Free Thunderstruck by Erik Larson Page B

his hand by her bedside, so that she could hold it when she needed comfort. Now her eyesight was failing, and she was plagued by periods of profound sleepiness. She had ruled so long and in such a benign, maternal way that it was hard to think forward to a future in which she did not exist. A man born in the year of her accession, 1837, would by 1897 be on the verge of old age. Yet queen or not, the laws of nature applied. Victoria would die and, given her health and age, probably soon.
    As the end of the century approached, a question lay in the hearts of Britons throughout the empire’s eleven million square miles: Without Victoria, what would the world be like?
    What would happen then?



T HE S ECRET B OX

    I T IS TEMPTING TO IMAGINE the arrival of Marconi and his mother in London as something from a Dickens novel—the two entering a cold and alien realm, overpowered by the immensity and smoke and noise of the city—but in fact they stepped directly into the warm embrace of the Jameson family and into the center of a skein of blood and business connections that touched a good portion of the British Empire. They were met at Victoria Station by one of Marconi’s cousins, Henry Jameson Davis, and were drawn immediately into the silk and flannel world of London’s upper class, with its high teas, derby days, and Sunday carriage rides through Hyde Park. This inventor had not yet starved, except by choice and obsession, and would not starve now.
    The delay caused by the destruction of his equipment amplified his ever-present fear that some other inventor with an apparatus as good as his own or better might suddenly appear. With Jameson Davis’s help, Marconi acquired materials for his apparatus and set to work on reconstruction. He demonstrated the finished product to his cousin and to others in the Jameson diaspora. The effect was as startling as if a dead relative’s voice had just emerged from the mouth of a medium. Here was a means of communicating not just across space but through walls.
    They talked of what to do next. A patent was necessary, of course. And a sponsor would help—perhaps the British Post Office, which controlled all telegraphy in Britain.
    Here the Jameson network proved invaluable. Through an intermediary, Jameson Davis arranged to have Marconi meet with William Preece, chief electrician of the British Post Office. By dint of his position, Preece, two years from the post office’s retirement age of sixty-five, was the most prominent man in British telegraphy and one of the empire’s best-known lecturers. He was well liked by fellow engineers and employees but was loathed by Oliver Lodge and his allies, who together comprised a cadre of theoretical physicists known as “Maxwellians” for their reverence for Clerk Maxwell and his use of mathematics to posit the existence of electromagnetic waves. To the Maxwellians, Preece was the king of “practicians.” He and Lodge had more than once come to metaphoric blows over whether theory or everyday experience had more power to uncover scientific truth.
    Marconi knew of Preece and knew that he had attempted with some success to signal across short distances using induction, the phenomenon whereby one circuit can generate a sympathetic current in another. Preece had never heard of Marconi but with characteristic generosity agreed to see him.
    Soon afterward Marconi arrived at post office headquarters, three large buildings on St. Martin’s le Grand, just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. One building, named General Post Office East, occupied the east side of the street and managed the processing and delivery of 2,186,800,000 letters a year throughout the United Kingdom, 54.3 letters per resident, with deliveries in London up to a dozen times a day. Across the street stood General Post Office West, which housed the Telegraph Department, Preece’s bailiwick, where anyone with a proper introduction from “a banker or other well-known citizen” could