Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

The society’s constitution stated that membership did not imply belief in “physical forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.” That the SPR had a Committee on Haunted Houses deterred no one. Its membership expanded quickly to include sixty university dons and some of the brightest lights of the era, among them John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, William E. Gladstone, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), and the Rev. C. L. Dodgson (with the equally prominent pen name Lewis Carroll). The roster also listed Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister of England, and William James, a pioneer in psychology, who by the summer of 1894 had been named the society’s president.

When men first encountered sparks, as when a lightning bolt incinerated their neighbors, they had no idea of their nature or cause, only that they arrived with a violence unlike anything else in the world. Historians often place humankind’s initial awareness of the distinct character of electrical phenomena in ancient Greece, with a gentleman named Thales, who discovered that by rubbing amber he could attract to it small bits of things, like beard hair and lint. The Greek word for amber was elektron.

Theoreticians devised equations to explain phenomena; Marconi cut wire, coiled it, snaked it, built apparatus, and flushed it with power to see what would happen, a seemingly mindless process but one governed by the certainty that he was correct.

He once stated that it took him a thousand hours to build a single coherer. As a future colleague would put it, he possessed “the power of continuous work.”

One day, by chance or intuition, Marconi elevated one of the wires of his transmitter on a tall pole, thus creating an antenna longer than anything he previously had constructed. No theory existed that even hinted such a move might be useful. It was simply something he had not yet done and that was therefore worth trying.

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London was still the biggest, most powerful city in the world. Its four and a half million people inhabited 8,000 streets, many only a block long, and did their drinking in 7,500 public houses and rode in 11,000 cabs pulled by 20,000 horses, the cab population divided among four-wheeled “growlers” and two-wheeled hansoms, named not for their appearance, which was indeed handsome, but rather for their inventor, Joseph Hansom. Crippen joined an estimated 15,000 of his countrymen already living in London, which number by coincidence equaled the total of known lunatics residing within the city’s five asylums. Most important, London formed the seat of an empire that controlled one-quarter of the world’s population and one-quarter of its land.

Londoners nicknamed these fits of opacity “London particulars.” The fog came thick and sulfurous and squeezed the flare of gas lamps to cats’ eyes of amber that left the streets so dark and sinister that children of the poor hired themselves out as torchbearers to light the way for men and women bent on walking the city’s darker passages. The light formed around the walkers a shifting wall of gauze, through which other pedestrians appeared with the suddenness of ghosts. On some nights the eeriness was particularly acute, especially after an evening of engaging in what had become a common pastime, the holding of séances. The walk home afterward could be a long one, suffused with sorrow and grief and marked by the occasional glance behind.

its long-standing policy of “splendid isolation,” rooted in the perception that because of its military and economic power the empire needed no alliances.

Barbara Tuchman, in The Proud Tower, recounted how at one luncheon at the Savoy Hotel for the diva Nellie Melba, guests enjoyed a dessert of fresh peaches, then “made a game of throwing them at passers-by beneath the windows.”

Scotland Yard, had grown larger and moved to new headquarters at Whitehall on the Victoria Embankment, on the north bank of the Thames. The building and the department became known as New Scotland Yard. The new location at first proved a bit problematic, albeit appropriately so. While excavating its foundation, in the midst of the terror raised by Jack the Ripper, workers had found the torso of a woman, without head, arms, or legs, triggering fears that this too had been Jack’s work. The story got grislier still. A police surgeon tried fitting the torso to a severed arm, with armpit, that had been retrieved from the Thames several weeks earlier. It fit. Next, a reporter used a dog to search the excavation and turned up a left leg. This too fit. Soon afterward a second leg was fished from the Thames. It did not fit.

Marconi told Dam that it was possible that he had discovered a kind of wave different from what Hertz had found. Asked to explain the difference, Marconi said, “I don’t know. I am not a professional scientist, but I doubt if any scientist can tell you.”

Lodge and his allies of course were enraged, but more broadly, within Britain’s higher social tiers and within the scientific establishment as a whole, there were many others who looked upon Marconi with suspicion, even distaste. He was a troubling character, and not just because he had laid claim to apparatus that Lodge and other scientists had used first. He was something new in the landscape. As he himself had admitted, he was not a scientist. His grasp of physical theory was minimal, his command of advanced mathematics nonexistent. He was an entrepreneur of a kind that would become familiar to the world only a century or so later, with the advent of the so-called “start-up” company. In his time the closest models for this kind of behavior were unsavory—for example, the men who made fortunes selling quack medicines, immortalized in H. G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay.

Somehow he had developed a belief in his vision that nothing could shake. His chief worry was whether he could develop his wireless quickly enough to outstrip the other inventors who, now that the news of his success was circling the globe, surely would intensify their own work on electromagnetic waves.

The world was growing more chaotic and speeding up. Rudyard Kipling could be spotted in his six-horsepower motorcar thundering around at fifteen miles an hour.

Kelvin wrote Lodge, “The chief objection I see to much practical use at distances up to 15 miles is that two people speaking to one another would almost monopolize earth and air for miles around them. I don’t think it would be possible to arrange for a dozen pairs of people to converse together by this method within a circle of 10 miles radius.”

One night, during a storm, an engineer named W. W. Bradfield was sitting at the Wimereux transmitter, when suddenly the door to the room crashed open. In the portal stood a man disheveled by the storm and apparently experiencing some form of internal agony. He blamed the transmissions and shouted that they must stop. The revolver in his hand imparted a certain added gravity. Bradfield responded with the calm of a watchmaker. He told the intruder he understood his problem and that his experience was not unusual. He was in luck, however, Bradfield said, for he had “come to the only man alive who could cure him.” This would require an “electrical inoculation,” after which, Bradfield promised, he “would be immune to electro-magnetic waves for the rest of his life.” The man consented. Bradfield instructed him that for his own safety he must first remove from his person anything made of metal, including coins, timepieces, and of course the revolver in his hand. The intruder obliged, at which point Bradfield gave him a potent electrical shock, not so powerful as to kill him, but certainly enough to command his attention. The man left, convinced that he was indeed cured.

THE PLAN FLEW IN THE FACE of all that physicists believed about the optical character of electromagnetic waves. Like beams of light, waves traveled in a straight line. The earth was curved. Therefore, the physicists held, even if waves could travel thousands of miles—which they couldn’t—they would continue in a straight line far out into space. Sending waves across the ocean was no more possible than casting a beam of light from London to New York.

ON ARRIVAL MARCONI WAS THRONGED by reporters, who were startled by his youth—“a mere boy,” the Herald observed—though at least one writer was struck by his alien appearance. “When you meet Marconi you’re bound to notice that he’s a ‘for’ner.’ The information is written all over him. His suit of clothes is English. In stature he is French. His boot heels are Spanish military. His hair and moustache are German. His mother is Irish. His father is Italian. And altogether, there’s little doubt that Marconi is a thorough cosmopolitan.” The passage was not meant as praise.

Tesla revealed his idea for a “world system” of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,” Tesla wrote in the Century article. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.” That word: television. In 1900.

In 1900 Ivan S. Bloch wrote, “At first there will be increased slaughter—increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue.” At the onset of hostilities armies would try to fight under the old rules of warfare but quickly would find them no longer applicable. “The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never able to deliver a final and decisive attack.”

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.

Marconi himself barely understood the nature of the phenomena he had marshaled, which made the process of preparing each station a matter of experiment. The huge cone-shaped aerial was the product of Marconi’s instinctive sense of how Hertzian waves behaved. No established theory determined its shape. Its height reflected Marconi’s conviction, partially confirmed by experimentation, that the distance a signal traveled varied in relation to the height of the antenna.

To make matters more difficult, the thing Marconi was trying to harness was invisible, and no means yet existed for measuring it. No one could say for sure even how Hertzian waves traveled or through what medium. Like Fleming and Lodge and other established physicists, Marconi believed that electromagnetic waves traveled through the ether, even though no one had been able to prove that this mysterious medium even existed.

No particular law of physics dictated the design. It just struck Marconi as right.