Villa Griffone, but because the transmitter at Poldhu channeled so much power, he feared that repeatedly holding down the key for a dash might cause an electric arc to span the spark gap and damage his equipment. His operators were to send ten-minute volleys of 250 S’s spaced by five-minute intervals of rest. The pauses were important, for the key required to manage so much power had more in common with the lever on a water pump than the key typically found in conventional telegraph bureaus—it required strength and stamina to operate.
That Monday Marconi sent Poldhu his cable. The message read, simply, “BEGIN WEDNESDAY 11TH.”
So far, he had succeeded in keeping his real goal a secret. Only the New York Herald had bothered to send a correspondent to Signal Hill, and now the newspaper reported that Marconi “hopes to have everything completed by Thursday or Friday, when he will try and communicate with the Cunard steamer Lucania, which left Liverpool on Saturday.”
On Tuesday Kemp and Paget conducted a test flight of one kite, which rose into the sky trailing an antenna of five hundred feet of wire. The weather was fair, and the kite flew nicely. The next day, Wednesday, when the signaling was to begin, the weather changed.
Of course.
A strong wind huffed across the clifftop and raised the hems of the men’s coats. They decided to try a balloon first,