Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [81]
Abruptly, the wind intensified. The balloon rose to about one hundred feet when Marconi decided the weather was too turbulent. The men began hauling it back down.
The balloon tore free. Had the balloon moved in a different direction, Kemp noted, “I should have gone with it as its speed was like a shot out of a gun.”
With six hundred feet of wire following in a graceful arc, the balloon, Marconi wrote, “disappeared to parts unknown.”
MARCONI TOLD THE Herald’s man, “Today’s accident will delay us for a few days and it will not be possible to communicate with a Cunarder this week. I hope, however, to do so next week, possibly with the steamer leaving New York on Saturday.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, December 12, the plateau atop Signal Hill was engulfed in what Marconi called a “furious gale.”
“I came to the conclusion that perhaps the kites would answer better,” he wrote, and so despite the storm Kemp and Paget readied one for launch. This time they attached two wires, each 510 feet long. Coats flapping, they launched the kite into the gale. It dipped and heaved but rose quickly to about four hundred feet.
“It was a bluff, raw day,” Marconi wrote: “at the base of the cliff, three hundred feet below us, thundered a cold sea. Oceanward, through the mist I could discern dimly the outlines of Cape Spear, the easternmost reach of the North American continent, while beyond that rolled the unbroken ocean, nearly two thousand miles of which stretched between me and the British coast. Across the harbor the city of St. John’s lay on its hillside, wrapped in fog.”
Once the kite was airborne, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget retreated from the weather into the transmitter room. “In view of the importance of all that was at stake,” Marconi wrote, “I had decided not to trust to the usual arrangement of having the coherer signals recorded automatically through a relay and a Morse instrument on a paper tape.” Instead, he connected his receiver to the handset of a telephone, “the human ear being far more sensitive than the recorder.”
It seemed at the time a prudent decision.
NOT ONLY THE PRESS was kept in the dark. Ambrose Fleming had left Poldhu on September 2 and soon afterward departed for his first vacation in years. Despite his crucial role in designing and adjusting Poldhu’s transmitter and power supply, he knew nothing about the attempt then under way in Newfoundland. On returning from his holiday, he occupied himself with his teaching duties at University College in Bloomsbury and worked on an important upcoming talk, a Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution.
For reasons that remain unclear, Marconi had excluded Fleming from the very thing that he had hired him to achieve. It may simply have been an oversight, owing to the turmoil raised by the destruction of the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet. It may, however, have been another example of Marconi’s periodic lapse into social blindness with its attendant disregard for the needs of others.
THE KITE SHUDDERED through the sky and strained at the line that tethered it to the plateau. At the appointed time Marconi held the telephone receiver to his ear. He heard nothing but static and the noise of wind. Each new gust stabbed the room with the scent of winter.
In Poldhu the operator began slamming down the key to make each dot.
To anyone watching, the whole quest would have seemed utterly hopeless, deserving of ridicule—three men huddled around a crude electrical device as a gigantic kite stumbled through the sky four hundred feet overhead. If not for the atmosphere of sober concentration that suffused the room, the scene would have served well as a