The Other Side of the Night (3 page)

In 1898, both the Royal Navy and the United States Navy began installing experimental wireless sets aboard some of their warships, demonstrating that wireless communication at sea was a practical proposition, and the following year Marconi established regular wireless communication between France and England across the English Channel, setting up permanent stations on the Isle of Wight, at Bournemouth, and later at in Dorset. In 1900 he took out his famous patent No. 7777 for “tuned” or “syntonic telegraphy”; that is, wireless circuits that could be “tuned” to send and receive on a specific, regulated frequency rather than across the entire electro-magnetic spectrum. This single development would prove to be the foundation of the radio, television, and computer industries of the 20th century and beyond.

As his experiments continued, Marconi expanded his devices’ capabilities. Marconi International Marine was formed in April 1900 to develop shipboard wireless sets for merchant vessels and passenger ships, the first installations being undertaken the following year. In December 1901, he staged a demonstration that proved wireless waves were unaffected by the curvature of the Earth, transmitting the first transatlantic wireless signals between Poldhu, Cornwall—near Land’s End, the uttermost southwestern corner of England—and St. John’s, Newfoundland, a distance of 2,100 miles. Exactly a year later he transmitted the first complete messages to Poldhu from stations at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and later Cape Cod, Massachusetts, tests that resulted in the establishment of the first transatlantic commercial wireless service in 1907.

Almost immediately there was competition. There was France’s Compagnie Generale Telegraphique, which had played a major role in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cables in the 1880s; the American Marconi Company, wholly independent of the various British Marconi corporations, which was formed in 1899 and began supplying most of the American merchant marine; while the largest competitor was the giant German electrical firm Telefunken, formed in 1903 from the merger of divisions of two rival firms, AEG and Braun-Siemens, which supplied wireless equipment used by the German government, the German Army, and the German Navy, and which also had a monopoly on the sets installed in German merchant ships.

The rivalry between British Marconi and American Marconi was intense but good-natured, the only real source of friction between the two firms being the British use of International Morse Code, while American Marconi insisted on using American Morse. The difference was much like that between British spoken English and American spoken English—close but not always compatible. The French, of course, simply made a point of being French, and their operators only contacted the wireless stations of other nationalities when it was absolutely necessary.

Marconi’s rivalry with Telefunken, on the other hand, was barely civil. While an enduring complaint about wireless of that era was the deliberate interference often caused by operators of one company with the signals of another, the worst and most frequent offenders were the German Telefunken operators, who, as an assertion of the alleged superiority of German wireless, often seemed to take an almost childish delight in interfering with Marconi messages.

For the wireless system to work it required trained personnel to operate it. Marconi Marine operators received their instruction at the Marconi School in Liverpool (called by its students the Tin Tabernacle), where they learned much more than simply the dot-dash rudiments of Morse. The school had several sets of working wireless apparatuses that were used for instruction, including a half-kilowatt set which had a range of about 100 miles, which was used for basic instruction, as well as several of the standard one and a half-kilowatt sets that were used on most Marconi-equipped ocean liners and a powerful five-kilowatt set. The school accommodated sixty pupils and the average term of instruction spanned ten months. Courses in electricity, magnetism, radio-wave propagation, troubleshooting of equipment, and the new regulations, such that they were, of the International Radiotelegraphy Convention, were all included.

The Convention was very clear about how wireless operators were supposed to conduct themselves, and quite explicit about the priority of certain types of transmissions. The courses in radio wave propagation explained to the operators the effect of the ionosphere on wireless transmission and why both transmission and reception were clearer and longer ranged at night than during the day. Of course, this benefit in range and clarity often meant that the majority of a wireless operator’s work was done during hours when most of the rest of the world was asleep.

The young men who graduated from the “Tin Tabernacle” quickly found themselves employed on ships all over the world. They were a distinctive type of youth, always intelligent, often high-strung, energetic and intense, yet time and again they would prove remarkably cool and calm in an emergency, carrying out their duties even when their own lives seemed to be in danger. Their position aboard the ships on which they served was somewhat peculiar: although they would be required to sign the ship’s articles and were subject to the orders and discipline of the ship’s captain and officers, they weren’t actually part of the crew. The company which owned the particular vessel in question would contract with Marconi Marine for their services, so that they remained Marconi employees no matter to which ship of what shipping line they were posted aboard.

At that time there was no requirement for a 24-hour wireless watch to be maintained by any ships, save warships, so the wireless operators usually worked a schedule set for them by their ship’s captain. On large ships, such as the fast German liners or Cunard’s soon-to-be-launched
Lusitania
and
Mauretania
, there would be two wireless operators who alternated shifts, twelve hours on, twelve off, seven days a week. Smaller vessels warranted only one operator, who usually pulled duty in fifteen- to eighteen-hour stretches.

It was not hard work in the conventional sense, but the long hours of enforced immobility and intense concentration as the operator sat at his table, headphones on, key at hand, were exhausting. The pay did little to compensate for this: a senior operator only made £8 ($40) a month, a junior operator only £5 ($25). It was the knowledge that they were part of a small, select fraternity, sitting on the leading edge of a new, revolutionary technology that few people understood and even fewer could operate, capable of snatching messages seemingly out of the thin air with their ungainly looking apparatus, that kept most operators at their stations.

The skill of the early wireless operators was nothing short of amazing. Spending long hours, sitting almost motionless, only their hands moving as they worked the key of their apparatus; or sitting listening through their bulky headphones as they sought to pluck the signals from other stations out of the ether. It was all far more difficult than is popularly supposed. Instead of the carefully modulated buzzes, beeps, or tones that today are most commonly associated with Morse Code, the sounds made by open spark transmitters of the day were more like bursts and crashes of controlled static, which resembled nothing so much as the interference distant lightning will create on a radio. And yet these bursts and crashes, and the various signals into which they would evolve, would save thousands of lives in the decades to come.

From the very beginning of his work Marconi had made it clear that his primary goal was to perfect wireless communication in order to bring an end to the isolation of ships at sea. An accident to the East Goodwin lightship, moored off the Goodwin Sands at the Dover Straits in the English Channel, offered the first proof of his success. On the evening of April 28, 1899, wrapped in a thick fog, she was rammed by the freighter
R.F. Matthews
. The lightship had been equipped with one of Marconi’s first shipboard apparatuses, and within minutes a message had been sent to the wireless station at the South Foreland lighthouse: “Help, we have just been run into by the steamer ‘R.F. Matthews’…Our bows are damaged.”

A lifeboat was quickly dispatched to the lightship but fortunately the damage was relatively minor and the crew was in no danger. Yet the incident made it clear to even the most casual observer that communications between ships, and between ships and the shore, were now not only possible but practical. In the words of historian Warren Tute, in his book
Atlantic Conquest
, “Wireless telegraphy was to deprive the sea of its ancient terror of silence.” The ultimate proof of that came ten years later.

On January 22, 1909, the White Star Line’s R.M.S.
Republic
left New York bound for Naples, Italy with 525 passengers and 297 crew aboard. Just before six o’clock the next morning she found herself surrounded by thick fog 175 miles from the Ambrose Lighthouse. Her skipper, Captain William Sealby, reduced speed to barely steerageway and began sounding the ship’s steam whistle at short intervals. It was a situation fraught with danger, for in heavy fog, doing anything could lead to disaster–-including doing nothing. It was a circumstance that had led to catastrophe for many other ships-–and was about to do so again.

Unknown to Sealby, the Lloyd-Italiano steamer
Florida
, inbound for New York from Naples, was not far from his ship, thoroughly lost. The fog swallowed up the
Republic
’s whistle, and though she was ablaze with light from bow to stern, the fog was so heavy that the glow was diffused and muffled at only a few hundred yards off. At 5:51 a.m., the
Florida
suddenly loomed out of the darkness on the
Republic
’s port side and drove her bow deep into the White Star liner, almost squarely amidships. The
Republic
’s engine room immediately started flooding, and before long it became clear to her chief engineer that the pumps, while slowing the inrush of water, would be unable to stop it. When the water rose high enough to reach the boilers, the
Republic
would lose all power and quickly sink. Captain Sealby swiftly mustered the passengers and crew, and began preparing to abandon ship.

Had the collision taken place a decade earlier, the situation would have been exceedingly grim for the
Republic
, as the only ship known to be nearby was the
Florida
, now drifting unseen somewhere in the fog, the extent of her own damage then unknown. But circumstances were different in this case: the
Republic
was fitted with an early version of the 1½-kilowatt Marconi wireless, and Sealby instructed the Marconi operator, 25-year-old Jack Binns, to send out a call for assistance–-the international distress signal “CQD.” Binns quickly made contact with a sister ship, White Star’s
Baltic
, which was 200 miles away but coming hard, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard’s Nantucket wireless station. Soon that station was relaying the
Republic
’s signals as power began to fade on the sinking ship, and over the next thirty-six hours Binns remained at his post, as a half-dozen ships, including the Cunard Line’s
Lucania
, the French Line’s
La Tourraine
, the Inman Line’s
New York
, and a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter, the
Gresham
, began converging on the sinking
Republic.

Meanwhile the
Florida
had drifted back out of the fog and lay a few hundred yards off the
Republic
’s port side. Her captain had the ship sounded and found that her collision bulkhead was holding firm, so Captain Sealby proposed that the
Republic
’s passengers and crew be taken aboard the Italian ship. A daring transfer of passengers and crew began, using the
Republic
’s lifeboats, working in relays against rising swells and rain, shuttling back and forth between the sinking liner and the
Florida.
It would take almost twelve hours to get everyone but a handful of the
Republic
’s officers and crew off the sinking ship. Now the problem was that the
Florida
was dangerously overloaded, and it was only when the
Baltic
appeared on the scene and took off the excess passengers that the danger was finally past for the small Italian steamer.

The fog began to lift, and Captain Sealby, along with the forty-six crewmen who remained aboard, began preparing the
Republic
to be taken in tow, in the hope that she could be run into shallow water and saved. She was slowly settling stern-first, and though some progress was made toward Nantucket, at a little before 8:30 p.m. on the 26th, the
Republic
began sinking rapidly. Within minutes she was gone, Captain Sealby and his crew being swept off the ship as she went under.

Miraculously, only four lives had been lost in the entire incident, all victims of the collision itself. It created a stir on both sides of the Atlantic, where both Captain Sealby and Jack Binns were rightly hailed as heroes. Binns in particular was singled out: he had spent almost thirty-six hours at his wireless key, without relief, without sleep, with little to eat or drink except an occasional cup of coffee, exposed to the wind and rain the entire time, for the collision had torn away two of the wireless office’s walls. His success in reaching ships hundreds of miles away that otherwise would never have known of the
Republic
’s plight, but were able to come to her assistance, drew attention to the lifesaving potential of wireless as nothing else could have done.

The dramatic image of the
Baltic
’s dash through storm and fog in response to the
Republic
’s call, and her subsequent rescue of the sinking ship’s 1,650 passengers and crew, were all the proof the world needed to understand that with the aid of wireless a ship in distress no longer need struggle alone to survive. Wireless could always summon other ships nearby; a liner’s lifeboats would only be needed to ferry passengers and crew to safety aboard another vessel. There would never be the need for everyone aboard to take to the boats at the same time-–someone near at hand would always answer when the wireless sent out a signal of distress…